Hi, I'm Anne Strange Champs.

And I want to take you back to a time when the world was filled with eldritch, alien, gods, and monsters.

Terrifying deities with tentacles and fangs, claws, and scales, and feelers.

Welcome to the world of H.P. Lovecraft, the writer who invented a universe of unspeakable cosmic horror.

He inspired movies like aliens and Ghostbusters.

He's revered by writers like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates.

His influence has even spread billions of miles into outer space because part of Pluto is named for his most famous monster, Kathulu.

Today, onto the best of our knowledge, we're celebrating the 125th anniversary of HP Lovecraft, beginning right here with one of his most famous stories, The Call of Cthulah.

Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when it lumbered slobberingly into sight

and gropingly squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansson's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this.

Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks too perished of pure fright in that accursed

instant.

The thing cannot be described.

There is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy.

Such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.

A mountain walked or stumbled.

God!

What wonder that across the earth the great architect went mad and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant. The thing of the idols, the green,

sticky spawn of the stars had awakened to claim its own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old

cult had failed to do by design the band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After

Vigintillians of years, Great Cthulhu was loose again and ravening for delight. Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned.

...