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I'm Christopher Lighten, this is OpenSource.

If you're sensing something ancient, cosmic, inescapable,

and frightening this Halloween season,

you may be catching a Lovecraftian breeze as an HP Lovecraft,

the Maestro of Weird Fiction.

He was an accolade of Edgar Allen Poe and a forebearer of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a lonely, near reclusive child of Providence, Rhode Island,

who felt innovations of mind-melting infinity in New England of the 1920s and 30s.

The coast north of Boston inspired him with gothic ideas,

which he dished out in stories long and short for pulp magazines,

thrilling readers who visited his mythical sights like Arkham,

Miscautonic University, and Innsmouth,

a fictional universe terrorized by creatures like Cthulhu,

the ocean monster so complexly described that he cannot be pictured.

Lovecraft specialized in such things, colors of no color.

Minerals not found on earth, languages that cannot be pronounced,

and, of course, an unreadable and uncaring universe formed in fright

as Melville put it speculatively.

...