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Just click the link in the show description to terrify. Good evening, children of the night.

This is Lawrence Santoro, and I welcome you to the Nook.

Come in, grab a drink, have a puff, have a pretzel, have some chips and kettle corn, and just relax, curl up.

Something a little different this week.

This week there will be no poetry, no short fiction, no reviews, no exploration of the

abattoir.

This week will be devoted to one story, but it is a long one, and it's a joy, and it's by the grandfather of weird tale-telling and mythos-making, H.P. Lovecraft.

We passed his death day a month or so ago. March 15 came and went with little

fanfare. In years past, Marty Munt and I did readings from his work or read pieces of our own

that owed fealty to Lovecraft at a wonderful bookstore just off the campus of the University of Chicago, a place called 57th Street Books.

And that little Sylvan Southside Hyde Park enclave might have been an outlying neighborhood of Miskotonic University.

But, oh, well, those Lovecraft ice cream socials, alas, are no more.

My first Bram Stoker nomination was for a piece called God Screamed and Screamed, and I

A God Screamed was a standalone story that became a chapter in my first novel, just north of nowhere.

It was designed as not quite a parody of Lovecraft's work, but more or less to stand some of the Levcraftian tropes on their ears.

Maybe someday I'll read it to you, but anyway, I know very few horror fans who have not had some affection for the work of this odd, endearing, difficult, brilliant, anglophile of the old colony. I know very few writers in the field who do not draw something from his work,

Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, at all, they all come out of the HP Lovecraft

mold. H.P., Howard Philip, was born in Providence, Rhode Island in late August of 1890, and died, hideously, of cancer of the intestines and malnutrition, also in Providence, amid increasing poverty, despite his prolific outpouring in the final few years on the aforementioned date in 1937. His father was a

traveling salesman who went mad while in a Chicago hotel and was brought home to Providence

...