PREVIEW： Chronicles #20 ｜ The Shadow Over Innsmouth
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Summary
In this episode of Chronicles, we re celebrating Halloween with a special episode of H.P. Lovecraft: The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a classic horror novel by H. P. Lovecraft, re-read and re-visited. We re joined by the hosts of the podcast Lotus Eaters to discuss Lovecraft s most famous work, The Call of Cthulhu.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Chronicles for something approximating a Halloween special. I do believe
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this will actually come out the day after Halloween, but you'll have to work with it.
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And as you can see, we're actually in Studio One today because we have a bigger cast of hosts.
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Joining me for this episode of Chronicles is Harry.
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Who you obviously know very well. And today we're going to be talking all about The Shadow
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Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft, because what better thing to mark Halloween with
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than some classic Lovecraft. And a great opportunity for me as well, because as I've said to you
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both many times, this is actually the first time I've been able to read some Lovecraft and
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it seems like a great opportunity to bring in some more learned heads, some people who
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enjoyed his work, you know, longer than I have. And so looking forward to having the discussion.
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Yeah, we've been wanting to cover Lovecraft at Lotus Eaters for a long while, and we've
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covered quite a few things that are Lovecraft adjacent on the screen. I don't know if you
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can see it on the video you're watching. We've got Junji Ito's picture of H.P. Lovecraft
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that he drew a portrait of. Junji Ito being a Japanese comic author who's heavily inspired
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by the works of Lovecraft. And speaking of which, Lovecraft is probably one of the most
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influential horror writers of the modern period. You can't really go anywhere without Lovecraft
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having inspired some author or some work which has gone on to inspire things that you've
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probably heard of. Stephen King, I mean, being the most notable example of somebody who was
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heavily inspired by Lovecraft, which is ironic given the complete divergence of their own
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But Lovecraft is someone that I've appreciated for a long time. I was introduced to him through
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the music of Metallica, because they're big Lovecraft fans and have at least three songs
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written about the Cthulhu mythos. Call of Cthulhu, obvious, thing that should not be,
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which is based directly on The Shadow Over Innsmouth. And one song off of their 2016 album,
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which name I cannot remember, but which the chorus is just James shouting, Cthulhu awakens.
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So I assume it's based off of the Call of Cthulhu.
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Yeah. So as a young teenager learning about that, I thought, well, I'd heard of him as well.
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I'd heard of Cthulhu, a big squid monster. Sounds awesome. So I got some of the collections
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and read those stories, but this was my first opportunity to go back and reread in about
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10 years, maybe a bit longer than that. I'd not read it in, not touched in a long while. And it was
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a great experience to do so. I'll also preface by saying that we were originally going to be
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focusing primarily on At the Mountains of Madness, which is one of his most famous stories and one
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which has influenced, again, a lot of people. John Carpenter was influenced in the naming
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convention for his film, At the Mouth of Madness. The problem is, for as famous as that story is,
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and as well regarded and loved, it's kind of like a lawmaster story. It's slow, it's plodding,
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it's mainly a guy going around a mountain describing the hieroglyphs that he is able to see,
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which gives a huge law dump for the actual Cthulhu mythos. But as a moment-to-moment and
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narrative, it's not very thrilling. So I suggested we switch to Shadow Over Innsmouth.
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I just arbitrarily picked At the Mountains of Madness because I thought, oh, it's about
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100 pages, so it's a longer story, it'll give us plenty to talk about. And then Harry just saw
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my face just slipping into regret and despair as I was like, am I supposed to understand?
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Well, it's the fact that about two pages in, you kind of looked up at me with this
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confused, physical look and said, are all of his stories written like this? And it clocked for me
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because I remember reading it as a teenager, and I thought, oh, yep, yep, that was my reaction as
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well, because I started with Call of Cthulhu and then moved on to Shadow Over Innsmouth,
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Dunwich Horror, which are the three stories I reread in preparation for this. All very well written,
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all exciting, they've got some mystery, they've got drama, they've got action in them.
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At the Mountains of Madness, very drawn out, very plodding, and it didn't really thrill me. And so
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I'm glad it wasn't just me. Perhaps, I know you've listened to them in audiobook. Does it work
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I didn't think that about At the Mountains of Madness. It's like The Thing, you know,
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Like, it's like that. So my relationship with Lovecraft, I'll let you know where I am.
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I read, years ago, when I was like 20 or 22, I read that one, I can't even remember what it's
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called now, about where it's a short, very short one, where it's The Mummy Wakes Up. So I read that,
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and it's actually kind of almost abstract. And I read that, and I was like, I don't really like
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that. And I was young, and it's not one of his best stories, I don't think. It's like called
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Inhotep or something like that. And so from then on, I was like, I'll give Lovecraft a
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swerve. And he's inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. I'll just read it, Edgar Allan Poe. I love
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Edgar Allan Poe, right? I don't need Lovecraft. He's an American, 20th century American, not
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interested. I don't, you know, I'm only joking with that. So for years, I didn't get into
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Lovecraft for years and years. And then, I don't know, maybe just for a lot to say, maybe
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five, six years ago, something like that. I listened to on audiobook, what must have
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been the Dunwich Horror. That's the one where there's that kid that grows up abnormally fast,
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right? Yeah. And then gets killed in the library. Yeah, right. Okay. So at that point, I was
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like, oh, I've got Lovecraft wrong. This is great. And then in the years since then, every
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now and again, someone will send me a link to something Lovecraft has said that's like really
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based. Stroke completely racist. I'm like, oh, well, maybe. Too overlapping. Yeah. Very
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often. I'm like, oh, well, you know, Lovecraft, okay. And then, but I still hadn't really done
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much Lovecraft until about a month ago, maybe a month ago, maybe five weeks ago. Sure. It
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came up in the office. Do you want to do At the Mountains of Madness? And I was like,
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sure, okay, I'll read it or listen to an audiobook. And anyway, so I did. I thought it was brilliant,
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but realised I didn't know anywhere near enough about the law. I hadn't read anywhere near
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enough Lovecraft. Well, hardly read any Lovecraft. So in the last five weeks or so, I've gone
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back and listened to an audiobook, because tons of it is on YouTube. You can find whole
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playlists. I believe Mr. H Reviews has done a few audiobooks. Yeah, he pointed a few out
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and sent us some links. Yeah. Yeah, you're all putting eight. So over the last five weeks
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or so, I've listened to 12, 15 of them. You've probably read more than me in that. The long
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ones, all the long ones as well, like where I'm like playing a computer game. I'm not interested
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in a 15 minute short story. I want the one that's two hours long or more. Yeah. And
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I even listened to one the other day that was a collaboration. It was basically Night at
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the Museum. It's Night at the Museum. So yeah. Just as funny? Just as slapstick? No, no. Did
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you imagine Owen Wilson? Really horrible and dark. So I've just been Lovecraft maxing for
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the last few weeks and it's been really, really enjoyable. Yeah. I mean, a lot of his stories,
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to start the literary criticism, a lot of his stories are the same, but most people like
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that, right? Most recording artists, they've got a sound and all their albums more or less
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sound similar. A lot of writers. I mean, I'm thinking of Arthur Conan Doyle. A lot of his
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stories are very formulaic. It's basically, basically the same story over and over and
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over again. Once you've found your theme, your stories become variations on the theme.
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And it's a, it's something that works. And for Lovecraft, I mean, I believe he was writing
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stories to get paid, to make a living for the publications, most notably weird tales that
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he was being published in. So if he finds something weird tales are going to keep accepting,
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he can expand on it as he goes, maybe write a larger novella here and there, like at the
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mountains of madness. But he's got a formula that works, then he'll go with it. And he
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did. Also, just to say, just to build on that, that's absolutely true. But also people that
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know Lovecraft and have read lots and lots of Lovecraft will also say, what I just said
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there's really unfair because there are loads of exceptions to that. There are loads of other
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stories he wrote, which actually aren't anything like his sort of the classic formula of a single
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first person narrator, going somewhere creepy, getting chased by something you don't really,
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you never really described properly. And then going mad. And then at the end,
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wondering if it was all a dream or whether he's mad. Like, so not all of his stories at all,
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like a lot of them are. And Shadow Over, this one is, this one is, is like cut to that template.
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Yeah. To AT. Yeah. Yeah. The ending, the ending is slightly different because instead of going mad
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or refusing to accept what's gone on, the character that you're following, um, finds out that he's
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deeply connected. Spoiler alert. Oh, well, yeah. Spoilers, spoilers for almost a hundred year old
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stories. Yeah, no, I'm joking. I'm joking. Uh, but, but I like your idea of Lovecraft, Maxime,
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because I, I, now I like to think that you've discovered and embraced all new prejudices that
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you never before thought possible. Your powers have doubled since before you read Lovecraft.
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Well, that's, that's one thing I think that's worth saying right off the bat, um, is put it in
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his context. So he died of natural causes before World War II, like 1937. There you go, 1937.
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And he was only in his stories hadn't been published by then. A lot of them. Yeah. And he was only in his
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mid forties. So he died young. Yeah. But so that's important to remember that he's basically doing all
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his writings in the 1910s, twenties and thirties. So, and he's a man of his time. Right. His hometown
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is Providence, Rhode Island. So he's a New Englander, not all of his stories by any way, but the majority
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of them are in New England, right? Right. So I think that's one of the first things you've got to say
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about Lovecraft before you actually go any further. Yeah. Because, uh, he's a very, very in today,
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a very controversial author because of his overt and explicit racial prejudices. Which is extremely
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overt in this particular story, which isn't at all why we chose it. Yeah. Um, social prejudice as well.
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Yeah. You know, I was going to say, and his class prejudices, uh, he very clearly is of the
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wasp middle and upper business classes and holds the lower orders, particularly those that he
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perceives as inbred backwards, rural folk with complete contempt. Yeah. He has strong views on
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the white. Comical contempt. The white trash. Yeah. Uh, but then you read about how he moved,
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as we were discussing, uh, before to New York. Um, and he was in such a traumatic shock
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at the level of what he considered to be human detritus that occupied the city in the early 20th
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century that he couldn't eat and lost a load of weight. Yeah. Plus like 40 pounds. Yeah. He was
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always, he was always very sickly, but he became particularly sickly in New York because he hated
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the fact that it was full of Jews, Italians, the lower orders, anyone who wasn't a prop blacks. The fact,
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anyone who wasn't a properly bred wasp was utter scum to him. Yeah. This really is a point as well,
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isn't it? When it's like, oh, Lovecraft was a white supremacist. It's like, no, he was an English
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supremacist. Well, yeah. One of the reasons why he wanted, um, advocated for intervening in World
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War One, uh, on the American side was because of the fact that no, we need to go save the motherland.
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We need to go save the homeland. We need to save the English. Yeah. And help them out.
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Uh, there's one thing to say about New York. I believe he moved there for like about two years
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towards the end of his life and only, uh, found out a day or two ago that, um, he got married
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briefly. He was like married for like, is that right? For like a year or two and then that fell
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apart and all of that happened in New York. Yeah. Ironically enough to a Jewish woman.
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Oh really? But he did say that she was well assimilated. Oh, okay. So yeah. And it did fall apart
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anyway. There's one of the lesser known stories I listened to, uh, that's, I can't remember the name of it,
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but other than it's got the word Brooklyn in it and it, I don't know, like horror in Brooklyn or
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something or terror in Brooklyn or something like that. And, um, and, um, and it's, uh, quite a good
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one. Uh, but you can tell, yeah, it just comes, drips through it. These absolute disgust of New York,
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like in there, the sort of the, the premise of that story is sort of the, um, you wouldn't think
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that there'd be like ancient rights going on and Britain, like human sacrifice and stuff
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in Brooklyn, but there is. Oh, that's the thing. I certainly think there would be actually.
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Right. Um, so yeah, I mean, one of the things I would say again, before we get on to sort of
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really the detail of, um, the Innsmouth story is a little bit more about his life.
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When you learn a little bit more about that, I think it puts a lot of the stuff. It explains a lot
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of his stories while he keeps returning to the same themes over and over and over again.
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One thing is that in these various stories, I listened to one just yesterday about, um, how
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he feels like perhaps our real waking reality is just virtual and sleep is real, your dreams and
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the sleep state. That's, that's the real reality. Was that the Dream Quest? There's one called the
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Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. No, it wasn't that one, I don't think. And there's, there's another one that's
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got sleep in the title. The point is he talks about sleep and dreams all the time. And that
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corresponds very well with the ending of this particular story. Right. And apparently he suffered
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from sort of night terrors most of his life or had crazily vivid dreams all his life. And the first
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thing he ever wrote when he was a little kid, he was like six years old, he did a little kiddies
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attempt at a story. And it was about these crazy dreams he's got. And then another thing, his dad was
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institutionalized as insane when he was like three. Yeah. Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Died
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in an asylum. And then, and then years later, well, syphilis eventually sends you mad. Right.
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And then years later, his mum went to an asylum as well. No wonder they pop up so much in his stories.
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And it makes it quite appropriate that the name of the fictional town that he created for his stories,
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Arkham was also appropriated in the Batman series as Arkham Asylum. Yeah. Yeah. It all connects
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together. So that's the other theme that Lovecraft just returns to. It might be every single thing
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I've ever listened to or read is madness, the theme of madness. Do the characters go mad in Herbert West?
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I know that's the reanimator. Yeah, the reanimator, because that's one of his stories that also got a
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loose adaptation in the 1980s, I believe, where it's a film just called reanimator, a video nasty
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B movie type thing, which I I've not watched, but I need to watch. See, I don't think the main where
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they're just basically reanimating corpses and creating Frankenstein zombies. Yeah, like a
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Frankenstein thing. And the various monsters come back and get get the guy. So, for example,
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that's a good example. I think I might be wrong, that the main character, the main narrator doesn't
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go insane. But the other main character in it, the the reanimator, he does, he is sort of going insane
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slowly. And still in that story loads, it's like, you know, something happens. And he said,
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and in that moment, I, I figured it was the first kernels of insanity were creeping in, like,
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he just talks about it all the time, all the time, something or other happens or something or other,
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someone says. And it's like, and that's insane. And that's, and that's the first, like, again,
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kernel of madness creeping in. Did I imagine it? Or am I mad? Just that over and over and over and
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over again. To return to your point as well, though, about what you were saying about the the madness of
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his parents as well. After the institutionalization and death of his father, I believe he made a reference
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to the fact, bear in mind, it only have been very early teenage years by this point, perhaps even a
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little younger, but he talked about being suicidal, wishing to kill himself. And so these dark thoughts
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of terror were obviously, as you say, from his mind from a very young age. And so you have to ask
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yourself, well, okay, if he felt like that from such a young age, what kept him powering through?
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What led him to actually keep going, keep working, keep meeting people, keep caring about life? Because
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obviously a huge part of the Lovecraftian philosophy is, what is it, cosmicism? The idea
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that it's just an indifferent ancient universe, and humans aren't at the center of it. There's
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nothing particularly special about us. So why care? And the true reality is so unknowable and horrifying
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that it drives you mad to even get a small glimpse of it. Yes. However, he had an insatiable curiosity
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just about the world, right? It was chemistry. He was actually a bit of a scientist. Astronomy.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just all number of subjects, scientific subjects, just putting life under
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the microscope. Even up to his final days of his death, he was, so long as he still had strength
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to lift his pen, he was chronicling like the pain and how it felt. He was also a famous man of letters.
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Yes. He wrote volumes and volumes and volumes of correspondence with all sorts of different
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people. So while he was known as quite a shut-in, his mind clearly wanted to understand and explore
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the world and to hold relationships with other peoples, even if he himself was not one to
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often be seen out and about anywhere. Yes. He was friends with loads and loads and loads of other
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important sci-fi and horror writers. I forget the name of the guy who created the Conan series,
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but he was friends and in correspondence with him quite often. They would borrow each other's ideas
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and steal it like deliberately, happily, willingly, steal each other's bits of each other's universe and
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write them into their own stories. I know that in the books, Conan apparently has a lot of references to
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the Cthulhu mythos, which outside of it just being awesome Conan barbarian stories. It also makes me
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want to read those even more. Yeah. There's a few things you mentioned there that I think worth noting
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again before we sort of dive into the one story we sort of meant to be talking about here. So the
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idea that his dad went insane and his mum went insane and on some level he is insane, but it's sort of
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not completely insane, but just aware that he's sort of unbalanced in some way. And that thing where
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obviously all the stories and all the main characters in it are absolutely obsessed and interested in
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like the occult and unknowable, unprovable things. And they're very, very often there's a dialogue
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between that character and a completely materialist, scientific, logical character often.
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And that's Lovecraft himself. He was a scientist, first and foremost, but also obviously loved all
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things occult and weird and paranormal. I think they're the best sort of paranormal people are
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people that do actually have a grounding in real science. So they're not just completely
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woo-woo, crystal skull, like paper-thin nonsense. It is actually grounded in logic and reason and
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science as well at the same time. That's what makes it good and believable and has substance to it.
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Absolutely. It creates a tension within the stories that makes them interesting because the character
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is always questioning themselves and in conflict with themselves.
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He's going, I'm a reasonable, logical man. What I just saw could not have happened. It could not have.
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This is exactly the stock character. Stock's a bit pejorative, but like the type of character in
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M.R. James' ghost stories, just, you know, the arch rationalist who just comes into contact with the supernatural.
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I think it speaks to the changing of eras that was happening through the 19th century and into
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the early 20th century when in the kind of post-enlightenment fashion people were perceiving
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themselves as having left an era of mysticism and the gods and the irrational and entering an era of
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science and the rational. And this speaks to the tension that was happening there, that was occurring
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then, of somebody like Lovecraft seeing that and saying, but what if?
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Yeah, we can do amazing things, we can create wonders, we can catalogue and understand the entire world,
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but what if there was something to the way we thought before? What if those old ways of seeing
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the world actually linger? What if they have some impact still that even with all of our advances
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and technological marvels? We can't catalogue, we can't comprehend, we can't understand, we still
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look to the stars and we see mysteries. We still, in the case of this and other stories like the
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Call of Cthulhu, we look to the ocean and we still don't truly understand what lies beneath the waves.
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Because that was something that's also quite, people term Lovecraft's style of horror as cosmic horror,
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he's one of the guys who created this concept of cosmic horror, which is true, but also a lot of
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his stories, particularly Shadow over Innsmouth, deal with what horrors lurk beneath the ocean.
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And the old gods themselves are not just star creatures of space, they are creatures of the ocean,
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the deep ones. Lovecraft's Cthulhu is this enormous squid creature, which embodies both at the same time,
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because it's got the squid-like features while also having wings, so it can exist both in the stars
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and in the oceans. So it's this whole concept of mystery, how much we know about the world,
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there are still all of these mysteries that we may never be able to resolve, that I think really
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shows itself through Lovecraft's work. Absolutely, there's this theme that he returns to again and
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again and again and again, that humans aren't sort of the first intelligent creatures on the earth,
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that there's actually eons and eons of time before, where all sorts of things happened,
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right, you actually get loads of that, finally he gives us loads of that detail in, at the mountains
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of madness, but it's in loads of his work before that, that yeah, whether it's creatures or more than
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one type of creature from the stars, or it's creatures that live under the ice in Antarctica,
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or creatures that live under the sea, or a mixture of all those things going on all at once.
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One last thing I think it's, I really want to say about Lovecraft, the man, before we go into the
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story, is just a tiny bit more building on his real life, because I think it's like an important
00:23:01.180
insight. So he was born to like a waspish New England, Rhode Island, rich family, his dad goes in
00:23:09.900
an asylum when he's like three, so him and his mum went to live with one of his grandparents.
00:23:15.340
Yeah, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, right, was his name. And he was really rich, they lived in a giant
00:23:21.260
house, right, and they were really, really rich. Yeah. Well, not really, really rich, but in the
00:23:25.020
beginning, they had a big house and loads of money. And then when Lovecraft's about 13 or so, I think,
00:23:32.540
the grandfather dies of natural causes, and they have to, like what's left the family,
00:23:38.540
have to sell the estate or something. So they go from living in this big grand house to living in
00:23:44.620
just a normal small house, and then just living off the money, eking out the money for the rest of
00:23:52.300
his life. So like Lovecraft never had a normal job, apparently, just a normal job where you earn a wage,
00:23:57.420
and that's how you get by and pay your bills. I could never imagine him working a normal job.
00:24:00.940
Imagine him doing a paper round. So eking out the money and making ends meet with selling
00:24:07.180
stories a bit, because he never got critical or sort of commercial success in his own lifetime,
00:24:13.500
right? He was never a big... He was like a Van Gogh character who only attained notoriety and fame
00:24:18.700
after his death. He's not like Stephen King, a millionaire in his own lifetime, nothing like that. So
00:24:23.100
it's another classic thing that someone that's aristocratic or used to have money or their
00:24:27.980
family used to have money, and now they don't. And there's a little bit, if not a massive chip on
00:24:33.580
your shoulder about that, right? It's like the world screwed us in some way out of our proper position
00:24:39.740
of being aristocratic and better than everyone else. But we have to actually scrabble around in
00:24:44.140
the dirt like everyone else, actually, though, and make ends meet.
00:24:53.820
I suppose if either of you went far enough back, you'd probably find a similar story as
00:24:58.860
Oh, yeah. Most families have got something like that.
00:25:00.460
It was a great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather spending all of the family money on his mistress
00:25:07.020
slash replacement wife after he became a widower.
00:25:18.700
Well, I only learnt about it in the past few years, so I've not had enough time to develop
00:25:24.620
But he definitely... He definitely... One of the few things that he says is the word decadent.
00:25:32.060
Okay, so when you read someone that's old-fashioned, whether it's early 20th century or older,
00:25:37.340
quite often their usage will be different. They'll have a word that we still use today,
00:25:42.700
but it's got a different meaning essentially. And so the only real one that really jumped out at me
00:25:48.460
sort of again and again and again is when he says something's decadent. He means sort of
00:25:54.940
disgusting and inbred. And we don't really use the word that way, do we?
00:25:59.500
A decadent to us, to me, just sort of means over the top. Not much more than that,
00:26:11.340
I've come across the word in that usage before, but that might be because I read Lovecraft when I
00:26:17.500
was a young teenager. So it just became part of my understanding of that vocabulary. So I'm used to
00:26:24.700
It's like the word queer just used to mean anything odd or strange. It's nothing to do with homosexuality.
00:26:34.140
Yeah. But one last thing, just to wrap up the discussion from where we started it,
00:26:39.820
regarding the modern perceptions of Lovecraft due to his prejudice. It is an awful shame that most of
00:26:46.380
the time people now, if they recommend Lovecraft, they have to add a little asterisk, or one of the
00:26:53.180
worst things is if they are adapting Lovecraft, because no matter your social views these days,
00:26:58.780
Lovecraft has to be acknowledged and appreciated as a pioneer of this kind of cosmic horror,
00:27:05.660
the unknowable horror that he was the one who really put out there.
00:27:10.300
He has to be acknowledged in that way. So people will read his stories, they'll go,
00:27:15.260
damn, this is good. I'll do an adaptation of this. But they have to switch all of the social
00:27:20.700
messaging to be the complete opposite of what he was suggesting. They have to, at the same time,
00:27:26.540
adapt his work, and as we're so familiar with these days, spit in his face at the same time.
00:27:32.700
Um, I know that one of the literary horror awards is a bust in the shape of Lovecraft's head.
00:27:39.900
Um, and some people, uh, black American authors in particular, if they've been awarded this,
00:27:47.340
have been horrified. They've been horrified at the idea that they're getting the image of this
00:27:53.260
virulent racist that they get to proudly put on their shelf in pride of place. I do find it amusing,
00:28:00.860
the idea of Lovecraft staring down at them in disgust. Apologies. Um, but I don't think that
00:28:09.900
you should have to add all of these asterisks and anything like that. I think whatever you
00:28:15.820
think of his social views, the stories are excellent in their own terms. Uh, they are reflective of the
00:28:22.060
times and frankly, who cares? Who cares? They're great stories. If you agree with the message behind
00:28:29.420
the stories. Great if you disagree with the message behind the stories. Great what I disagree with
00:28:34.700
is people trying to bastardize and skin suit his work in the modern day. It's such a shame that we
00:28:41.180
don't have, as far as I'm aware, a proper filmic retelling of many of his stories. That they've not
00:28:49.340
been adapted because I understand it would be difficult given that a lot of the horror is supposed to be
00:28:53.820
unknowable and unseeable. But I think there could be some really fantastic films made as adaptations
00:29:01.020
of these stories and so many people are just afraid to touch them. They're afraid to touch them. Um,
00:29:06.540
and they shouldn't be. And they shouldn't be. The only other thing that I'll say before we, uh,
00:29:10.220
before we get into the details of the story, if we've piqued your interest with Lovecraft and you've
00:29:15.180
never read him before in this preamble to the discussion of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Lovecraft's one,
00:29:19.660
actually a really easy author to get into because he didn't have an enormous body of work. He wrote
00:29:26.300
a lot of stories, but they're all, most of them are very short. So you can get something like what
00:29:30.300
Luca has here, which is a single volume collection of all of his fiction. All of it just there. And
00:29:37.580
it's pretty reasonable. You can get it for what, like 20 quid? Yep. So if you want to read his stuff,
00:29:43.180
you can get it very, very easily, all in one place, nice and convenient. Oh, on YouTube,
00:29:48.060
one of the first things that will come up if you search for HP Lovecraft audio book is like a
00:29:53.340
playlist of like 40 of all the, all the best ones just right there. So you don't even need to spend
00:29:59.020
a penny or, um, or go to a bookshop or anything or read. You could just have it playing while you're,
00:30:05.580
while you're playing a computer game or doing the ironing or whatever it is.
00:30:08.860
You don't even need to read. So get on it. You don't even need to be able to read to enjoy
00:30:14.140
Lovecraft these days. Something that I'm sure would absolutely horrify him. You just need the
00:30:19.500
internet and some ear balls. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,