PREVIEW： Chronicles #20 ｜ The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft
Episode Stats
Summary
It's Halloween, and what better way to celebrate than to celebrate with some classic horror fiction written by H.P. Lovecraft? Join us as we discuss The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Three Houses of Dunwich Horror.
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,