Lovecraft was a racist dick, but the man mastered two things: manufacturing existential terror, and crafting a hell of a sentence so complex it takes, like, three once-overs to understand.
I haven't delved into the nitty-gritties of the 'separating the art from the artist' argument yet - all I know is that there have only been two authors to ever horrify me, and bigoted ol' H.P. was, and still is, one of 'em. I always wanted a stab at cosmic horror, to emulate his style, and I did take a wee stab it. A while ago. Butchered it, really. But you wouldn't know that.
I built a world full of monstrous monsters and deplorable deplorables (read: humans), but I never wrote anything beyond an intro inspired by the first story I ever read by Lovecraft: Dagon. It remains, to this day, the most unsettling tale I've ever read. I want to do that. And I think I can. But I simply don't have the time, now, do I?
I'll come back to the world of Qozzinth eventually, after finishing The Quaking Aspen and They Are Not Human. And by then, well... I trust I'll have enough literary experience to shit your trousers like a rich foreigner's ability to charm your panties off when you've had one too many vodka-crans.
For now, though, here's something to suffice. Something I wrote over a year ago. Something I can't wait to expand on, cus the monsters and the world they live in... well. You'll just have to wait, won't you?
Let's just say instead of cephalopods and tentacles, it involves... well, look at the picture, you dummy.
Of that place there exist no words rich enough in deplorability, in unholiness or debaucherous abandon, to capture the raw iniquity toiling inside. Within its walls. Beneath its floors. Behind its every door. For truly this hell, (which I wholly regret exhuming from the sandstone annals of ancient history), is but a writhing nest of horrors both Lovecraftian and Freudian, and another nameless -ian as yet undiscovered; undiscovered because such a school of fear could not—should not—be real, incomprehensible and corrosive as it is to the human mind.
I am no better equipped to dive into this recounting than I am to return, physically nor mentally, to that abysmal pit, laden with despair as a wealthy woman’s choker hangs heavy with pearls. I am, in fact, not equipped at all, but I remain the final soul to flee that void intact, at least in body if not in brain, and as such it is my duty to divulge what may very well be mankind’s final warning before its inevitable fall before the darkness encroaching.
‘Inevitable’ is not a word I use without shouldering the weight of its intended meaning, and as such this is the only circumstance in which I feel its use appropriate, if not devastatingly insufficient.
I pray these words, however incapable of conveying the horrors that lay in predatorial wait beyond the veil I dared pierce, not come to rest upon deaf ears.
But I know they will. I write this, now, only as a last resort—the only resort—one that shall not be heeded; one destined for unceremonious burial beneath the soil of ignorance; one that shall rear its head, in ghoulish fashion, on a day soon to come when our race has been deemed unnecessary by beings describable only as demons or as gods: the difference inconsequential. For what tools, what technologies have we to resist the crush of the cosmic unknown; of beings thrice as old as the very planet upon which we walk, let alone abuse?
And so, with that thought held fast in mind, I write this as a log; a record; a final history of our histories, a truth among centuries of falsities, so that if a race or species might arise after us, they might know our tragedy and avoid the fate we befell for the sake of pride, of arrogance, of faking certainty in a universe rife with unknowability.
It is pride and pride alone which composed the song that would become our death knell, word by word, as nails to a coffin.
And how we danced to every hammering. Every pummeling. Allowing wishful thinking to take the lead (like a broken horse to bridle), turning that metal-on-wood clang to a rhythmically blissful naivete, velvet-lined with skepticism and sarcastic laughter.
We were wrong to roll our eyes at the cosmos.
We were skeptical in a time when skepticism was a blade against the throat.
We were not afraid in an era when fear would have saved us.
And so we shall die. Even if you, dear reader, find this chronicle of mine, you shall know, too well, the irrevocability of our demise. Am I wrong?
We—like the tens of thousands of species we’d casually murdered for the sake of industry—of progress—we will die slowly. Not overnight. No explosive ends nor cataclysmic catastrophes, no; we will die like they did, like they all did: strangled by silence, by an inability to interfere on one’s own end.
A fate deserved.
Well deserved, I thought, at the tender age of twenty-one, riding the train from Arkham, to Lemarchand, to Crampton and Blyton Hills and finally a rolling stretch of green on Long Island’s grape-vined countryside: Astund Wick.
What I, already a misanthrope desperate for validation—a woman stuck in the persistent boy’s club of academia—failed to account for, however, was the suffering which my own suffering would unleash.
It was surreal.
It was all-consuming.
Undeniably real in a realm of such keen unreality.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Or rather, myself.
Let us return, first, to the train: to the mistake I made: when I opened a box, and then a door, and finally crossed beneath a bridge at night when I knew far better than to cross beneath a bridge at night.
Let us return, as we all must, now, to Qozzinth.