Lurking Fear - Lovecraft (1922)

https://tentaclii.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/annotated_lurking_fear_6x9-final.pdf

This is a good time for a horror story and I enjoyed all the annotations. The footnotes really ground the work not just in Lovecraft's biography but in the landscape he loved so much. In all the starry voids, cosmic monsters, anglophila and orientalist spookiness, it is easy to lose track of how much Lovecraft true passion was the forests and towns of Eastern North America.

'The Lurking Fear' is a story about a degenerate lineage of Dutch pioneers set in the Catskill Mountains. It is not his best work but with the annotations it is not just a horror story history but a slice of natural and colonial history.



[It was in another story but I recently read one the funniest line Lovecraft wrote and I cannot resist quoting here: "At first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a deity sent from the upper world, [the ancient Roman skull] afterward fell into dire neglect as the race of simple, artless burrowers succumbed before the onslaught of the conquering Aryan." The story is a parody of academic pettifoggery where Lovecraft shows off his own erudition and the prarie-dog cult is pure comedy gold. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ibid]