Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
Speaker 1: much for tuning in. Let's hear a big shout out
Speaker 1: for our super producer, the madness over Ennsmith, Max Williams. Yes, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the classic Williams enthusiasm. Folks, they call me Ben
Speaker 1: Bollen in this part of the world. My podcast partner
Speaker 1: in crime, Noel Brown is on is on Revengers, He's
Speaker 1: on Adventures. But we'll be returning soon. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: this is part two of a fascinating exploration we're having
Speaker 1: with a special guest. We asked ourselves a while back,
Speaker 1: why is HP Lovecraft so very weird? And we thought
Speaker 1: there could be none better to explore this with us
Speaker 1: than the man, the myth, the legend, a good friend
Speaker 1: of our show, a brother in arms on a personal level.
Speaker 1: Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Let's welcome him back with a big
Speaker 1: round of applause or whatever sound effect Max chooses. It's
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, a.
Speaker 2: Man called Jonathan, man called Jonathan All what may sound strange,
Speaker 2: do you? Everybody tells him what to do?
Speaker 3: Hey, if I'm going to give myself a Lovecraftian nickname.
Speaker 3: I think that's gonna be the Sandwich horror instead of
Speaker 3: this horror. Yeah. Yeah, I've been watching a lot of
Speaker 3: role for Sandwich. Have you ever watched that series? Wait yet,
Speaker 3: it's been on for a while, right, Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: the guy's been doing it for a few years. But
Speaker 3: he does a thing where he rolls dice to determine
Speaker 3: what kind of bread, what kind of filling, what kind
Speaker 3: of roughage, what kind of sauce, and like you know,
Speaker 3: obviously it went wild on TikTok, but it's also on
Speaker 3: YouTube shorts and I remember hearing about it when my brother.
Speaker 3: My brother and me worked up a table of wild
Speaker 3: magic modifiers and so I just got a wild hair
Speaker 3: to track it down and watch all of them and
Speaker 3: highly entertaining. But yeah, there's a lot of there's a
Speaker 3: lot of like Eldrich horror in that series as well. Honestly,
Speaker 3: you never know if it's gonna emerge or not.
Speaker 1: AMC. They have a cookbook there too, And I love
Speaker 1: that you're doing nicknames, Max. I hope you like yours.
Speaker 1: And of course my true name is unpronounceable in the
Speaker 1: human tongue. If you haven't checked out episode one, please
Speaker 1: please please do give it a listen. Otherwise, without further ado,
Speaker 1: we welcome you to the Darkness. He also is president
Speaker 1: briefly of another organization that is the PEPSI to Opah's coke,
Speaker 1: the National Amateur Press Organization or NAPA. So it's Uppah
Speaker 1: and NAPA and he just wants to hang out with
Speaker 1: both of them. This is what gets him back into
Speaker 1: writing fiction. If you like Call of Cuthulhu Mounts Madness,
Speaker 1: this is.
Speaker 3: Why you done. Which horror that kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I would say that this actually reminds me a lot.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a different era, but it reminds me
Speaker 3: a lot of a storyline that plays out in the
Speaker 3: Apple TV Plus series Mythic Quest, which is which is
Speaker 3: about a video game company that's making a massively multiplayer
Speaker 3: online role playing game. There is a character in that
Speaker 3: show named CJ, who is a former Nebula Award winning
Speaker 3: science fiction author who won his award back in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy four and has been coasting on it ever since.
Speaker 3: And I get the sense that that the characterization of CJ,
Speaker 3: at least some elements of his personality are drawn from
Speaker 3: HP Lovecraft. This this desire for being included in an
Speaker 3: esteemed group of literary professionals, also a desire to be
Speaker 3: viewed as a a particularly accomplished contributor to that group.
Speaker 3: I don't know that HP was thriving on it in
Speaker 3: the way that you know CJ is like a parasite
Speaker 3: in mythic quest. I don't. I don't think HP necessarily
Speaker 3: was a parasite at all. I think, in fact, he
Speaker 3: was quite the opposite. He seemed to be. One of
Speaker 3: the nice things we can say about HP Lovecraft is
Speaker 3: he genuinely seemed to be enthusiastic about encouraging young writers
Speaker 3: to write.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, and not in a creepy, grooming way, even
Speaker 1: though they talked about really creepy things like in a
Speaker 1: genuine collegiate manner that did result in actual friendship. This
Speaker 1: is why, as you mentioned earlier, he ultimately becomes one
Speaker 1: of the most prolific letter writers of his century. I
Speaker 1: kind of don't want to imagine him on Twitter or
Speaker 1: social media, but for him being able to take the
Speaker 1: time to put the thoughts in order right, he was
Speaker 1: doing great.
Speaker 3: I was like, there's another example I can give. I
Speaker 3: think it was Robert Block, who wrote when he wrote
Speaker 3: to him, because Block was Block was significantly younger than Lovecraft.
Speaker 3: Block I think was born in like nineteen seventeen, so
Speaker 3: much younger than Lovecraft. But he came across some of
Speaker 3: Lovecraft's stories because they had been republished in various pulp magazines,
Speaker 3: and he wrote to Lovecraft to say, hey, do you
Speaker 3: happen to know where I can find your other works?
Speaker 3: Because I love these that I've come across, but I
Speaker 3: do not know where I can find your other stories.
Speaker 3: And Lovecraft have a book, and Lovecraft sent him copies
Speaker 3: of all the stories, and uh, you know, obviously, I'm
Speaker 3: sure part of that was Lovecraft was flattered by the
Speaker 3: attention and you know, the appeal to him as an
Speaker 3: author of great skill. But I think it also speaks
Speaker 3: to his genuine desire to have this sort of collaborative
Speaker 3: creative network of writers. Uh. I think I think a
Speaker 3: lot of the things we attribute to Lovecraft are at
Speaker 3: least partly the work of this massive group of other writers,
Speaker 3: writers who all helped work within each other's worlds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which he also encouraged. And I think that was
Speaker 1: that is perhaps one of the greatest modern innovations in
Speaker 1: Lovecraft's UVU if we're being if we're being pretentious because
Speaker 1: it's not really his past. A certain point people would
Speaker 1: write to him and say, oh, I love this story, right,
Speaker 1: I love the way this is constructed. I love you know,
Speaker 1: insert ambiguous, nebulous threats here. And here's something I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about. How how do you see these two things
Speaker 1: working together? And be like, oh, that's great, let me
Speaker 1: think about it. Okay, So in this world, you know,
Speaker 1: I've got I've got Cuthulhu or something, or you know,
Speaker 1: the goat with a thousand young and he kind of
Speaker 1: works this way, and so maybe this is one of
Speaker 1: those thousand young I don't know, tell me what you think.
Speaker 1: I look forward to writing back, and then they would
Speaker 1: write back, and they would It's just something that can
Speaker 1: seem kind of rare because think about it today, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of another like a big multi format universe, maybe
Speaker 1: Stephen King's Connected.
Speaker 3: Or or comic book universes. Right, that's great because these
Speaker 3: comic book universes are literally made up of the contributions
Speaker 3: of hundreds of different authors and artists, and the attempt
Speaker 3: to fashion a an interconnected universe of all these disparate
Speaker 3: stories and try to make them make sense within a
Speaker 3: larger narrative is an ongoing challenge. It's why you have
Speaker 3: these like universe resetting events in DC or Marvel in particular.
Speaker 3: But it's it's the closest I can think of. It's
Speaker 3: a bunch. And in that case, you've got like a
Speaker 3: corporate overlord who's making sure that you've got a bunch
Speaker 3: of different authors who are all kind of working toward
Speaker 3: the same goal. But in this case it was much
Speaker 3: more organic than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and and the I love that comparison. I think
Speaker 1: that's apropos. I would also say for the important thing
Speaker 1: about the Stephen King example is imagine if you are
Speaker 1: King is a superstar by this point, But imagine if
Speaker 1: you are someone who just likes reading scary stories, and
Speaker 1: you have an idea for a scary story that you
Speaker 1: want to set in the universe Stephen King is created.
Speaker 1: There are there is an entire industry of legal experts
Speaker 1: who can't wait to smack someone down for trying that,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Unless you're his son, Unless
Speaker 1: you are Joe Hill, who I think is quite talented.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, no doubt. I mean you know, Doctor
Speaker 3: Sleep is great, but yeah, I it's funny because King
Speaker 3: himself did this within his own work, right where you
Speaker 3: would have seemingly disconnected storylines, and then he would gradually
Speaker 3: reveal that, oh no, these actually exist within the same universe,
Speaker 3: and in fact one will reference and perhaps even transform another.
Speaker 3: So King King kind of did this as a one
Speaker 3: man show, but in Lovecraft's time, what we're talking about
Speaker 3: is literally like a dozen authors, all of whom are
Speaker 3: working in genres that are maybe not directly weird fiction,
Speaker 3: but are somewhat related. Like Robert E. Howard famously would
Speaker 3: be sword and sorcery, right like he's that's the creator
Speaker 3: of Conan the Barbarious. Yeah, And so you would have
Speaker 3: these people who are working in different areas of speculative fiction,
Speaker 3: but they would start to incorporate elements of each other's work,
Speaker 3: and you get this incredibly rich tapestry where if you
Speaker 3: are a voracious reader, if you're someone who's subscribing to,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the these pulp magazines, you get that
Speaker 3: rewarding feeling of oh, I recognize that reference, just as
Speaker 3: if you are like a diehard Marvel Cinematic Universe fan
Speaker 3: and you sit there through the whole movie and you
Speaker 3: wait until that you know, Stinger at the end of
Speaker 3: the credits, and you think, oh my gosh, they're referencing
Speaker 3: this other, like incredibly obscure thing that's was mentioned once
Speaker 3: in like a television episode of Agents of Shield or something.
Speaker 3: It's that same kind of endorphin release, you know, that
Speaker 3: feeling of oh, I recognize this. That makes me feel
Speaker 3: included and special. But we're not done with Lovecraft's tragedies
Speaker 3: because just as all this is going, there's another setback
Speaker 3: in his life.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and this is I think it's appropriate that we
Speaker 1: spend some time on the good parts so that you
Speaker 1: know it's not just a wretched march to the grave here,
Speaker 1: but there are more tragedies ahead. As you said, Lovecraft's
Speaker 1: mother hers a quote unquote nervous breakdown in nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 3: It's the family business.
Speaker 1: Yeah. She is admitted to Butler Hospital, and just like
Speaker 1: her husband before her, she does not emerge there alive.
Speaker 1: She dies in the facility on May twenty fourth, nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty one, with some gallbladder related complications. So not syphilis
Speaker 1: in this case.
Speaker 3: Although there were some at least some elements that I
Speaker 3: read where there was speculation that perhaps she too had
Speaker 3: oh syphilis. Yeah, but again possible. Yeah, it's speculation because again,
Speaker 3: like we're talking about a time where records aren't as
Speaker 3: thorough the actual medical practices and as thorough. It all
Speaker 3: depends upon what you have access to. So again this
Speaker 3: could be elements of speculation. But there have been those
Speaker 3: who have suggested that perhaps she too was inflicted by syphilis.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And this is horrific either way you slice it.
Speaker 1: And because this is the most important person in Lovecraft's
Speaker 1: life at this point, for better or worse, he is
Speaker 1: shattered and he spends a few weeks in a very
Speaker 1: dark emotional place. But eventually he says, you know, stiff
Speaker 1: upper lip, we must soldier on. And he goes to
Speaker 1: a journalism convention in Boston. This is on Independence Day
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty one, and despite being an avowed racist
Speaker 1: and a virulent anti Semite, he hits it off with
Speaker 1: a Jewish woman named Sonia half to Green, She's seven
Speaker 1: years older than him. They feel like they click. This
Speaker 1: is the closest thing this guy's ever going to get
Speaker 1: to a meet greet in a rom com and he
Speaker 1: is head over the heels, head over the heels. I'm
Speaker 1: still learning English, He's asked, yes, yes, just so. So
Speaker 1: he visits Sonia in her apartment in Brooklyn in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty two, and then by March third, nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: they're married. There's a bit of acrimony in the Lovecraft
Speaker 1: household because he does not tell his two aunts, who
Speaker 1: raised them and still of course have very much come
Speaker 1: from that patrician mindset. Lillian D. Clark and Annie Eve
Speaker 1: Phillips Gamwell find out that their lovely nephew got married
Speaker 1: via the post.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like they receive a letter. It's like
Speaker 3: breaking up via text. So Ben, quick question for you,
Speaker 3: do you think that HP lovecrafts let us say in
Speaker 3: the language of Facebook, it's complicated relationship with his mother
Speaker 3: may have played some part in him becoming enamored of
Speaker 3: a woman seven years his senior.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. I would take it a step further
Speaker 1: with you. Let's keep walking down that one, because I
Speaker 1: would also argue is fraught relationship with his mother informed
Speaker 1: his decision to marry literally the first other lady who
Speaker 1: was nice to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, just
Speaker 1: to have that constant maternal figure.
Speaker 3: And to be fair, I never met the man.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, so.
Speaker 1: We have to see you.
Speaker 3: No, it could be that we are way off base
Speaker 3: and we're viewing this from a lens in the twenty
Speaker 3: first century that just simply cannot see the minutia. But
Speaker 3: there are certain indicators that appear to support that narrative.
Speaker 1: There we go. We do know some facts that are inarguable.
Speaker 1: Post matrimony. Lovecraft moves into Sonia's place. She's got that
Speaker 1: apartment in Brooklyn, and at first it looks like our
Speaker 1: newly minted couple is going to be doing okay. Sonya
Speaker 1: owns a hat shop off Fifth Avenue, which even back
Speaker 1: then is a big deal. Lovecraft is making a living,
Speaker 1: a modest living, but it's living nonetheless as a professional writer.
Speaker 1: Several of his earlier stories have been accepted by Weird Tales,
Speaker 1: one of the pre eminent pulp publications of the day.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, tragedy comes back again, back into the fore.
Speaker 1: Their happy honeymoon period is all too brief. Sonya's hat
Speaker 1: shop goes bankrupt. Lovecraft turns down some opportunities that he
Speaker 1: should have taken to rise in the world of publishing.
Speaker 1: He could have been the editor of magazine that was
Speaker 1: coming out sort of adjacent to Weird Tales, not a competitor,
Speaker 1: but like a compliment, like, if you like this, you'll
Speaker 1: also like that.
Speaker 3: The problem was that this job would have necessitated a move.
Speaker 3: He would have had to move to Chicago, and that
Speaker 3: was a pretty big ask when you've got, like, at
Speaker 3: the same time, you have this failing business that is
Speaker 3: not in Chicago, and clearly your wife cannot accompany you
Speaker 3: without abandoning the business entirely. So it was a tough call, right, Like,
Speaker 3: it's not as simple as hey, you can stay exactly
Speaker 3: where you are and take this gig. It's no, you
Speaker 3: have to up end your life and start over in
Speaker 3: a new city, but you will have this gig. And
Speaker 3: ultimately love Craft says, you know, it's too rich for
Speaker 3: my blood to have to move over there. I'm going
Speaker 3: to stay where I am. I've got my wife whom
Speaker 3: I can always depend upon, who will be stalwart and
Speaker 3: true and will never get sick ever. Right, And then
Speaker 3: she got.
Speaker 1: Sick, and then she had then her health turns south
Speaker 1: as well, as she has to go to a sanitarium
Speaker 1: in New Jersey, and Lovecraft needs to do his best
Speaker 1: to support her and himself and probably a few cats
Speaker 1: at this point, And so he tries to find a job.
Speaker 1: He is, and we say this with great affection, he's
Speaker 1: a little bit nebbish, you know what I mean? This
Speaker 1: guy his hands, they don't have callouses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not like I mean we mentioned this earlier.
Speaker 3: It's not like he had any work experience whatsoever. Like
Speaker 3: we mentioned that when he was doing the whole hermit thing,
Speaker 3: and same is true. Now, right, he's thirty four and
Speaker 3: he lacks any practical skills that he can apply to
Speaker 3: landing your regular kind of job. So what are you
Speaker 3: gonna do. He's in a really bad way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's in a non ideal situation and he has
Speaker 1: to move again. And this is a guy who very
Speaker 1: much hates moving, just to be clear. And so he
Speaker 1: has to go to like a bachelor apartment, a single apartment,
Speaker 1: and it's near a area of Brooklyn called Red Hook.
Speaker 1: This will go on to inform a lot of his
Speaker 1: writing in a very non complimentary way to the neighborhood
Speaker 1: and the people of Red Hook.
Speaker 3: Yes, he's having to associate with folks outside of his
Speaker 3: normal realm of experience, and he has a negative point
Speaker 3: of view about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the foreign hordes, the masses of foreigners in the city,
Speaker 1: and to the point where you know, you can read,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a spoiler at this at this juncture,
Speaker 1: you can read where there are characters in Lovecraft stories
Speaker 1: who go who you know immediately leg just intuitively know
Speaker 1: that the foreigners in Red Hook practice secret religions to
Speaker 1: squamous and unclean gods. Why because they had, you know,
Speaker 1: like a bit of an air to their eyebrows.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you if you read any Lovecraft stories, like
Speaker 3: a lot of them end up incorporating characters who are black,
Speaker 3: and they are also typically antagonists or sometimes depicted as barbaric,
Speaker 3: and you know, to Lovecraft, civilization was the epitome of
Speaker 3: human achievement, and so anything that was considered uncivilized in
Speaker 3: Lovecraft's eyes, would be equivalent to being evil. So he
Speaker 3: depicted a lot of black characters as being primitive, barbaric, uncivilized,
Speaker 3: and as a result of those things, also prone to
Speaker 3: worshiping these sort of profane figures that ultimately would have
Speaker 3: an incredibly negative impact on the typically the protagonist. I
Speaker 3: don't know if any of y'all have read a lot
Speaker 3: of Lovecraft, but if you have, you probably are aware
Speaker 3: that there's a better than eighty five percent chance the
Speaker 3: protagonist is not making it out alive or sane by
Speaker 3: the end of the story, of course.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's you know, I enjoy that part of
Speaker 1: this structure. Actually, that the that you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: upending a lot of the conventional rules of stories of
Speaker 1: that time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unless you're unless you're Robert Chambers, who already did
Speaker 3: it in The Yellow King.
Speaker 1: But okay, yeah, yeah, and The Yellow King is great. Oh,
Speaker 1: I love that one story, the repairer of reputations. Do
Speaker 1: check out The Yellow King. Just know it's an anthology
Speaker 1: of short stories by Robert Chambers. Uh, not every one
Speaker 1: of them, slaps, I'm just gonna be diplomatic.
Speaker 3: Well, and not all of them. I don't think people
Speaker 3: would categories categorize all of them as falling into weird fiction.
Speaker 3: But the ones that do, the ones that do really
Speaker 3: like you can see, not that you know. It's speculated
Speaker 3: that Lovecraft didn't encounter a lot of those stories told
Speaker 3: after he was already writing, so it seems like it
Speaker 3: was not a case of any sort of influence or plagiarism.
Speaker 3: I don't want to suggest that, but Chambers established a
Speaker 3: lot of tropes that Lovecraft and his contemporaries would continue
Speaker 3: to engage in. M M.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Lovecraft also, you know, you have to bring
Speaker 1: Algernon Blackwood into the conversation and several other things that
Speaker 1: you know, Lovecraft was not just like he wasn't reticent
Speaker 1: to criticize stuff he didn't like. He was also never
Speaker 1: reticent to praise stuff that he enjoyed or felt informed him.
Speaker 1: So we have to give him points there. But despite
Speaker 1: the fact that he has generated these friendships, this massive
Speaker 1: correspondence as a couple of what we would call irl
Speaker 1: friends there in New York, he's still depressed, he still
Speaker 1: feels isolated, and he still cartoonishly xenophobic. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty six he returns to Providence. He just feels like
Speaker 1: he has to do it. The scuttle butt here is
Speaker 1: that his aunts don't want him to bring his wife.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know what will happen with Sonia, but he
Speaker 1: goes anyway, and so.
Speaker 3: Well, of course, and yeah, so leading up to this,
Speaker 3: when he was in Red Hook, Sonya was actually in Cleveland.
Speaker 3: She was still seeking treatment in Cleveland. So that's one
Speaker 3: of the reasons why he felt so isolated, is that
Speaker 3: his wife, Like you can start to see a pattern
Speaker 3: with like his dependence. I'm sure there was like a
Speaker 3: codependent kind of thing going on between him and his mother,
Speaker 3: and is inspect something similar was going on between him
Speaker 3: and his wife, and he's separated from her while she's
Speaker 3: seeking treatment in Cleveland, he's in Red Hook. They reunite
Speaker 3: when they go to Providence in nineteen twenty six, but
Speaker 3: you know, through one means or another, that relationship becomes
Speaker 3: unsustainable and nineteen twenty nine it comes to an end.
Speaker 3: But this is also right around the time where Lovecraft
Speaker 3: is finally actually experiencing the success of his work. You know,
Speaker 3: he's been at it for quite some time, but this
Speaker 3: is like the renaissance of Lovecraft that we're entering into here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And
Speaker 1: we have to recognize this paradox, which unfortunately may sound
Speaker 1: familiar to a lot of people. Your professional life goes
Speaker 1: really well, and your personal life takes. Your personal life
Speaker 1: goes really well, and your professional life takes and it
Speaker 1: seems that Lovecraft is always trying to find that balance, right,
Speaker 1: often without success.
Speaker 3: See also every stand up comedian ever.
Speaker 1: Yes see also literally every stand up comedian. Come at
Speaker 1: us for that one. All right, so you nailed at
Speaker 1: Jonathan Lovecraft returns to Providence nineteen twenty six, like you said,
Speaker 1: and the last ten years of his life. He may
Speaker 1: have found some kind of balance here, possibly his best
Speaker 1: decade as a writer, maybe some of his best personal
Speaker 1: years as well. His life at this point isn't super eventful,
Speaker 1: you know, he's not living out real life pirate cosplay
Speaker 1: or anything. He does travel to a lot of historic
Speaker 1: sites around the Eastern Seaboard to soak in their culture
Speaker 1: with varying reactions, and they all kind of they start
Speaker 1: to inform his fiction, you know, his generally, like the
Speaker 1: one the work that even non Lovecraft fans know the
Speaker 1: most about is probably going to be The Call of
Speaker 1: Cudulhu in twenty six or at the Mountains of Madness
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty one. While he's writing these stories that
Speaker 1: will go on to cement his legacy, he's doing another
Speaker 1: legacy cementing move, which is he's writing about these to
Speaker 1: his friends, his peers. You know what I mean, what
Speaker 1: do you guys think rightw what do you guys think
Speaker 1: about breeding with fish people to worship a fish god?
Speaker 3: All right? What do you think about this little story
Speaker 3: I got called Dagon, which ends up being one of
Speaker 3: my favorites of Lovecraft. That's actually my favorite film adaptation
Speaker 3: of Lovecraft. Oh come on, but only if you're going
Speaker 3: as like a fairly strict following of Like, if you're
Speaker 3: going into the more loose adaptations of Lovecraft, my favorite
Speaker 3: is re Animator. I mean, it's always going to be
Speaker 3: re Animator. Evil Dead is obviously inspired by Lovecraft's signed adaptation, though,
Speaker 3: but Reanimator is and it's bonkers and I love it
Speaker 3: and it's fantastic. I mean, there's so many great adaptations
Speaker 3: of Lovecraft. But again, like that collaborative nature, that camaraderie
Speaker 3: that was built up between all these different authors who
Speaker 3: are sharing ideas and nurturing one another's ideas and informing
Speaker 3: one another's ideas, I would argue that a Lovecraft story
Speaker 3: is not solely a Lovecraft story. It is the product
Speaker 3: of this collaborative universe, just as I would say Robert E. Howard,
Speaker 3: a Roberty Howard's story is again a product of this
Speaker 3: that you know, the the prime author is whomever actually
Speaker 3: wrote the piece, but that that piece would not exist,
Speaker 3: at least not in the form that we are familiar
Speaker 3: with without this collaborative relationship going on between all these
Speaker 3: different authors who are encouraging each other to participate in
Speaker 3: this process. And again, it's one of those things where
Speaker 3: I'm like, I'm not aware of too many other instances
Speaker 3: where something like this has happened, at least not organically,
Speaker 3: where it wasn't just like some sort of weird content
Speaker 3: farm kind of approach.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's the key part there, that it would
Speaker 1: organically arose as he was he was not just enjoying
Speaker 1: his own success and pursuing it, but he was hoping
Speaker 1: interest would be contagious.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: He wanted other people to pick up the toys that
Speaker 1: he had built and play with them and maybe, you know,
Speaker 1: make some toys of their own, and there's something human
Speaker 1: and astonishing about that. We also know we're going to
Speaker 1: set them up before we have to do the drop here.
Speaker 1: We also know that he was not one hundred percent
Speaker 1: immovable in some of his ideas and prejudices. Depression occurred
Speaker 1: during his lifetime. He witnessed this, and it led him
Speaker 1: to support Roosevelt, which might be surprised based on some
Speaker 1: of the stuff we already know about his background and
Speaker 1: his racist perspective. But he became a socialist towards the.
Speaker 3: End well, and like the Great Depression affected him as
Speaker 3: well as you know, affecting working people all over the place.
Speaker 3: In that publications like like Weird Tales began to scale
Speaker 3: back like they were still printing. Because as we are
Speaker 3: all familiar at this point, I think some of us
Speaker 3: are now becoming directly familiar that times of recession or depression,
Speaker 3: entertainment often is one of the few industries that continues
Speaker 3: to do well as people seek escape from the stresses
Speaker 3: of life. Well, same was true back then during the
Speaker 3: Great Depression, which, by the way, not that great. If
Speaker 3: you ask me, it's a terrible name. It was a
Speaker 3: pretty awful depression. But yeah, we're even with that. They
Speaker 3: had to scale back. They just couldn't afford to continue
Speaker 3: publication on the same schedule that they had been doing,
Speaker 3: which in turn had a cascading effect on all the
Speaker 3: different authors who are contributing to those publications, and so
Speaker 3: Lovecraft himself was feeling the effects of the depression, just
Speaker 3: like other people were, and perhaps the hardships of his
Speaker 3: life once his grandfather had passed and his legacy was
Speaker 3: mishandled so dramatically, gave him a little bit of reflection
Speaker 3: into how life isn't all tea time and Gothic tales
Speaker 3: by the fire.
Speaker 1: And we've spoken at length about the intensely problematic views
Speaker 1: regarding Lovecraft there have been. Of course, there are still
Speaker 1: continual additions to the existing mythos, even here in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, and there are authors like Matt Ruff, the
Speaker 1: creator of Lovecraft Country, who kind of navigate these issues
Speaker 1: by centering people of color in their lovecrafty and explorations.
Speaker 1: And we know, look Lovecraft, we still know how he
Speaker 1: would have reacted if he saw the effect that he
Speaker 1: has had upon fiction and speculative fiction. Weird horror today
Speaker 1: because the last two or three years of his life
Speaker 1: were also filled with more heartbreak. His aunt, Miss Clark, died,
Speaker 1: he moved in with his other aunt, Miss Gamwell, to
Speaker 1: another basically an apartment, and his later stories were more
Speaker 1: and more difficult to sell. They were kind of struggling
Speaker 1: under the weight of the world building he had created.
Speaker 3: Against something that Marvel fans can kind of identify with
Speaker 3: that the lung you the longer you go with this
Speaker 3: interconnected mythos, the more is required of the consumer of
Speaker 3: that art to have at least some familiarity with the
Speaker 3: stuff that came before, or else they're completely lost.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, shout out to everybody who just saw uh,
Speaker 1: you know, iron Man.
Speaker 3: Three, right right, but yeah, to your to your point,
Speaker 3: like we're getting toward the end of his life here,
Speaker 3: and we'll just I can't think we can skip ahead
Speaker 3: to say that he had cancer and by the time
Speaker 3: the cancer was discovered, it had progressed to a point
Speaker 3: where the writing was already on the wall, and so
Speaker 3: he too began to fall apart, and eventually he passed
Speaker 3: away due to the cancer he had. And so, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, there are there's definitely tragedy in his life.
Speaker 3: I don't want to just paint Lovecraft as this xenophobic,
Speaker 3: you know, racist blowhard who you know who expouse espoused
Speaker 3: views that were absolutely terrible. But we also can't completely
Speaker 3: divorce ourselves of that because he actually that informed his writing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's clear in some of his stories.
Speaker 3: You can't I don't think death of the author is
Speaker 3: something we can easily apply here because those views inform
Speaker 3: much of his work.
Speaker 1: Agreed one hundred percent, and I think we could add
Speaker 1: a little bit of arm armchair psychology here with the following.
Speaker 1: Tell me when you guys think about this. I have,
Speaker 1: after doing a bunch of reading for this stuff and
Speaker 1: over the years as a fan of love crafting and work,
Speaker 1: I have come to the light conclusion that one of
Speaker 1: his mental issues may have been something we would right
Speaker 1: kignies as obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD, in that his
Speaker 1: racism is that aphobia is. It's one of his many
Speaker 1: weird hang ups, probably the most dangerous. But he had
Speaker 1: a lot of very strident opinions for and against things,
Speaker 1: and he did obsess over them to what would be
Speaker 1: considered an abnormal degree. Give you one of the fun ones,
Speaker 1: and this made me think of you, Jonathan. He hated seafood.
Speaker 1: He hated seafood. Now, not all of our listeners may
Speaker 1: know this, you and I have talked about over the
Speaker 1: years under many adventures, but he is he actively hates it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you actively hate it, but you
Speaker 1: definitely can't eat it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I can't eat it because I have a
Speaker 3: severe shellfish allergy, one that will send me to the
Speaker 3: emergency room if I have any shelfish or at least
Speaker 3: lobster and shrimp are the known shellfish that I am
Speaker 3: allergic to. I have eliminated all shellfish, including stuff outside
Speaker 3: of things like lobsters and shrimp and stuff from my
Speaker 3: diet because after having that experience a couple of times,
Speaker 3: I don't want to ever have it again. Plus it
Speaker 3: was pretty scary the last time. And also it means
Speaker 3: that I have to be careful around seafood in general
Speaker 3: because of cross contamination. So I don't hate seafood. I
Speaker 3: do avoid seafood unless I am extremely certain that the
Speaker 3: seafood restaurant or whatever is very good about avoiding cross contamination.
Speaker 3: So I would not go so far as to cast
Speaker 3: fish as the bad guys in my stories.
Speaker 1: But maybe there's an untrusty there's an untrustworthy mollusk from Brooklyn.
Speaker 3: Yes, maybe, yeah, I could have like a I don't know,
Speaker 3: a ship d crab. Maybe that's how they walk man. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: they're always they're always edging away from you, you know.
Speaker 3: But yeah, Lovecraft like famously despised seafood to the point
Speaker 3: where where he made a big deal of it. And
Speaker 3: and also, at least according to what we came across, uh,
Speaker 3: appeared to never really evolve his his dietary. UH preferences
Speaker 3: beyond a small child and like to eat like lots
Speaker 3: of sweet stuff and not not so much anything of
Speaker 3: real nutritional value. He'd mess with a sandwich, Yeah, he
Speaker 3: would mess with a sandwich, probably a PB and J
Speaker 3: if I had to guess, but yeah, crust. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: he's cut on the diagonal. But he uh he he
Speaker 3: definitely despised seafood, which, if you're growing up in Rhode Island,
Speaker 3: that's rough, y'all.
Speaker 1: That's a that's right, Yeah, that's such a waste. And
Speaker 1: Max will throw it to you in in the second
Speaker 1: four of the update on the condition if you're comfortable.
Speaker 1: But for now, what you need to know is we
Speaker 1: discovered one of the few times that Lovecraft is on
Speaker 1: record swearing. He did not swear casually, you know, nor conversationally.
Speaker 1: But the story goes and got this thanks to our
Speaker 1: friends a mental floss that he hated seafood so much,
Speaker 1: so cartoonishly that one time a friend of his was
Speaker 1: trying to you know, get him outside, get him out
Speaker 1: of his creepy little room, and they said, hey, come
Speaker 1: with me. Let's you know, we'll go after dinner. And
Speaker 1: when Lovecraft found out that the dinner was steamed clams,
Speaker 1: Lovecraft said, quote, while you are eating that god stuff,
Speaker 1: I'll go across the street for a sandwich. Please excuse me.
Speaker 3: I do love that he was reluctant to swear in public,
Speaker 3: but he had no problem throwing racial slur around.
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, that's a weird demarcation of decorum. All right,
Speaker 1: so let's before we wrap up next. I saw you
Speaker 1: pop on what's going on? My friend? Oh?
Speaker 5: I just wanted to commiserate with Jonathan that because of
Speaker 5: the condition, I cannot eat any shellfish as well. So
Speaker 5: you and I can sit around eating like plain chicken
Speaker 5: together and being and talk about how much we like
Speaker 5: it despite.
Speaker 3: Not Was there a time when you could eat shellfish?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 4: Is there years ago?
Speaker 3: Any particular shellfish that you really miss?
Speaker 5: Muscles are probably my favorite shellfish. I personally, I have
Speaker 5: a very much a love hate relationship with shrimp. I
Speaker 5: just I just know too much about them at the
Speaker 5: gnography class in yeah school.
Speaker 4: And I they're just like really gross to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, crab, lobster, all that stuff.
Speaker 4: Just seems so annoying to eat. I mean, oysters are good,
Speaker 4: but also oysters are just like.
Speaker 1: They're the boog of the sea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like, what, there's not really anything in this well.
Speaker 3: Also, also opening up an oyster is taking your life
Speaker 3: in your own hands. Tried to use a knife to
Speaker 3: pry one of those shells open without like shoving it
Speaker 3: through your.
Speaker 5: Hand, Johnny, I remember ten years of food and beverage experience.
Speaker 5: I mean I was mostly front of house, but I'm
Speaker 5: pretty good with knives in the kitchen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, see me. No, I'm being a left hander and
Speaker 3: all that kind of stuff. Yeah lefties though, I'm just
Speaker 3: saying like a lot of tools were made for right handers,
Speaker 3: and it does get annoying when you're getting to that.
Speaker 5: That's why wors pure is because we have grown up
Speaker 5: with the spiral and the spiral notebook digging into our hands.
Speaker 5: You know, the desks in public school, they're always on
Speaker 5: the right side, at the left side. Actually, when I
Speaker 5: went with Georgia State and where I got my degree from,
Speaker 5: they had left handed ones, but it was always like
Speaker 5: I would always sit in the right hand one and
Speaker 5: right would sit in left hand ones. We all complain
Speaker 5: about stupid desk is.
Speaker 3: Because yeah, yeah, well, well for me, it's shrimp. Poe
Speaker 3: Boys like I too, share a deep understanding of shrimp
Speaker 3: and the issues, and.
Speaker 1: I'm just a little I like the little line of poop.
Speaker 3: Yeah do you. Yeah, it's always it's great picking picking
Speaker 3: up a shrimp in a restaurant and seeing that there
Speaker 3: and thinking, oh, you didn't even take the basic step
Speaker 3: of deveining the shrimp. But no, Yeah, I miss Poe
Speaker 3: boys a lot. Uh, but I've gotten to the point
Speaker 3: where I've eliminated pretty especially any place that does fried seafood.
Speaker 3: Obviously you've got to be careful about the oil. So, uh,
Speaker 3: the thing I really miss is kalamari. I miss kalamari
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, hey, if it makes you guys feel better,
Speaker 1: there's a big problem with counterfeit klamari. So a lot
Speaker 1: of your friends you're bragging about eating it may not
Speaker 1: maybe eating pig intestine.
Speaker 3: Uh, yeah, I've I've often heard that, but I've also
Speaker 3: heard it debunked. But you know, there, I'm not sure
Speaker 3: because there is that one Lovecraft story where the monsters
Speaker 3: are pig intestines, so.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah, they're also oh we should mention this too.
Speaker 1: Also not every he has at least a few stories
Speaker 1: where the human esque or human descended villains are not
Speaker 1: just the quote unquote foreigners that he would describe. There's
Speaker 1: one in particular, I'm trying to remember it. That's about
Speaker 1: a southern family of white folks who used to be
Speaker 1: well thought of, but then they became inbred and they
Speaker 1: committed mis engenation and turned into like mole people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you remember that one?
Speaker 3: I don't remember that one. For the sake of transparency,
Speaker 3: it has been a long time since I've read Lovecraft's works.
Speaker 3: I did read. I think I pretty much read every
Speaker 3: single published work he had, besides you know, the compilations
Speaker 3: of letters. But I've read like pretty much all of
Speaker 3: his short stories and everything. But it's been years, and
Speaker 3: with so much other media, either directly or indirectly inspired
Speaker 3: by Lovecraft, it's easy for me to conflate things. So
Speaker 3: I don't want to. I don't want to say something
Speaker 3: and then just be totally wrong, simply because you know,
Speaker 3: my brain's got scrambled. Back in twenty twenty four, pretty
Speaker 3: darn good. And it turns out anything before twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: I can never be entirely sure if I'm remembering it
Speaker 3: or if I'm inventing it.
Speaker 1: It is the Lurking Fear by HP Lovecraft. I think
Speaker 1: I'll have to reread it. I believe that's the uh,
Speaker 1: that's the story. So everybody could get a little bit
Speaker 1: of xenophobia from Lovecraft. I think that's the one where
Speaker 1: he also talks trash about Dutch people or something.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean again, you know you walk around in
Speaker 3: wooden shoes long enough, you're gonna bound to tick somebody off.
Speaker 3: I knew that from my clogging days.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is true. We've got we've got to include
Speaker 1: that in the thank you credits. Big thanks to our
Speaker 1: super producer, mister Max Williams. I've been a research associate
Speaker 1: for a lot of this. We hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Big thanks as well to Alex Williams who composed this
Speaker 1: slap and bop A J. Bahamas Jacobs also known as
Speaker 1: the Puzzler, and of course Jonathan Strickland. Thanks to you,
Speaker 1: this is this was really awesome. Man. I loved learning
Speaker 1: more with you and I appreciate you not being the
Speaker 1: quister today.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, it's that's why you should Sorry, no, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really fun. Oh excuse me, sorry, I don't know what.
Speaker 1: Time you were so close? I trust you.
Speaker 2: God.
Speaker 1: All right, get weird with it, all right, Max, I'm
Speaker 1: going to need you to help me out on this.
Speaker 1: I imagine our friend's alter ego is here to play
Speaker 1: a game.
Speaker 3: Yes, welcome to the Quiztor segment, the most cringe worthy
Speaker 3: segment and all love podcasting. Where I the quiz to
Speaker 3: quiz beloved hosts. Where's Noel? Noel should be here.
Speaker 4: We're a little better off with Noah here.
Speaker 5: But I mean I agree to change because I had
Speaker 5: to put on my quizler shirt.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, I just want to tell you sucking
Speaker 3: up does work, so excellent job there, Max.
Speaker 1: Ye that really is, folks, that really is. He really
Speaker 1: is wearing it.
Speaker 3: We're all on video and he just proved it.
Speaker 5: Well, Ben, Ben and Noill get the credit. They just like,
Speaker 5: you know, Ben reached out of me. He's like, what's
Speaker 5: your dress? And what's that shirt? Actually I think you
Speaker 5: have I think you have my dress, Bend, but like,
Speaker 5: what's that shirt you wear?
Speaker 2: Max?
Speaker 5: Last time that to you.
Speaker 4: And also and I just had ridiculous history shirts.
Speaker 3: I do have to admit that I'm wearing a shirt
Speaker 3: with a black cat on it, but it is not
Speaker 3: Lovecraft's cat. I want to make that very clear.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yeah, that's good myth busting now, quister arch
Speaker 1: nemesis of Low these several years. That sounded less dramatic
Speaker 1: when I had to be accurate. But of Low these
Speaker 1: several years with our good friend and partner in crime,
Speaker 1: Noel on Adventure, it falls to young Max Williams and
Speaker 1: I to play your insidious game.
Speaker 3: Yes, and this game is where I present to you
Speaker 3: three scenarios. Two of them are real and one I
Speaker 3: made upsis And so tis down to the to determine
Speaker 3: which of these is the one that I made up.
Speaker 3: And I will present to you the three scenarios, and
Speaker 3: upon the presentation, you will have three minutes to confer
Speaker 3: between the two of you to determine which of the
Speaker 3: three are fake. I want to say this one is
Speaker 3: I think pretty. This one's not hard, but it was
Speaker 3: fun to write.
Speaker 1: Don't set us up like that, man. We'll try to
Speaker 1: make it look really.
Speaker 4: Bad when we flail and do awful of this one.
Speaker 1: I'm in your head, dude, I know how you work.
Speaker 3: I have faith in you. But as always, if you
Speaker 3: wish to ask a question for clarification's sake, and if
Speaker 3: I happen to know the answer, you can do so,
Speaker 3: but you have to preface it with a phrase of
Speaker 3: my own choosing. For this particular quiz, that phrase shall be,
Speaker 3: of course, it must be yah yah cutoul photogon right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: popping photogon photogon. Yet pronunciation is very clear, I mean,
Speaker 3: despite the fact that Lovecraft wrote it in such a
Speaker 3: way that you're not supposed to be able to say
Speaker 3: it with the human tongue. I am being very persnickety. No, uh,
Speaker 3: here are your three scenarios. I shall start with scenario
Speaker 3: number one. One of Lovecraft's predecessors, mister Edgar Allan Poe,
Speaker 3: receives credit for helping establish the genre of mystery fiction. However,
Speaker 3: did you know that Poe's own journey included debunking the
Speaker 3: famous mechanical turk The York was an invention of Wolfgang
Speaker 3: von Kemplin from nearly a century before, and appeared to
Speaker 3: be a humanoid automaton capable of playing expert levels of chess.
Speaker 3: By the time Poe investigated it, Kimpland was long dead,
Speaker 3: and a man named Johann Meltzel, who took this Turk
Speaker 3: from Europe to America, was doing exhibitions across the eastern
Speaker 3: coast of the United States. Poe argued that because the
Speaker 3: Turk occasionally lost in chess games, it must therefore be
Speaker 3: controlled by a person either inside the device or from
Speaker 3: some remote location, because machines would win every single time. Now,
Speaker 3: as we all know from chat GPT, that's not necessarily
Speaker 3: a guarantee. But our Poe boy was at least right,
Speaker 3: but for the wrong reason. Scenario number two. Lovecraft contemporary
Speaker 3: and correspondent Robert E. Howard is probably best known for
Speaker 3: the creation of the beefcake Barbarian conan. Howard became part
Speaker 3: of the Lovecraft Circle. These are the authors who collaborated
Speaker 3: with one another, sharing stories and concepts in an effort
Speaker 3: to weave together a rich tapestry of mythology. Two Gun Bob,
Speaker 3: as he was known within the circle, made a major
Speaker 3: contribution to the Lovecraftian mythology the Necronomicon. While Lovecraft had
Speaker 3: invented the name Abdullah has read many years before the
Speaker 3: two corresponded.
Speaker 1: It was Robert E.
Speaker 3: Howard who first incorporated what later storytellers would call the
Speaker 3: Book of the Dead into a sword and sorcery tale
Speaker 3: titled The Tomb of the Witch. The necronomicon is only
Speaker 3: mentioned in the story and holds no significance for the plot,
Speaker 3: but Lovecraft liked the sound of the title, and, with
Speaker 3: Robert E. Howard's permission, used it in his own works.
Speaker 3: You can really argue the necronomicon didn't really hit the
Speaker 3: big time until far after Lovecraft's death, and that's why
Speaker 3: I say groovy scenario number three. Before becoming a famous
Speaker 3: crime novelist, Robert Albert Bloch was a young member of
Speaker 3: the Lovecraft Circle, contributing to publications like Weird Tales and
Speaker 3: such and participating in the group Mythology created by Lovecraft,
Speaker 3: Roberty Howard, August Durleis, Jay Vernon, Shay Clark, Ashton Smith,
Speaker 3: and many many others. Bloch's first published piece in Weird
Speaker 3: Tales wasn't a short story, but rather a critique of
Speaker 3: Conan's stories, showing that not all authors within the Lovecraft
Speaker 3: circle fell over themselves to praise one another's work. Block
Speaker 3: himself served as an inspiration for a character named Robert
Speaker 3: Blake and Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark. Lovecraft killed
Speaker 3: off Blake in that story as a playful response to
Speaker 3: Block having previously invented a character based on Lovecraft, only
Speaker 3: to have him killed off in a tale titled The
Speaker 3: Shambler from the Stars. Oh and Lovecraft also doxed Block
Speaker 3: by including his real life address in the story. Block
Speaker 3: eventually shifted away from weird fiction and became better known
Speaker 3: for the crime stories he wrote, including the novel Psycho.
Speaker 1: Begin Okay, okay, So I am going to run over
Speaker 1: to this grandfather clock that we paid way too much
Speaker 1: money for again. Uh, and then we're going to start
Speaker 1: the timer. And then we're going to start the timer
Speaker 1: right now, all right.
Speaker 5: I don't even remember what we're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 5: Is we're find one that's fake or one that's real.
Speaker 1: The one that's fake to a real one is made up.
Speaker 1: We have a ticking clock of two minutes fifty seconds,
Speaker 1: and we can ask this is our time for you
Speaker 1: and I to work together to determine what we think
Speaker 1: is most likely. We can also ask the quister a
Speaker 1: question as long as we begin it like this, I
Speaker 1: Cthulhu Fagan.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, you're just you're just needling me on purpose.
Speaker 3: Go ahead, mister mister bowl.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, that I did mispronounce it, so quister. Uh,
Speaker 1: just for a quick recap, the idea is that Edgar
Speaker 1: Allan Poe mythbusted the mechanical Turk. Scenario one, HP Lovecraft
Speaker 1: got the idea and the name of the Necronomicon not
Speaker 1: from his own head but from another author. Scenario two
Speaker 1: and scenario three, that members of the mythos weren't above
Speaker 1: dunking on each other's works or even playfully, uh, setting
Speaker 1: up fictional characters based on.
Speaker 3: Each other, right, and and then killing them off playfully,
Speaker 3: and then.
Speaker 1: Killing them off with whatever passes for playfulness that in
Speaker 1: that circle. Okay, I'm going to say it this way, Max,
Speaker 1: I think it's number two.
Speaker 4: You think it's number two. I was between one or two?
Speaker 5: Hold on second maybe, uh yeah, yeah, to fill a
Speaker 5: fulopen Ah, yes, Max, I mean this is.
Speaker 4: Just pretty stiple question.
Speaker 5: John, there, are you well aware that this seconment is
Speaker 5: one hundred percent a very transparent ripoff of where Wait,
Speaker 5: don't tell me he's bluffed the listener. Uh where where
Speaker 5: where people tell a story?
Speaker 2: And three?
Speaker 1: There's three?
Speaker 4: There's three stories and only one of them is real?
Speaker 3: Sorry, I don't, I don't. I'm not familiar with this.
Speaker 3: Is this a new a new program? Perhaps?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 3: Well, what what? Where could I hear such an idea?
Speaker 3: I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean
Speaker 3: to think I like to think of it as podcasters
Speaker 3: are just part of a large collaborative effort, and no
Speaker 3: one's ideas are all their own.
Speaker 5: I mean it's we've been having a running series on
Speaker 5: intellectual property, So I don't know. I think it's something
Speaker 5: we all share in the world of art. Ben, this
Speaker 5: is one hundred percent out of my spectrum. So I
Speaker 5: was thinking one or two, and you if you think
Speaker 5: it's two, I say.
Speaker 1: Two, let's lock it in, Okay, three? Two? One boom,
Speaker 1: locked in? All right, Christ, we're going with number two
Speaker 1: as the fake story.
Speaker 3: Well, gentlemen, you're right. I told you this was going
Speaker 3: to be a relatively easy one. Yes, no, so, in fact,
Speaker 3: Robert Block, not Robert Block. I'm sorry, Robert E. Howard.
Speaker 3: There are so many Roberts.
Speaker 1: Robert E.
Speaker 3: Howard did contribute some titles of books that would find
Speaker 3: their ways into Lovecraft's work, but Necronomicon was in fact
Speaker 3: something Lovecraft himself came up with independently. It does find
Speaker 3: itself in it mentioned in other author's works, often as
Speaker 3: just one of those books that litters an arcane occultist's
Speaker 3: bookshelf sort of thing. But yes, number two is a fiction.
Speaker 3: There was no story called the Tomb of the Witch.
Speaker 3: I completely invented that. That no such stories. It's similar
Speaker 3: to titles that Robert E. Robert E. Howard did, right,
Speaker 3: but not that one. That's a fabrication. So congratulations, We
Speaker 3: all follow up.
Speaker 4: Was Robert E. Robert E. Howard or whatever was he
Speaker 4: named after? Robert E.
Speaker 2: Lee?
Speaker 3: I do not believe.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: He had a rather unfortunate and tragic story of his own.
Speaker 3: His his his life was was cut short. Yeah. I
Speaker 3: think he was only something like thirty six when he
Speaker 3: shuffled off the mortal coil by his own hand, if
Speaker 3: I were calling correctly.
Speaker 1: Even even younger I think he was.
Speaker 3: I have only been thirty. He was only thirty, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was quite young.
Speaker 1: Well, with this, we gratefully accept the laurels of victory,
Speaker 1: knowing that there will be yet another conflict on the
Speaker 1: horizon and are continuing cosmic horror of a trick quiz
Speaker 1: show that happens at the end of every not every episode,
Speaker 1: but just enough for us to not be able to
Speaker 1: predict it. With that quister aka Johnson Strickland. We can't
Speaker 1: thank you enough for for hanging out with us on
Speaker 1: the show Man and I hope you had a good time.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can do some more of these in the future.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a pleasure dropping the quister for this
Speaker 3: because tired. No, it was great because, as you know,
Speaker 3: I hung up the podcasting headphones not that long ago,
Speaker 3: and so occasionally I do miss it and it's fun
Speaker 3: to get on the microphone and wrap about stuff with
Speaker 3: y'all and to explore these topics and to really kind of,
Speaker 3: you know, have fun indulgent curiosity.
Speaker 1: Just so you know, we we cut the part where
Speaker 1: you were wrapping because it was bad, not because it
Speaker 1: was bad. You had a tight sixteen I expect it.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, because it starts with a hip hop hippie
Speaker 3: to the hippi, I don't stop rocking. All right, that's
Speaker 3: our show.
Speaker 1: We'll see you next time. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.