“A Night of Cats & Wolves” By Various Horror Masters
“If a WEREWOLF is slain as a MAN, then his half soul will haunt his slayer forever!–Robert E. Howard (In the Forest of Villefere)
Category: hplovecraft
Halloween Horror: Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”
“Suppose Jack the Ripper didn’t grow old? Suppose he is still a young man today?
“It’s a crazy theory, I grant you,” he said. “All the theories about the Ripper are crazy. The idea that he was a doctor. Or a maniac. Or a woman. The reasons advanced for such beliefs are flimsy enough. There’s nothing to go by. So why should my notion be any worse?”
“Because people grow older,” I reasoned with him. “Doctors, maniacs, and women alike.”
–Robert Bloch (Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper)
Halloween Horror: Robert Bloch’s “The Cloak”
“The cold, heavy cloth hung draped about Henderson’s shoulders. The faint odor rose mustily in his nostrils as he stepped back and surveyed himself in the mirror. The lamp was poor, but Henderson saw that the cloak effected a striking transformation in his appearance. His long face seemed thinner, his eyes were accentuated in the facial pallor heightened by the somber cloak he wore.–Robert Bloch (The Cloak)
The Best Halloween Poems–Episode 27: Robert Ervin Howard’s “Dead Man’s Hate”
His lips were writhed in a horrid grin like a fiend’s on Satan’s coals,
And the men that looked on his face that day, his stare still haunts their souls.
Such was the fate of Adam Brand, a strange, unearthly fate;
For stronger than death or hempen noose are the fires of a dead man’s hate.–Robert E. Howard (Dead Man’s Hate)
The Best Halloween Poems–Episode 21: “Unda ‘Bride of the Sea'”
Murmuring waters about me are closing,
Soft the sweet vision advances to me:
Done are my trials; my heart is reposing
Safe with my Unda, the Bride of the Sea.–H. P. Lovecraft (Unda–Bride of the Sea)
The Best Halloween Poems–Episode 16: “Ulalume” By Edgar Allan Poe
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere—
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: “It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—
That I brought a dread burden down here—
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—
This misty mid region of Weir—
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”–Edgar Allan Poe
The Best Halloween Poems–Episode 13: “Song at Midnight” By Robert E. Howard
A slow-worm spoke from the gallows foot:
“Death is spoils for a crow to loot.
“The winds and the rain they worked their will,
“The kites and the ravens have had their fill,
“But last of all when the chains broke free,
“The fruit of the gallows came to me.
“Men and their works, so swiftly past,
“Come to a feast for the worms at last.
“Here I have gnawed on this marrow good,
“Where now I gnaw on this crumbling wood.
“For men and their works are a feast for me—
“The bones, and the noose, and the gallows tree.”–Robert E. Howard
Halloween Horror: “The Hound” By H.P. Lovecraft
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.–H.P. Lovecraft
Jeffrey LeBlanc 