#cimmerianseptember #robertehoward #booktube #conan #horrortale #horrorstories #horrorshorts #horrorstory #conanthebarbarian #barbarian It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun, With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds, And the dark woodlands brooding over all, Not even lightened by the rare dim sun Which made squat […]
‘Trite and grotesque the plot of the film may have been, but the actor who played the lead had instilled it with ghastly reality. He had been dead; his eyes knew. And the voice was the voice of Lazarus awakened.’–Robert Bloch (Return to the Sabbath)
Have you ever felt the tread of little feet walking across the top of your skull? Footsteps on your skull, back and forth, back and forth? —Robert Bloch (Enoch)
“Ah! little ken’d thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches!”
— Robert Burns (Tam O’ Shanter)
“Rip and claw flesh and hair,
Gnaw the bones, lap the blood without care,
Moonlight in the cold dark gloom,
Illuminates the black stones of tombs,
Down in the hollow, night winds howl,
Stalk bestial in darkness with the owl,—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Cry of the Werewolf)
“Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart’s desire.
She came—she came—and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.”–Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (The Witch)
Has the cat got your tongue?–Robert Bloch (Catnip)
“There was a deep soft thundering in his ears, a rosy dazzlement in his eyes. Somehow the hut appeared to expand, to change luminously about him. He hardly recognized its squalid furnishings, its litter of baleful oddments, on which a torrid splendor was shed by the black candles, tipped with ruddy fire, that towered and swelled gigantically into the softgloom His blood burned as with the throbbing flame of the candles.”—Clark Ashton Smith (Mother of Toads)
“She’d turn her gaze briefly out at the frosted marshes and the drifts of snow which glittered on the beaches and estuaries. Then, those furnaced, ice-blue eyes returned to the sea with the fiercest intensity in her gaze. ”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (Curse of the Sea Witch)
“The fairest fade and the fairest now rot!” Hawkeye laughed at Maddie Badeaux as she held the body of her Millie.”–Jeffrey LeBlanc (Curse of the Sea Witch)
“And a Shape in the shadows wags its grisly head forever?
You swore by the blood-crust that stained your dagger,
By the haunted woods where hoofed feet swagger,
And under grisly burdens misshapen creatures stagger.
Up, John Kane, and cease your quaking!
You have made the pact which has no breaking,
And your brothers are eager their thirst to be slaking.
Up, John Kane! Why cringe there, and cower?
The pact was sealed with the dark blood-flower;
Glut now your fill in the werewolf ’s hour!”–Robert E. Howard (Up, John Kane!)
“It was the eyes that grew dim. Little by little he came to know that some day the dream would not end when he turned away to go home, but would lead him down the gorge out of which the vision rose. She was nearer now when she beckoned to him. Her cheeks were not livid like those of the dead, but pale with starvation, with the furious and unappeased physical hunger of her eyes that devoured him. They feasted on his soul and cast a spell over him, and at last they were close to his own and held him. He could not tell whether her breath was as hot as fire or as cold as ice; he could not tell whether her red lips burned his or froze them, or whether her five fingers on his wrists seared scorching scars or bit his flesh like frost; he could not tell whether he was awake or asleep, whether she was alive or dead, but he knew that she loved him, she alone of all creatures, earthly or unearthly, and her spell had power over him.”–Francis Marion Crawford (For the Blood is the Life)
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”–William Butler Yeats (The Stolen Child)
“By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.”–Edgar Allan Poe (Dream-Land)
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?–Edgar Allan Poe (A Dream Within a Dream)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 