The Dunwich Horror

It felt bigger.

Then came the shadow over Innsmouth, the Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Color Out of Space.

Each story pushed further into the idea that the universe is ancient, uncaring, and filled with things we were never meant to understand— Readers at the time were divided.

Some found his work too dense, too strange, too bleak.

Subsequent authors helped preserve and expand the mythos.

Filmmakers found rich ground in his cosmic dread.

Reanimator, The Dunwich Horror, The Call of Cthulhu, Color Out of Space.

Each adaptation brought new audiences into Lovecraft's universe.

This time he chose Frank Armitage.

which is a reference to a character from Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror, Henry Armitage.

And it's just weird.

I don't know, it was...

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us at 1001 Greatest Love Stories.

This is your host, John Hagedorn, and today we're going to take you to what some people might call the original toy story, The Velveteen Rabbit, a heartwarming tale of the love that a little stuffed rabbit has for his owner and his wish to become real.

Many adaptations have been made for TV, stage, and film, but none can come close to the original story penned by Marjorie Williams Bianco nearly one century ago.

The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, is a British children's book written by Marjorie Williams Bianco and illustrated by William Nicholson.

It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit's desire to become real through the love of his owner.

The book was first published in 1922, and it's been republished many times since.

The Velveteen Rabbit was William's first children's book.

Writing about her childhood many years later, she recalled how vividly her father described characters from various books and the infinite world of knowledge and adventure that lay on the printed page.

Two centuries ago when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality.

In our sensible age, since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the towns and the world's welfare at heart, people shun it without knowing exactly why.

Perhaps one reason, though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers, is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters.

They have come to form a race by themselves, with a well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.

Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

but Zechariah came to lead a pair of alderney cows which old Waitley had bought of his son Curtis.

This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family, which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went.

Yet at no time did the ramshackle Waitley barn seem overcrowded with livestock.

Yeah, yeah.

There's my favorite quote from, I believe it's the Dunwich Horror, where they talk about the hills are too rounded to be natural, or there was a slightly unnatural shape to the hill.

Yeah, bent.

These mountains and their anteluvian secrets have inspired generations of horror, from H.P. Lovecraft's early works like Beyond the Wall of Sleep, which features characters from the Catskills, another sub-range of the Appalachians, to his use of backwoods and regional hill folk of New England's western regions.

of Appalachia.

But he used so many of them and he talked about them.

Dunwich Horror is a great example.

Very disparaging.

Right.

His famous work, The Dunwich Horror, along with The Electric Executioner, which he co-authored with Adolf de Castro, and The Mound, co-authored with Zelia Bishop.

And it's important to remember, these aren't just terrifying ghost stories.

They are really intricate thought experiments.

That's code almostfamous at resortpass.com slash almostfamous.

Section 1 of The Dunwich Horror.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phil Chenevert.

The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft, Parts 1-4 Introductory Quote from Charles Lamb, Witches and Other Night Fears Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire stories of Solano and the harpies may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition But they were there before They are transcripts types the archetypes are in us and eternal how else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all and is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury oh least of all these terrors are of older standing they date beyond body or without the body they would have been the same that the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual, that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy, or difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our anti-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

CHARLES LAMB Part 1 When a traveler in north-central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike, just beyond Dean's Corners, he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher and the briar-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road.

Available at Lowe's.

Section 1 of The Dunwich Horror This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phil Chenevert The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft Parts 1-4 Introductory Quote from Charles Lamb Witches and Other Night Fears Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire stories of Solano and the harpies may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition But they were there before They are transcripts types the archetypes are in us and eternal how else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all and is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury oh least of all these terrors are of older standing they date beyond body or without the body they would have been the same that the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual, that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy, or difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our anti-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.

CHARLES LAMB Part 1 When a traveler in north-central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike, just beyond Dean's Corners, he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher and the briar-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road.

Afterward, one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

outsiders visit dunwich as seldom as possible and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down the scenery judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon is more than uncommonly beautiful yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists Two centuries ago, when talk of witch blood, Satan worship and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality.