Okay, I know, I said we were never going to do another Friday Challenge...
But then, last week’s discussion of Lovecraftian horror got us talking. What if what the world needs right now is yet another writing contest? Specifically, a Lovecraftian horror writing contest? But not just any contest, no: what we want to do is go full Bulwer-Lytton on this thing. Ergo, Rampant Loon Press is appalled to announce...
The First Annual Rampant Loon Press Bad Imitation Lovecraft Writing Contest
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write one paragraph—beginning, middle, or end of a story, we don’t care—of truly rancid, turgid, clotted prose, in the inimitable and yet all-too-often imitated style of the legendary H. P. Lovecraft. Throw everything you’ve got in there: Arkham, Miskatonic, pustulence, ichor, eldritch, sunken R’lyeh—get it all out of your system. Give it the whole fnlakghing works. Extra credit for making it all one single ghastly run-on sentence; double extra credit if you can correctly identify this kitchen utensil and work its properly Lovecraftian name into your contest submission.
But, there’s a catch. Your contest submission can be no more than 100 words long, at the most. We are looking to capture the distilled and pungent essence of Lovecraft—everything about his style that makes us cringe—in a single paragraph.
So think about it. Let the unspeakable soul-crushing horror of it all burn. Then enter your submission in the comments section of this post—or if you can’t get past the captcha, email it to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com and we’ll post it for you—and on Saturday morning, November 3rd, we’ll announce either the winner or the finalists, depending on the quantity and quality of the entries we receive. The deadline for entries is midnight Friday, November 2nd. The author of the winning submissions will get all the honor, glory, and recognition commensurate with winning such an auspicious competition.
Oh, what the hell: and a $25 Amazon gift certificate, too.
Sound like fun? Then on your mark, get set... Start writing!
Update 10/29/18: If this all seems like something of a mystery to you, please consider this outstanding example of the idiom: “Harbinger of Doom (for the Home Team)” by Dan Micklethwaite.
11 comments:
I really wish I understood what the heck you just said above. As I don't, I'll be just watching the next few days. Maybe I'll learn what the word "eldritch" really means!
BTW -- I can't wait to find out what Lovecraft called a meat cleaver!
This is going to be so cool.
Unknown is me, Robert Hobson.
I dunno, Robert. So far it sounds like crickets chirping.
I watched her approach, lest the cyclopean walls, built in some non-Euclidean manner, covered in a convulsion of brackish leafy vines, quivering stigma from purplish venous flowers leaked squalid globules of pus rattled my brain. Her squamous translucent skin, so translucent her green arteries and black veins pulsated across her vaguely human form; bulbous black eyes and hard lips, like a catfish with needle teeth, opened and closed synchronously; the stygian reek of her breath swarmed me as if I was swallowed up in some fetid grave. A bloody eldritch cleaver, spellbound to my hand, dripped oily blood.
By Robert Hobson
The Deliberate Work of the Generational Scrivener Richard Edwards -
Word Count - 100
By C.S. Humble
Ponderously, Edwards shambled into shadows veiling the third chamber where his ancestors trod for a century and more. Their generational work, an enigmatic eldritch transliteration of nameless occult aesthetes, was his life. The name no longer alloyed him with familial grandeur. Only his work. The son of a cruel widower descended into the dripping tabernacle where a manuscript lay upon a black obelisk. The volume, forbadding decay, lay perfectly preserved, impossibly balanced on the stone. The scales of a maniac universe irrepressibly relying on transcription. Words unspeakable forbade the stars their alignment. So too, tonight, did Edwards faithfully transcribe, alone.
[posted by brb on behalf of the author]
C.S. Humble rocked it.
Robert Hobson
Heading home merry-pin, feeling delira and excira yet destined for bed, I departed the gas lit cobblestone street for a benighted alley short cut. However, I seemed to continuously slow until a private fletcher's paradox rendered me immobile. Moonlight revealed nearly invisible strands binding me. Eying this webbing heavenward I gasped at the sight of a mammoth attercop, its fangs sunk into the flank of a celestial canine, sanguinolent ichor spilling onto me from the eldritch arachnid's maw. Tearing free, I raced to the Miskatonic dorms where some chuckled at my story, though Sirius is no longer in the sky.
The vast aboriginal beast emerged from the tenebrous subterane, It’s queer tetrapodean body compelling and repugnant in equal measure. Sighting me with sclerotic eyes it lurched forward on its hind quarters, its forelimbs gesturing self-referentially with fleshy pentacles, each tip sheathed in translucent chitin. It’s small head was pocked with crude sensory organs, it’s mouthless snout flaring above a nuclear orifice that gaped to reveal a yellowing potters-field of teeth circumferencing a garish red tentacle which writhed to articulate the damned name of its hideous breed: “Hyü-mārn”
Title: The Questioning Sanity of an Antiquarian Man
Word Count: 100
Author: Micah Castle
What happenstance occurred to the eldritch, nameless man with the Innsmouth look; did he evanesce into obscurity, traversing the cosmos to accompany those accursed Elder Gods; or had the hideous, amphibious creatures who dwelt in the sunken city Ry’leh reach beyond our terraqueous world and tear him away — it was not that his body had vanished, no; but that the congealing, ichorous blood remained on the cleaver… — Was I hallucinating or was the madness of preceding antiquarian excursions into the Miskatonic’s library taking a toll on my New England mind? — or was the horrifying, maddening, incomprehensible circumstance before me true?
[posted by brb on behalf of the author]
Title: Garden Shoggoth
Word Count: 100
Author: Gregg Chamberlain
With trembling tread, I made my way across the backyard to deal with---the Shoggoth in the Garden! Among the stricken strawberries it squatted, squalid and squamous, trickling eldritch ichor from obscene orifices. I stared for a moment then cast the sulphurous contents of my slingbag at the Shoggoth. Bursting buboes boiled up where the powder fell, giving rise to weirdly warbling wails. Sprays of scalding sputum spurted from slitted mouths, spewing against me. Leaving a slime-strewn trail in its wake, the Shoggoth squished and squelched through the breach in the fence, ululations of agony hovering in the still air.
[posted by brb on behalf of the author]
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