Re the Bad Imitation Lovecraft Challenge

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As of the Saturday deadline, we’d received six viable entries for the Bad Imitation Lovecraft challenge. Another entry was disqualified for exceeding the 100-word limit—by a factor of 40X, which in itself is impressive overachievement—and as for the Lovecraft limerick we received...

Moving right along, props to Robert Hobson for being the only contestant to correctly identify this kitchen utensil.

It is, of course, an eldritch cleaver. Sigh. There was a time when every socially conscious young radical was practically required to carry around a copy of Soul on Ice and be ready to quote from it on a moment’s notice. Sic transit, and all that.

Now, as for judging the challenge and determining who wins the $25 Amazon gift card: I’m going to take a step back and remind you that The Friday Challenge was an audience participation feature. A major point of the challenge was not merely to motivate people to write, but also to motivate them to read other people’s writing, and to discuss, critique, and comment upon each other’s work. I remain adamant in my belief that the way you become a better writer is not merely by doing lots of fantasizing and typing, but also by doing lots of reading, and by thinking about what you’ve read, and trying to ferret out what makes it good, and where it falls short.
And to make one more point clear: you need not have entered a challenge in order to comment on the entries. That’s the Writer’s Group fallacy. Sometimes the most valuable feedback of all comes from those who do not aspire to write, but only want to read.

Therefore, in the interests of stimulating discussion, and with the not-at-all-sub-rosa goal of deciding whether we want to bring The Friday Challenge back as a regular feature, I herewith present the entries we received, in LIFO order.

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Title: Garden Shoggoth
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.

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Title: The Questioning Sanity of an Antiquarian Man
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?

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(untitled)
Author: Rupert

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”

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(untitled)
Author: J. Rohr

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.

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Title: The Deliberate Work of the Generational Scrivener Richard Edwards
Author: 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.

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(untitled)
Author: Robert Hobson

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.

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Let the conversation begin.

Categories: the friday challenge