Glub Glub

I went out tonight with Monk and Stef, who were looking for a Hello Kitty waffle iron. Apparently, they've long been discontinued. I ended up buying socks and a huge collection of Lovecraft stories. I know I don't need more Lovecraft, but I enjoy having a single compendium that houses Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Picture in the House, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Whisperer in Darkness, as well as plenty of other less popular short stories and prose poems. It was the $13 price tag and the presence of Charles Dexter Ward that sold me on it. CDW was the first Lovecraft story I read and the singular hook that pulled me into a strange and fucked up world of tentacles and slime so horrific that death is a better end than losing one's ignorance.

Despite its claims to the contrary, the book does not seem to be "complete". It is missing at least The Horror at Martin's Beach. It's a fairly short tale, even for Lovecraft goes, but it resonates with all his tell-tale story components. Man kills sea monster, man puts sea monster on display, sea monster disappears, and then... well, you know the rest:

"There is no exact record of the time the thing began, although a majority say that the fairly round moon was 'about a foot' above the low-lying vapors of the horizon. They mention the moon because what they saw seemed subtly connected with it - a sort of stealthy, deliberate, menacing ripple which rolled in from the far skyline along the shimmering lane of reflected moonbeams, yet which seemed to subside before it reached the shore."