"And then the openings poured forth lizard men. There were at least a hundred of them, all about four feet in height, their skins gray-green in the eerie luminescence. Their loins were wrapped in some sort of bindings that left room for the massive tails that dragged the ground behind them. They had almost no necks, and their lipless mouths extended more than an inch beyond where their noses should have been. Thier bulbous eyes stared unblinkingly as they shambled forward on massive lower legs that bent nearly double. Had they straightened those legs they would have been the height of a man."
Scott's essay on the Lizard Men Of Los Angeles is one of the deeper rabbit holes we've gone down. It's one of the more entertaining essays he's written connecting a lot of dots. I won't spoil it, I'll just highly recommend you check it out.
A pretty inappropriate cover of Fantasy & Science Fiction by Kent Bash & George Warren Shufelt's map of the tunnels under LA.
The lizard men do have precedence in mythology and weird fiction. Robert E. Howard often featured a race of "serpent people" in his fiction & Lovecraft name drops them in The Shadow Out of Time & The Haunter Of the Dark.
In modern mythology or urban legend, they start with George Warren Shufelt. He claimed to have invented a special "radio x-ray" device that he used to map a series of tunnels beneath LA. There's also Richard Shaver's hollow earth stories and the "deros" that inhabit the subterranean realm.
There's even a wild bonus in Scott's essay towards the end!
A pretty inappropriate cover of Fantasy & Science Fiction by Kent Bash & George Warren Shufelt's map of the tunnels under LA.
The lizard men do have precedence in mythology and weird fiction. Robert E. Howard often featured a race of "serpent people" in his fiction & Lovecraft name drops them in The Shadow Out of Time & The Haunter Of the Dark.
In modern mythology or urban legend, they start with George Warren Shufelt. He claimed to have invented a special "radio x-ray" device that he used to map a series of tunnels beneath LA. There's also Richard Shaver's hollow earth stories and the "deros" that inhabit the subterranean realm.
There's even a wild bonus in Scott's essay towards the end!
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