SPAWN OF ANCIENT EVIL

 SPAWN OF ANCIENT EVIL

"The structure was festooned and enwrapped by wriggling, climbing shapes, none of which he could see in their entirety, for they were so entangled in their climbing that no one of them could be see in in their entirety. There was about them a drippiness, a loathsomeness, a scaliness that left him gulping in abject terror. And there were, as well, he saw, others of them on the ground surrounding thd well, great dark, humped figures that lurched along until they crossed the track."

"He could see no eyes, but he could feel them looking."

"Heads, if they were heads, moved back and forth. There was the sense of twitching tails, although he could see no tails."

Clifford D. Simak, The Whistling Well

Read Scott's essay about The Whistling Well here

BUBBLES & OTHER

BUBBLES

"'It's curious, we are much more afraid of the Others, who aren't very dangerous, than of the bubbles. I suppose it's because the horror of the Others upsets us whereas the bubbles have a sort of perfect beauty.' It's true, bubbles are rather pretty. I often watch them float outside."

Julia Verlanger, The Bubbles

OTHER

"The Others change. Instead of being dissolved by the slime from the bubbles, they rise a moment later, apparently unharmed. But, some days later, things grow on them! Many arms, like the woman who looks like the goddess in the old book. Or loads of legs, or eyes everywhere, or two heads, or an assortment of mouths on their neck and chest. It's horrible!"

"I wonder if he is maybe outside, with lots of arms or legs, or if all his hair has fallen out and many eyes have sprouted on his head, or if... But I don't want to think about it."

Julia Verlanger, The Bubbles

Read Scott's essay about The Bubbles here

VENUSIAN MIMIC & NIGHT CLOAK

VENUSIAN MIMIC

"A girl arose genie-like from the yawning opening of an enormous shell. Her shapely body was—perhaps—human. Tentacles intertwined nervously where her hair should have been. Her hands were webbed claws, her facial expression the rigid staring look of a lunatic, and her torso tapered away into the sinister darkness of the shell's interior."

"'Looks a little like a conch shell,' Hilks said. 'It's much larger, of course.'"

The shell was there, as in the first photo, and protruding out of it was the caricature of a shapely Venus. The outline was hazy but recognizable."

"Then the dratted snail did an imitation of me. Made me feel like a dratted fool. But I was wearing a black suit and red necktie, and it didn't have any trouble with those colors."
Lloyd Biggle Jr. ,The Botticelli Horror

NIGHT CLOAK

"Allen scratched his head and tried to envision a sailing, multicolored rug."

"'Well, like I said, it was pretty stuff. Vivid colors, red and black and yellow and white without any special pattern. It had a nice sheen to it—looked like a hunk of thick blanket.'"

"In the distance, just above the seething treetops, appeared a blob of color. It enlarged slowly as it sailed toward them, a multicolored flat surface that rippled and twisted and curled in flight."

Lloyd Biggle Jr. ,The Botticelli Horror

Read Scott's essay about The Botticelli Horror here

GREENFACE

GREENFACE

"[The legs were] each about six inches wide and perhaps six feet long, they seemed attached in a thick fringe all around the lower part of the head, like a Hawaiian dancer's grass skirt."

"The lines on its pulsing head formed two tightly shut eyes and a wide, thin-lipped, insanely smiling mouth."

"The smiling, jade-green face was turned toward Hogan, lit up by strange reflections from the stormy sky. The glistening, flowing mass beneath it writhed like a cloak of translucent pythons. It towered in the bay, dwarfing even the trees behind it in its unearthly menace. It had grown again! It was all of thirty feet high."

James H. Schmitz, Greenface

Read Scott's essay about Greenface here

OPALESCENT THING

OPALESCENT THING
"It resembled nothing so much as a star-shaped blob of transparent jelly that shimmered and changed color like an opal. It appeared to be some lower form of animal, one-celled, not large, only about a foot in circumference when it stretched those feelers out to full length. It oozed along over the sand like a snail, groping its way with those star-points—and it hummed!"

"It was nauseating to watch, and yet beautiful, too, with all those iridescent colors gleaming against that setting of dead-black stone."

"Instead, I took off my flying-helmet and tossed the goggles directly in the path of the creature. It did not pause or turn aside, but merely reached out one of those sickening feelers and brushed the goggles very lightly. “And they turned to stone!"

"It took me about three days to trap the thing, although it gave me no more actual resistance, of course, than a larger snail."

"He had prodded this jelly-like Thing with his automatic, and it had turned (him—and everything in contact with him —into shiny dark stone."

"I saw horror—a jelly-like, opalescent thing like a five-pointed star. It pulsed and quivered for an instant, and the room fairly rocked to the unmuffled sound of that vibrant humming."
Mary Elizabeth Counselman, The Black Stone Statue

Read Scott's essay about The Black Stone Statue here

LIZARD MAN

LIZARD MAN

"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."

Lewis Shiner, Lizard Men Of Los Angeles

Read Scott's essay about Lizard Men Of Los Angeles here

DUNE ROLLER

DUNE ROLLER

"It was not a pebble or a piece of chipped glass as he had supposed; instead, he fished out a small, drop-like object shaped like a marble with a tail. It was a beautiful little thing of pellucid amber color with tiny gold flecks and streaks running through it. Sunlight glanced off its smooth sides which were surprisingly free of the surface scratches that are the inevitable patina of flotsam in the sand-scoured dunes."

"'It reminds me of something, with that little tail. I know — Prince Rupert drops.'"

"It looked the same as the three small drops he had previously seen, but he saw that what he had mistaken for golden flecks inside of it was really a fine network of metallic threads which formed a web apparently imbedded a few centimeters below the thing's surface."

"'There have been some funny old stories told along these shores. I heard one myself from my grandmother when I was about twelve. About the Dune Roller that was bigger than a schooner and lived in the caves at the bottom of the lake. It came out every hundred years and rolled through the dune forest, leaving a strop of bare sand behind it where it had eaten the vegetation. They said it looked for a man, and when i found one, it would stop rolling and sink back into the lake.'"

J.C. May, Dune Roller

Read Scott's essay about Dune Roller here

OOPS! NOW the store is updated!

Hey folks! Looks like I goofed and forgot to put the "purchase button" on the Commonplace Book Deluxe Edition. It's all fixed now!

 I have a store inventory update but most importantly I have Deluxe Editions of my fully illustrated edition of The Commonplace Book! 

Each of these will come with a hand inked page from the book! 

I adjusted the zine inventory post-Necronomicon & I got a restock of books from Lethe Press so these are available again:

MONSTROUS MYTHOLOGIES 

DELUXE EDITION

• Hand signed.
• Hand numbered.
• Includes an original drawing of a monster featured in the book.
• Includes an original monster hand drawn on the inside back cover.
  
  

HARBORING MONSTERS
DELUXE EDITION

• Hand signed.
• Hand numbered.
• Includes original drawing of a monster from the book.

COSMIC TITAN

COSMIC TITAN

Nothing was distinguishable beyond a few yards, but his mind's eye could see the rest—the immense slug-like shape that extended in ponderous repose across the river valley, its head and tail spilling over the hills on either side, five miles apart. The beast was quiescent until morning—sleeping, if such things slept.

Above him lay the great black steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain to be climbed.

 Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin.

 Unmistakably even in the misty dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its integument. 

Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide. 

The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.The slabs of flesh he had cut off were gray and unappetizing, but he knew from the studies he had helped Sutton make that the monsters, extraterrestrial though they were, were in the basic chemistry of proteins, fats and carbohydrates one with man or the amoeba, and therefore might be—food. 

The scientists had found, in the burst bodies of the Titans that had been killed by atomic bombs, the answer to the riddle of these creatures' crossing of space: great vacuoles, pockets of gas that in the living animal could be under exceedingly high pressures, and that could be expelled to drive the monster in flight like a reaction engine. Rocket propulsion, of course, was nothing new to zoology; it was developed ages before man, by the squids and by those odd degenerate relatives of the vertebrates that are called tunicates because of their gaudy cellulose-plastic armor....
Robert Abernathy, Strange Exodus

Read Scott's essay about Strange Exodus & The Rotifers here.

ROTIFER

 ROTIFER

"'Oh—nothing,' Harry turned back to his work. As if on after-thought, he explained, 'I was wondering if the rotifers could see me when I'm looking at them.'"

"Mr. Chatham laughed, a little nervously, because the strange fancies which his son sometimes voiced upset his ordered mind. Remembering the dark glistening eyes of the rotifers he had seen, however, he could recognize whence this question had stemmed."

"There was a swarm of them under the lens, and they swam lazily to and fro, their cilia beating like miniature propellers. Their dark eyes stared, wet and glistening; they drifted in the motionless water, and clung with sucker-like pseudo-feet to the tangled plant stems."

"'I won't tell you how to talk to them, because nobody ought to talk to them ever again. Because they find out more than they tell.... They know about us, now, and they hate us. They never knew before—that there was anybody but them.... So they want to kill us all.'"

"He remembered the shapes that swam and crept in the green water gardens, with whirling cilia and great, cold, glistening eyes."

Robert Abernathy, The Rotifers

Read Scott's essay about Abernathy's The Rotifers & Strange Exodus here.