DISTORTED RABBIT

DISTORTED RABBIT
"Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum’s house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark’s Corners. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

FUNGUS VAMPIRE

FUNGUS VAMPIRE
"Out of the fungous-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half human and half monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes - wolfish and mocking - and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shunned House

THE UNNAMABLE

THE UNNAMABLE
'"Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine.”'

"I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof."

'“No—it wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes—and a blemish. It was the pit—the maelstrom—the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”'
H.P. Lovecraft, The Unnamable

GIANT RAT

GIANT RAT

"73-Rats multiply and exterminate first a single city and then all mankind. Increased size and intelligence."
H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

MONSTROUS CAT

MONSTROUS CAT

"Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of a red liquid. The shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

SPHINX

SPHINX

"There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren—but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear."

"The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . ."
H.P. Lovecraft & Harry Houdini, Under the Pyramids

SHAPELESS ELEMENTAL

SHAPELESS ELEMENTAL
"Odours of incense and corruption joined in sickening concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes."

"In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound—goat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Elementals-The unseen intelligences who inhabit the four elements, of the finest essence of which thy are composed."
Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia Of Occultism

TWISTED TOAD

TWISTED TOAD
"In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound—goat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

MONSTROUS BAT

MONSTROUS BAT

"She affirm'd, and her good neighbours likewise, that it had been borne to her, and took oath that she did not know by what manner it had come upon her, for it was neither Beast nor Man but like to a monstrous Bat with human face. It made no sound but look'd at all and sundry with baleful eyes. There were those who swore that it bore a frightful resemblance to the Face of one long dead, one Richard Bellingham or Bollinhan who is affirm'd to have vanished utterly after consort with Daemons in the country of New Dunnich. The horrible Beast-Man was examined by the Court of Azzizes and the which then burnt by Order of the High-Sherif on the 5th of June in the year 1788."
H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, The Lurker At the Threshold

DISTORTED SQUIRREL

DISTORTED SQUIRREL
"They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

GROTESQUE WOODCHUCK

GROTESQUE WOODCHUCK
"In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out Of Space

MISSHAPEN FAUN

MISSHAPEN FAUN

"Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"These beings are the offspring of the classical Greek demigod Faunus, which resembled him in their semihuman form with the legs, hooves and horns of a goat but the torso and head of a human male. They are likened to the Satyrs and are guardians of the wild life of the woods and fields they inhabit."
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

YAKITH LIZARD

YAKITH LIZARD

"So T’yog wrote his protective formula on a scroll of pthagon membrane (according to von Junzt, the inner skin of the extinct yakith-lizard) and enclosed it in a carven cylinder of lagh metal—the metal brought by the Elder Ones from Yuggoth, and found in no mine of earth. This charm, carried in his robe, would make him proof against the menace of Ghatanothoa—it would even restore the Dark God’s petrified victims if that monstrous entity should ever emerge and begin its devastation."
H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, Out Of the Aeons