NIGHT-GAUNT

NIGHT-GAUNT

"Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell, But every night I see the rubbery things, Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings, And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi From Yuggoth

"But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black things with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

GUG

GUG

"It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

GHAST

GHAST
"...the ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos."

"After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, 

and other important particulars."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

GHOUL

GHOUL
"The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground- for Pickman's morbid art was pre-eminently one of demoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness."
H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model

"All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined that request which he had in mind, and which he did not think extravagant considering the services he had so lately rendered the rubbery, dog-like lopers."
 H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

DEEP ONE

DEEP ONE

"I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly wed tar articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

LENGIAN

LENGIAN 

"The mouths of the men who came from it to trade were too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms." "They leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a sort of wig or headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of them were quite furry. Behind they had dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the excessive width of their mouths. Then he knew what they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpieces after all. For the cryptic folk of Leng were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants of the black galleys that traded rubies at Dylath-Leen." 

H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

NAMELESS CITY INHABITANT

NAMELESS CITY INHABITANT 

"They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all know biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared - in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories." 

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

FORMLESS SPAWN

FORMLESS SPAWN
 "At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss with their great atom-power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed along stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of  Tsathoggua. But they were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes."
H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Mound

"Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not, as we had thought, a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and was now forming these damnable arms, that groped toward us with tentacle-like appendages in lieu of claws or hands!"
Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros

GUARDIAN DEMON

GUARDIAN DEMON
"'Startled as I was, I looked round after him, and saw him stand for a minute at the top and then walk away a few yards. Then I heard him call softly, "All right, sir," and went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck.'"

"'My dear Gregory, I am telling you the exact truth. I believe I am now acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can endure without losing his mind.  I can only just manage to tell you now the bare outline of the experience. I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several--I don't know how many--legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out, Brown says, like a beast, and fell away backward from the step on which I stood, and the creature slipped downwards, I suppose, on to that same step. Providentially the band round me held firm.'"
M.R. James, The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas

SHANTAK

SHANTAK

"Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his stumbling was at an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for they were larger than elephants and had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that they must be the Shantak-birds of ill rumour, and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the boreal rock desert."

"It was hard work ascending, for the Shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

IBIAN

IBIAN

"It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of lb were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Doom That Came To Sarnath

COLEOPTERAN

COLEOPTERAN
"After man there would be the mighty beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world."

"Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time

LITTLE RED OWL

LITTLE RED OWL

"He paused in his narrative and looked archly at the children. They were listening intently. He observed with pleasure that they were both pale with excitement and what was pretty certainly distress. 'What do you think happened to Billy and Gwendolyn?' he urged them. 'Go on, tell me what you think happened to them.' 'I know!' Peter said, almost shouting, 'I know! The Little Red Owl Came and got them out!'"

"'I don’t believe it. The Little Red Owl . . . the Little Red Owl isn’t hurt. He’s all right!'”

Margaret St. Clair, The Little Red Owl

HYRA

HYRA

“And under system conditions Hyra increase so slowly that for one to bud off was a real  rarity.”

“The silicious, gelatinous bodies of the Hyra were extremely hard to destroy.”

“The reason it looked so much emptier was that the Hyra —ugh, how he loathed them—he’d never let Alice see how much) were all jammed together at one end, heaped up on one another, like a pile of oozing, pupilless eyes.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Vanderlark