CREATURE OF THE MONOLITH
"I opened my mouth to scream my horror and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like thing squatted on the top of the monolith!"
"I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight, and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their ancestors mowed blind and hairless in the tree-tops. In those grisly eyes were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it."
"Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith. And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful faint."
Robert E. Howard, The Black Stone
The creature in this pretty classic Howard story is, thought by some, to be Clark Ashton Smith's creation Tsathoggua. However, since there's no direct evidence of that and this creature shows up in a completely different circumstances, I chose to treat it as a unique entity.
This is my favorite Howard horror story. It's got Lovecraftian lore, a great set up, the introduction of a new mysterious book (Nameless Cults or Unaussprechlichen Kulten), an far off location...but the nightmarish vision is what really draws me in. The priest dashing an infant's skull against the stone and then tearing it apart with his bare hands! That's one of the more brutal things I've read in a mythos story then or now.
This is my favorite Howard horror story. It's got Lovecraftian lore, a great set up, the introduction of a new mysterious book (Nameless Cults or Unaussprechlichen Kulten), an far off location...but the nightmarish vision is what really draws me in. The priest dashing an infant's skull against the stone and then tearing it apart with his bare hands! That's one of the more brutal things I've read in a mythos story then or now.
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