NAMELESS THING

NAMELESS THING

"Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,

Cobwebs of cable by nameless things spun;

Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers

Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Cats

SERVITOR OF THE OUTER GODS

SERVITOR OF THE OUTER GODS

"He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter Of the Dark

"Beside it had been carved two squat squid-like figures from a part of which — presumably the heads, though no outline was definitive — projected what must certainly have been instruments of some kind, for the strange, repugnant attendants appeared to be playing them." 

"And flanking it on either side were two lesser beings, equally amorphous, holding pipes or flutes in appendages and making that demoniac music which echoed and reechoed in the enclosing forest."

August Derleth, The Dweller In Darkness

DISTURBINGLY STRANGE INFANT

DISTURBINGLY STRANGE INFANT

"The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which—hideous to relate—solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

URHAG

URHAG

"High over its jagged rim huge ravens flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness."

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

DRAGGING DEAD

THE DRAGGING DEAD

"The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed

That ever I had come to such a den,

When suddenly a score of windows burst

Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:

Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead—

And not a corpse had either hands or head!"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi From Yuggoth

VAPOROUS BRAIN

VAPOROUS BRAIN

"It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign—yet in a flash the Carter-facet realised how slight and fractional all these conceptions are."

H.P. Lovecraft & E. Hoffman Price, Through the Gates Of the Silver Key

WHITE POLYPOUS THING

WHITE POLYPOUS THING

"There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu

SPAWN OF YOG-SOTHOTH II

 

SPAWN OF YOG-SOTHOTH II

"They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey - great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could make!"

"Bigger’n a barn...all made o’ squirmin’ ropes...hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step...nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together...great bulgin’ eyes all over it...ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’...all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an’ Gawd in heaven—that haff face on top!...”

" 'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....' "

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

MERCURIAN VEGETABLE ENTITY

MERCURIAN VEGETABLE ENTITY

"Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space-to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury." 

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time

MUTANT PENGUIN

MUTANT PENGUIN

"For it was only a penguin - albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness."

"Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits."

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains Of Madness

YEKUBIAN

 

YEKUBIAN

"It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or at least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms."

Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merrit, C.L. Moore, The Challenge From Beyond

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 

"The Sphinx was described as having the body and legs of a lion, with the wings of an eagle and its foreparts being the head and torso of a beautiful young woman."

Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters & Dragons

GENIE/DJINN

GENIE/DJINN

"The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Demon of the Valley, saying, 'I am old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of Stone.' And the Demon replied, 'I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.'"
H.P. Lovecraft, Memory 

"They mostly take the shape of a gigantic human but may be invisible or take other shapes, such as that of a vast and grotesque beast."  

 "Their deception may be detected because they will have vertical eyes and the feet of a goat or a camel."

 Carol Rose, Giants Monsters and Dragons

"Surely, I shall fill Hell with jinns and men all together." 

The Noble Qur'an, Huud 11:119

CHIMAERA

CHIMAERA 

"You recall that Pickman’s forte was faces. I don’t believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel."  

H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model  

“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal."  

Charles Lamb, Witches and Other Night-Fears (H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror)   

"First he sent him away with orders to kill the Khimaira none might approach; a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire." 

Homer, The Iliad  

Her heads were three: one was that of a glare-eyed lion, one of a goat, and the third of a snake, a powerful drakon." 

Hesiod, Theogony 

COLOURED GAS BEING

COLOURED GAS BEING

"He had learned much of the Other Gods in distant parts of space, especially in that region where form does not exist, and coloured gases study the innermost secrets. The violet gas S’ngac had told him terrible things of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, and had warned him never to approach the central void where the daemon-sultan Azathoth

gnaws hungrily in the dark."

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

DWELLER

DWELLER

"It had been old when Babylon was new;

None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,

Where in the end our questing shovels found

Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.

There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,

And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew

Fantastic beings of some long ago

Past anything the world of man recalls.

And then we saw those stone steps leading down

Through a choked gate of graven dolomite

To some black haven of eternal night

Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.

We cleared a path—but raced in mad retreat

When from below we heard those clumping feet."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi From Yuggoth

PRIMORDIAL THING

PRIMORDIAL THING

"169-What hatches from primordial egg." 

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

VALUSIAN SERPENT PERSON

VALUSIAN SERPENT PERSON

"There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time

"It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter Of the Dark

"I can compare the sound to nothing more aptly than to the roar of some dread monster of the vanished saurian age, when primal horrors roamed the earth, and Valusia’s serpent-men laid the foundation-stones of evil magic."

H.P. Lovecraft & William Lumley, The Diary Of Alonzo Typer

"For as he watched, Tu's face became strangely dim and unreal; the features mingled and merged in a seemingly impossible manner, Then, like a fading mask of fog, the face suddenly vanished and in its stead gaped and leered a monstrous serpent's head!"

Robert E. Howard, The Shadow Kingdom

PROGENY OF YIG

PROGENY OF YIG

"The moving object was almost of human size, and entirely devoid of clothing. It was absolutely hairless, and its tawny-looking back seemed subtly squamous in the dim, ghoulish light. Around the shoulders it was rather speckled and brownish, and the head was very curiously flat. As it looked up to hiss at me I saw that the beady little black eyes were damnably anthropoid, but I could not bear to study them long."

"Yig’s chief trait was a relentless devotion to his children—a devotion so great that the redskins almost feared to protect themselves from the venomous rattlesnakes which thronged the region. Frightful clandestine tales hinted of his vengeance upon mortals who flouted him or wreaked harm upon his wriggling progeny; his chosen method being to turn his victim, after suitable tortures, to a spotted snake."

H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Curse Of Yig

THING IN THE MOONLIGHT

THING IN THE MOONLIGHT

"Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, and saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the moonlight."

"I leaped up at once & raced madly out of that car & away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked me – doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapering to

one blood-red tentacle. . ."

H.P. Lovecraft & J. Chapman Miske, The Thing In the Moonlight