"The Cats of Ulthar" has to be one. It's always been a favorite, and not just because I love cats nearly as much as HPL did. It's a great little fairy tale, short and sweet with just the right dash of gruesomeness.

I also quite like "The Festival," with its final blood-curdling passage from the Necronomicon, "The Temple" with its really evocative and creepy picture of strange happenings on the sea floor, and "The Tomb," which, clumsy Poe pastiche or no, gives us some really great old-school ghost story action.

I'm wary of applying 20th-century pop culture monster classifications to actual folklore, history, and pre-Hollywood fiction. It's something I see a lot on the various weird fiction podcasts (this one, The Double Shadow, and A Podcast to the Curious), as well as any podcast dealing with mythical monsters (like MonsterTalk and the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe).

For example, when MonsterTalk covered the Bell Witch, they went off on this whole tangent about how the alleged haunting was variously described as a witch, a ghost, a goblin, etc. "Which is it?" That kind of thing. A Podcast to the Curious covered M.R. James' "An Episode of Cathedral History," and there was some question as to whether the hairy creature that crawled out of the tomb in that story to stalk the town and sap the life force of its inhabitants was a "vampire" or something else. Fifer & Lackey hesitate to call the werewolf in a story called "The Were-Wolf" a werewolf.

But real folklore isn't as cut and dried as all that. It's fuzzy. It doesn't hold to the sort of genre classifications that our movies and comic books are split into. Names, categories, and "rules" change depending on who's telling the story, when, and where. In the old days in Eastern Europe, a "vampire" could be any undead creature whether it sucked blood or not, and/or any creature that went around sucking blood or otherwise draining people's life force. Ghosts, goblins, and witches were fairly interchangeable terms for "that supernatural thing that keeps messing with my family and livestock and whatnot." A werewolf (literally "man-wolf") could be any creature that combines the qualities of a man and a wolf.  The point is, folklore is messy, and the rules are never set in stone.

As for werewolves being an explanation for serial killers... well, sure, partially. I know Sabine Baring-Gould thought so, as put forth in his Book of Were-Wolves. But I think that's an oversimplification. Real-life serial killers could very well have fed the popular image of the werewolf, but I think it's a stretch to say that they're the sole source of the legends, or even the main one. That's like saying that witches were just an explanation for general misfortune, or that vampires were just a way to explain the spread of disease. Sure, those are elements, but there are a million other sources that could have played their part, like the instinctive fear of death (and, by extension, dead bodies), mistrust of those who are different, fear of wild animals, fear of unseen spirits, religious prejudice -- as well as plain old crazy-ass superstition and psychedelic mold in the food supply.

I didn't realize it had come out! I'm gonna have to check it out.

Divine Fantasy is such a generic name for a book like this, too. There are a million trashy romance novels out there that could use that title, none of which feature Ambrose Bierce as a sexy werewolf. And that cover image looks just like every other trashy romance novel ever published.

I like to think that someday some nice, unsuspecting woman will absent-mindedly pick this off the shelf without reading the blurb. Surely this is just another in a long line of more or less interchangeable books of the same genre. A little light reading for a slow weekend. She will place it on the counter at Barnes & Noble without giving it another thought. She will take it home, casually open the cover, and begin to read. "Ambrose Bierce?" she will say aloud to her empty apartment in a puzzled tone. "That's odd, but whatever. I'll buy it. He was a pretty rugged dude. This could still be good." And she'll keep reading, because she doesn't know how deep this rabbit hole really goes. By the time she gets to the point where she should put it down, it will be too late. Curiosity, amusement, and something like horror will keep her glued to the pages. By Monday morning, she will be sitting alone at her kitchen table with a bottle of liquor, shaking her head, wondering just what in the green hell she just read. She will call in sick to work that day, and will ever afterward be visited by ridiculous dreams of sexy werewolf Ambrose Bierce that cause her to wake up laughing, or perhaps crying, but mostly just confused. She will never be the same, going about her life a little sadder, wiser, and yes, stranger than she began.

Or maybe it'll just be a dumb book that she can't get through the first chapter of without losing interest. One or the other.

I really like this story so far, but I don't have much to offer in the way of comment aside from what the guys say on the show. I'm going to read the actual story before the next episode comes out. I just really love the "creepy folklore" feel of it so far, and the Heavy Metal magazine sort of thing that White Fell has going on.

I had no idea Rudyard Kipling wrote weird fiction!

The werewolf stuff in this story is kind of lame, in that it's all the silly parts of a modern werewolf movie (the dog-like smell, the craving of rare meat, and all that) without any of the werewolf action. But the stuff with the Silver Man is creepy as a bastard.

Are you referring to "The Ghost-Eater," by HPL and C.M. Eddy, Jr.?

If so, you'll have to buy the book. It isn't available online, and really, it's not worth spending $13 for.

Cool Ale
The Lurking Beer
The Yeast in the Cave
The Brew That Came to Sarnath
The Terrible Old Can

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu Rl'yeh Wgah'nagl Lager.

Yeah, he could have been both. Although really, it's the Avoidant Personality Disorder diagnosis that I think doesn't quite fit. You yourself say "he had friends and corresponded with lots of people throughout his lifetime." He wasn't the recluse that he's sometimes been painted as; he traveled whenever he got the chance, as far north as Quebec and as far south as Florida. He may have been shy, but not pathologically so.

We can judge his feelings about race based on his own words. Aside from his outright offensive portrayals of foreigners and minorities in several stories, there are his letters to Robert E. Howard, particularly the early ones, in which both men go on at length about, er, let's call it "anthropology," making it pretty clear that HPL just sort of assumed the superiority of white European culture and people (as lots of people did at the time, though of course that doesn't excuse anything).

Anyway, no discussion of whether or not HPL was a racist is incomplete without linking to this charming little poem which answers the question about as definitively as one could hope for. He would have been around 22 when he wrote that. His views may have moderated as he aged, but that's where he was starting from.

And as LambethWarp points out, even if he did have AvPD, it manifested itself in pretty overtly racist ways. He didn't just avoid people in general --  he specifically avoided foreigners and minorities, got angry that they were "taking over" his white and pristine New England, and painted them as savages in his writing.

I hadn't thought of connecting the two stories, but that makes a lot of sense. Now that you mention it, there's even a bit of a parallel in the two menaces living underground: one buried in the basement and causing the mushrooms and fungi to grow in weird shapes, the other living in the well and causing EVERYTHING to grow in weird shapes and colo(u)rs.

Good catch!

The guys discussed it briefly waaaaaaaaaay back in Episode 4, ("Polaris"), but a full treatment would be awesome.

I hereby declare this the most adorable episode ever!

I was thinking of something else. A hairless, monstrous creature with sharp teeth, about the size of a 14 year-old boy? There's only one guy I know of who fits that description...



Well, you know, except for the part where Bat Boy isn't invisible.

My copy of Deadbeats arrived over the weekend, and is pretty awesome. It's funny and action-packed, I like all the characters I'm supposed to like, and I don't like the characters I'm not supposed to like. And the monster stuff is Lovecraftian as all get out without being explicit about it (although some names and words sure seem familiar). Good job all around, I say.