“Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgorous sky… formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion… insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choking with fungous vegetation…” – The Lurking Fear
Spoken Arts label, Cadabra Records, is thrilled to announce the next title set for release in their ongoing series in homage to H. P. LOVECRAFT, with the horrifying tale, The Lurking Fear.
Marking the first time in history that The Lurking Fear has been read for vinyl, the upcoming release features a dynamic reading by professional actor Andrew Leman, a co-founder of the H. P. LOVECRAFT Historical Society, who delivers the terror, dread, suspense and madness that permeates LOVECRAFT’s writing with by-the-throat conviction. Dark ambient/industrial outfit, Theologian, backs up Leman’s conveyance of the awesome story, supplying an appropriately macabre and unsettling score.
Cadabra’s version of the suspenseful The Lurking Fear will see release on July 8th, the 12″ LP to be pressed in a run of 500 of which only 300 will be available for sale. The album will feature a deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket, with a new set of detailed notes on the tale written by weird fiction scholar S. T. Joshi, and more, and newly commissioned art by Alan Brown. Preorders and audio samples of the timeless and eternally terrifying The Lurking Fear will be released in the coming days.
A segment of the liner notes by S. T. Joshi offers, “Reading LOVECRAFT can on occasion be a guilty pleasure. When we encounter a sentence like this from The Outsider – “It was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable”- we are inclined to smile as well as to admire the verbal pyrotechnics that can create such a cascade of evocative adjectives. Especially in his earlier years, LOVECRAFT enjoyed experimenting with this kind of over-the-top horror, and the results are some of his most entertaining stories. The Lurking Fear is one of these.
Written in November 1922, it was the second of LOVECRAFT’s professionally published stories. Weird Tales, which was the haven for most of his later tales, would not be founded until March 1923; and LOVECRAFT – who was not even sure he wanted to be a “professional” writer, if that meant churning out hackwork according to market specifications – wrote The Lurking Fear in response to the pleas of a friend, George Julian Houtain, who wanted just such a blood-and-thunder narrative. Houtain had begun a semi-pro magazine (which LOVECRAFT later called a “vile rag”) entitled Home Brew, subtitled “America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine.” Most people don’t know that Home Brew was a humor magazine, full of articles, sketches, limericks, and other matter poles apart from LOVECRAFTt’s usual brand of supernatural horror.”
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