E-Book Overview
Having fled town under a cloud of salacious scandal, Shelby Tyree has returned, a mysterious woman at his side and a strange new devotion to horror writer H.P. Lovecraft in his head. His childhood friends Rick and Conrad scarcely recognize Shelby, who has been transformed from a rakish dilettante into a zealous guru devoted to his own pseudo-religion. They take it upon themselves to discover what Shelby is really up to. Why has he founded his own church, devoted to a presumably fictional demonic alien? Is it possible Shelby's lost his grip on reality or is somehow under the spell of this mysterious woman? Or is it possible that Shelby has uncovered some secret truths that man was not meant to know? "The Cthulhu Cult is a brilliant and scintillating novel of Lovecraftian terror. It grips the reader from the first page and develops a tremendous cumulative power. Anyone who has the least interest in H. P. Lovecraft's work will find The Cthulhu Cult a must-read." --S. T. Joshi
E-Book Content
Chapter 1 “Although long a devotee of weird tales and unsettling stories, it never once occurred to me that true, life-wrenching, and some might say blasphemous horror would ever overturn my own life, as it did in the Spring of 2007. And as for what befell my friends Shelby Tyree and Conrad Laughton, that is a fate no augur or oracle could ever have foreseen. I count myself fortunate indeed that I escaped that fateful season with my mind and body relatively intact, although the scars both psychic and physical remain prominent to this day, and my life stands forever altered from its previous course.” That, I think, is how Lovecraft might have begun my story, and having now lived it, I can see why. Sometimes the only way to protect yourself from your own terrible, horrifying fuck-ups is to hide behind a labyrinthine dam of words and sentences and hope the terrible truths come out in drips and drops rather than in a raging flood. Too much truth all at once can shatter fragile minds and make things much worse rather than a little better. And I want things to get better, if that’s even possible anymore, and so I’ll start at the entrance to the maze and hope I’m brave enough to carry on to the nasty, brutal center. For me and Conrad and Shelby, matters began to go wrong in the old house on the bay with what was, in those innocent days, one of the more disturbing experiences of my life. The house off Indian Point Drive was an economic anomaly. Built in the 1920s and added onto over the decades since, it always verged on total dilapidation even though it sat on a million-dollar waterfront lot sandwiched between multi-million–dollar homes along Sarasota Bay. Only a never ending succession of current and past New College students kept the place from sliding into complete decrepitude, and their stopgap fixes and amateur carpentry tended to be in the experimental, artistic style, rather than anything like traditional architectural techniques. With no air-conditioning and five bedrooms sometimes occupied by as many as eight or nine or even ten residents, the house was always a crowded, hot den of activity. Most of the residents were students because no one else was adventuresome or poor enough to brave the Florida heat in close quarters with so many others. Those who did stay on after graduation tended to be the type who retained the curiosities and passions of their student years long into adulthood, and of these there was no one who’d lived in the house longer than my old grade-school friend, Shelby Tyree. It might sound strange to hear that those dark days all began at a party, but this was no typical summer soirée. This was one of Shelby’s events, and those were always more spectacle than celebration. Parties at the house honored ancient or unusual events. Over the years I’d attended a birthday party for Karl Marx, a costume-wake for Rona