Lovecraft is one of those authors who I've never really read. I had a poor experience with one of his short stories back in the day - I have no idea which one, the experience was so interminably tedious I blocked it from my mind - that I never really bothered again. So I'm giving him a go now, despite his appalling character, on the grounds that I want to be well-read in the horror canon and I'm tired of only having a very nebulous idea of what Cthulhu is.

This is the second Lovecraft story I've read in the past week, and you know, at least it was better than "Dagon". I'm still not hugely excited but it was mildly interesting. Mostly I just feel sorry for the author. Yes, racist as he is, and there's a clear and unpleasant undercurrent of that here. But he's clearly just so terrified of everything in life, especially anything that isn't exactly like him, and no wonder his mythology is all about the terrifying unknown, because I rather get the impression that for Lovecraft everything is the terrifying unknown. He doesn't like people who aren't like him, and he doesn't like science much, according to this book, because it engages with the unknown, and he'd really rather just stay in bed and pull a pillow over his head, except he might dream and that terrifies him too. It's all just rather pathetic.

I have to laugh, though, at the narrator's insistence that he will never hint to others of what he has discovered before writing the whole lot down so that others can discover it. Also at the description of Dunedin, NZ, which is where I went to uni, and how degenerate it is. Castle Street and the the Captain Cook on a Saturday night springs to mind, lol. And I do like squid. But that's about it, really.