Episode 400 – The Testament of Athammaus

Chad and Chris may have missed the obvious symbolism of eating food in the underworld, but CAS wouldn’t!

This may be my favorite CAS that you have covered!

Macabre Mittens

Oh hell yes!

doctorpandaman

The bestest version of the Cat Came Back is the National Film Board cartoon<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJl_4IsQJ2g" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJl_4IsQJ2g</a>

i love your page

"for" most of us. Oh God my Android keyboard.

Minor quibble here on Chad and Chris's commentary: the "members" in the story probably refers not to Zhaum's penis (which is singular) but to his testicles (which are, fur most of us, plural). Not the twig, but the berries.

Another good one by Clark Ashton Smith is The Maker of Gargoyles. Without really giving much away, it’s about an artist who seems to repress his destructive emotions to the extent that he consciously, or unconsciously, funnels them into two of his own creations, and the emotion is so intensely concentrated it gives a menacing life to his designs. And, I’m not sure whether or not Lovecraft was aware of this story, specifically, but he was aware of the fictional French town in which the story takes place, Averoigne — a creation of Smith’s akin to Lovecraft’s own Arkham — since H.P.L. referenced the “evilly famous ruins of Château Faussesflammes, in Averoigne, France” in Out of the Aeons with Hazel Heald. A number of Smith’s stories take place in the region I hear, though I haven’t read any more of them. Yet, the appeal of this tale, for me at least, is that it’s quite different from the chimerically distant-past or far-fetched-future tales that we’re used to with Smith, and his efforts here have been more grounded, more tamed, in a realistic setting and style that would have certainly impressed Lovecraft had he read it — seeing as Smith went even farther and invested a dimension of almost Freudian neurosis into the piece.