All posts by Bruce Priddy

The Living Al Azif, Lesser Servitor Race

“It was a rectangle of tawny, limp parchment, grained on the upper-side with scales, like the skin of some unfamiliar reptile. It turned it over, the other surface was smoother, with pore-like markings and lines of faint, rusty scribbling.” – Manly Wade Wellman, The Terrible Parchment.
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Beast of Averoigne, Lesser Independent Race

“Then, with terrible ineffable, Gerome beheld the thing to which light clung like a hellish nimbus, moving as it moved, and revealing dimly the black abomination of head and limbs that were not those of any creature wrought by God. The horror stood erect, rising to more than the height of a tall man; and it swayed like a great serpent, and its members undulated, bending like heated wax. The flat black head was thrust forward on a snakish neck. The eyes, small and lidless, glowing like the coals of a wizard’s brazier, were set low and near together in noseless face above the serrate gleaming of such teeth as might belong to a giant bat…This much, and no more, Gerome saw, ere the thing went past him with its nimbus flaring from venomous green to wrathful red. Of it’s actually shape, and number of limbs, he could form no just notion…” – Clark Ashton Smith, the Beast of Averoigne
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Jersey Devil, Unique Entity

“It was about three feet and a half high, with a head like a collie dog and a face like a horse. It had a long neck, wings about two feet long, and its back legs were like those of a crane, and it had horse’s hooves. It walked on its back legs and held up two short front legs with paws on them. It didn’t use the front legs at all while we were watching. My wife and I were scared, I tell you…” — Witness in the 1909 encounter
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Zuvembi, Lesser Independent Race

“…he saw a vague figure…it looked like a woman, but no human woman ever had that face of horror, that leering yellow blur of lunacy – yet he tried to scream at the sight of that face, at the flint of keen steel in the uplifted claw-life hand – but his tongue was frozen.” – Robert E. Howard, Pigeons from Hell

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Amara, Unique Mummy

“In the bright beam of his flashlight, he saw more than he wanted to: arms and legs like sticks, bulging points, red hair falling in glossy swatches; a gaunt and eyeless face…its mouth opened wide…those godawful white teeth…framed my black, dead lips. The creature attacked, arms reaching out…eyes twin pits of darkness.” — Richard Laymon, To Wake the Dead
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Horror of the Heights, Greater Independent Race

“The whole aspect of this monster was formidable and threatening, and it kept changing its colour from a very light mauve to a dark, angry purple so thick that it cast a shadow…On the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air…their method of progression–done so swiftly that it was not easy to follow–was to throw out a long, glutinous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So elastic and gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape, and yet each change made it more threatening and loathsome than the last…The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred..” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Horror of the Heights
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Xo Tl’mi-go, Greater Independent Race

“…there was something in the opening…something watching intently, its face pressed up against the metal grating, its pale hands clinging tightly to the bars. I saw…the empty craters where its eyes had been — empty but for the red dots, like tiny beads — and the gaping red ring of its mouth, like the sucker of some undersea creature. The face was alien and cold, without human expression, yet I swear those eyes regarded me with utter malevolence — and that they recgonized me.”
— T.E.D. Klein, Children of the Kingdom
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“Though the night was dark and dismal, yet the form of the unknown might now in some degree be ascertained. He appeared to be a horseman of large dimensions, and mounted on a black horse of powerful frame…mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless! but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!” — Washington Irving, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow
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