Archive for Stories

This bit of flash fiction gives us a blood-chilling preview of doom.

The feeling is like what the heroine goes through in a silent film, tied up and laid on the train tracks, at the approach of the 12:05. The villain is gone, the hero is nowhere to be seen, and your slim, pale neck rests on one steel rail while your calves cross the other. The train is almost there. You can feel its vibrations through the metal, like an Indian guide with his ear to the ground, and you can now just hear the chugging of the steam engine. Continue reading »

Friends, we have a duesey of a story for you today. Fred Lubnow has explored through deep time and deep Antarctic wastes to bring you back this tale of cosmic horror set in the Mountains of Madness.

From the Neo-Galactic Sacred Text of the Elder Things:

When the Elder Things arrived on Earth, it was nothing more than a steaming rock covered with oceans, lakes, and pools. Life was essentially comprised of loose aggregates of unicellular cells. Cyanobacteria were photosynthesizing, emitting copious amounts of toxic oxygen into the atmosphere. The Elder Things used this prokaryotic raw material to create more complex eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.

They then used these more complex cells to generate various forms of multi-cellular life; some are still in existence, most have gone extinct. However, all were small bundles of cells, passively floating in the organically enriched waters of the Earth. While the Elder Things used this biological material to initiate the forces of evolution, they were not content to work with Terran biomatter. The Elder Things wanted more. They wanted to create larger creatures that were useful relative to their needs and purposes.

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Today we are honored to present a never-before-published story by David Barker, co-author with Wilum H. Pugmire of the new collection In The Gulfs of Dream and Other Lovecraftian Tales, available from Dark Renaissance Books. This is a story that couldn’t fit into that collection, but is shared here for the readers of Shoggoth.net.

Andy Blake arrived at Rams Wood Park an hour early, a few minutes past noon. The walk from the parking lot to the bronze statue of the soldier where they were to meet—which couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty feet—left him winded, and it was with relief that he settled onto a bench near the statue and took from his knapsack a small volume he’d brought to pass the time: Appearances, Semblances and Apparitions, a collection of prose poems by his late friend, Daniel Hird.

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