"The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft

"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras-dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition-but they were there before. They are transcripts, types-the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body-or without the body, they would have been the same. . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual-that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy-are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence."
-Charles Lamb: "Witches and Other Night-Fears"

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I believe May Eve is what most people today would know as Walpurgis Night, or for the Gaelic types, Beltane.

The large amounts of dialog in whatever accent or dialect that is supposed to be was quite a bother to record. No idea how well I did with it, probably not well at all. But since I don't even know what accent it is supposed to be, some rustic, turn-of-the-century New England thing I suppose, it's hard to do it right. And I've been to New England often enough, from upstate New York to New Hampshire, and don't recall hearing anything like this. Ugh.

The picture used is "The Dunwich Horror - Lovecraft - Concept Art" by mcrassusart, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dh.aspx

It occurred to me very near the end of my recording session that the name Dunwich probably should be pronounced "Dun-wick". But listening to a few other recordings, it appears everybody uses the same pronunciation I used. So, hurray? I don't have to go back and rerecord the name everywhere it is used in the story? Plus there is an actual place by the name of Dunwich in England, which appears to be pronounced in the way I used here, so there's that.

Before recording this I was unsure how to pronounce the name Whateley - because of course Lovecraft can't ever use an obvious and simple name for ANY of his main characters. Fortunately, Whateley is a real name, so looking up some clips on youtube of people with that name, I believe the pronunciation I used is the actual one used by real people in the real world. Of course, one can expect variations in time and place, so I probably could have gotten away with just about any pronunciation, but I am quite content with the one I used.