at the mountains of madness

based on an illustration from Astounding Stores (Feb 1936) for H.P. Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness", artist unknown

newt gingrich as a gug

(for the uninitiated)

h.p. lovecraft

blasphemous fish-frog

"I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible."

--The Shadow over Innsmouth

night-gaunt

"When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me 'night-gaunts'—I don't know where I got hold of the name) used to snatch me up [and] carry me off..."

--H.P. Lovecraft

The Music of Erich Zann