Read New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird for Free Online

Hittite, and Babylonian antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    What is it I am trying to accomplish with this catalog of dates and death and misfortune, calamity and crime? Among Thurber’s books, I found a copy of Charles Hoyt Fort’s The Book of the Damned (Boni and Liveright; New York, December 1, 1919). I’m not even sure why I took it away with me, and having read it, I find the man’s writings almost hysterically belligerent and constantly prone to intentional obfuscation and misdirection. Oh, and wouldn’t that contentious bastard love to have a go at this tryst with “the damned”? My point here is that I’m forced to admit that these last few pages bear a marked and annoying similarity to much of Fort’s first book (I have not read his second, New Lands , nor do I propose ever to do so). Fort wrote of his intention to present a collection of data which had been excluded by science ( id est , “damned”):
    Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You’ll read them—or they’ll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
    Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
    And I think I have accomplished nothing more than this, in my recounting of Endecott’s rise and fall, drawing attention to some of the more melodramatic and vulgar parts of a story that is, in the main, hardly more remarkable than numerous other Hollywood scandals. But also, Fort would laugh at my own “pallid data,” I am sure, my pathetic grasping at straws, as though I might make this all seem perfectly reasonable by selectively quoting newspapers and police reports, straining to preserve the fraying infrastructure of my rational mind. It’s time to lay these dubious, slipshod attempts at scholarship aside. There are enough Forts in the world already, enough crackpots and provocateurs and intellectual heretics without my joining their ranks. The files I have assembled will be attached to this document, all my “Battalions of the accursed,” and if anyone should ever have cause to read this, they may make of those appendices what they will. It’s time to tell the truth, as best I am able, and be done with this.
    5.
    It is true that I attended a screening of a film, featuring Vera Endecott, in a musty little room near Harvard Square. And that it still haunts my dreams. But as noted above, the dreams rarely are anything like an accurate replaying of what I saw that night. There was no black pool, no willow trees stitched together from human bodies, no venomous phial emptied upon the waters. Those are the embellishments of my dreaming, subconscious mind. I could fill several journals with such nightmares.
    What I did see, only two months ago now, and one month before I finally met the woman for myself, was little more than a grisly, but strangely mundane, scene. It might have only been a test reel, or perhaps 17,000 or so frames, some twelve minutes, give or take, excised from a far longer film. All in all, it was little but than a blatantly pornographic pastiche of the widely circulated 1918 publicity stills of Theda Bara lying in various risqué poses with a human skeleton (for J. Edward Gordon’s Salomé ).
    The print was in very poor condition, and the projectionist had to stop twice to splice the film back together after it broke. The