Although everyone's keeping a low profile so far, I'm encouraged by the interest expressed to me privately about the Halloween story contest. I think this'll be fun.

So let's press onward! As promised, I'm going to post a bunch of spooky stuff in order to provide both inspiration and a gentle kick in the ass. I think I'm going to start this process by heading back in time from the Hellboy comic that started the process.

The Hellboy universe has a lot of influences, and Mike Mignola swings between them pretty wildly. But more than anyone else, the book owes a debt to H.P. Lovecraft. Sometimes this is explicit — the BPRD Plague of Frogs storyline could be fairly called an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (which we'll get to later). But the most important idea taken from Lovecraft is atmospheric in nature.

Lovecraft's probably best known for making our pop fright-fest aesthetic include more tentacles than it used to. That's not his real innovation, though. Before Lovecraft, horror was mostly about deviation from the normal — about the horrible things that might exist, things which put themselves at odds with virtue and far from god. Lovecraft pointed out that if there is a god — well, first of all, that should probably be pluralized — and second of all, it's pretty presumptuous for us to assume that they care for mankind or the world we've built. Human society and its idea of goodness is a pleasant anomaly; one we're born into loving and defending, but one that has little in common with the essential cold vastness of the universe. We are so, so tiny. It's probably too much to ask for even indifference from the unknowable forces that dwarf us. Why should we be the only thing with intents and ends? We may just be the only thing that flatters itself by bothering to call those ends benevolent.

Put another way: if you've ever found yourself standing outside on a dark, cloudless night and paused to imagine the radio waves from our civilization and the heat from your body commingling as they radiate into space, the photons soon to be lost forever in endless cold — and better that than for them to be noticed by something else, something incomprehensible and uncompassionate — if you've ever thought something like that, shivered, and then hurried inside, you probably owe H.P. Lovecraft a royalty payment.

Lovecraft said that the story he liked best of those he ever wrote wasThe Colour Out Of Space. Although it's not directly related to his more famous works within the Cthulhu mythos, it is as emblematic of his sense of cosmic dread as anything else I've read. Here's the text:

H.P. Lovecraft – The Colour Out Of Space

iPhone owners may also be interested in installing Stanza, a free book reader application that has The Colour Out Of Space available through its Feedbooks catalog.

Boo!