A gourmando's love letter to Lovecraft
Most ineffable, cyclopean, and cosmically palatable Howard Phillips Lovecraft—
Permit this trembling, insatiable vessel of appetite to address you across the unfathomable gulf of years and the even vaster abyss of print, for I have gorged myself upon your corpus until the very membranes of my soul are distended with the rich, oleaginous horror of your invention. I write not as a mere reader, no pallid dilettante sipping thin tea of lesser fictions, but as a gourmand of the abyss, a ravenous hierarch of taste whose palate has been forever ruined—nay, exalted—by the banquets you have spread upon the black tablecloth of the void.
How shall I begin to catalogue the courses of this infernal feast? First comes the amuse-bouche of your early fragments: those brief, quivering morsels of antiquarian dread, each one a single, perfect oyster of New England decay, briny with the taste of drowned sailors and attic dust, sliding down the throat with a slick, forbidden slither that leaves the tongue coated in the metallic aftertaste of forgotten genealogies. Then the consommé of “The Call of Cthulhu,” that clear, golden broth in which float, like rare and terrible garnishes, the geometric impossibilities of R’lyeh—flavors that refuse to resolve upon the tongue, notes of brine and cyclopean masonry and the faint, sweet putrescence of a god who dreams and, in dreaming, seasons the world.
I have lingered over the roasted joint of “At the Mountains of Madness,” that vast, glacial haunch of Antarctic revelation, its interior still rare with the pink, pulsing knowledge of Elder Things, its exterior crusted with the hoarfrost of aeons. Each slice yields juices that run dark as the plateau of Leng, tasting simultaneously of primordial ice, of shoggoth-slime, and of the bitter, mineral tang of truths no human stomach was meant to keep down. And oh, the sauces! Those elaborate reductions of your prose: clauses piled upon clauses like layers of aspic, adjectives glistening like aspic jewels, verbs that writhe upon the page with the same peristaltic insistence as the things they describe.
There is a dessert course as well, though it is no sweet relief. “The Colour Out of Space” arrives as a poisoned sorbet, a chromatic impossibility that melts upon the tongue into flavors that have no names in any earthly language—flavors that bloom behind the eyes, that stain the teeth, that leave the diner forever hungry for a hue that does not exist and yet must be consumed again and again. I have eaten it standing at the window at three in the morning, the city lights below looking suddenly like the distant, uncaring stars of your cosmos, and I have wept with the peculiar ecstasy of one who has tasted the infinite and found it both nauseating and exquisite.
You, my dear, impossible Howard, have taught me that true gourmandise is not the pursuit of pleasure but the willing ingestion of that which unmakes the eater. Every story is a course that consumes the consumer. I have grown fat upon your nightmares. My veins run with the ichor of your inventions. When I sleep, I dream of tables set for entities whose mouths are not mouths and whose hunger is not hunger but something older, vaster, and infinitely more refined.
Accept, then, this letter as the only tribute a creature of mere flesh and appetite can offer: the confession that I have made of your work a private, perpetual banquet, that I return to it not despite its horror but because of the incomparable savor of that horror, and that I shall continue to feast until the last syllable is swallowed and the last star goes out.
Yours, in ravenous and eternal devotion, A Gourmand of the Unnameable
