Put planchette to board. Close eyes. Heart fills with a hate for every single day with a love and fear and dark respect for the nameless that sits above the sky. He is in you. You are him.

Oncoming, there is a century to which you did not give birth. Oncoming, this is an onslaught. Byron is dead. Everyone around you is different, strange, malformed. You shut the door. You lock the door. You never open the door again. Stay there in that shuttered room. Stay forever in New England. Stay dead in Providence, the place—no—the very landscape that you are.

Fiddleblack #8 is dedicated to the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The writers whose work appears in this issue are not emulators of Lovecraft. Seldom do they even channel the Mythos directly. Rather, they approach Lovecraft’s deep fears and rash xenophobia as essential exercises in exploring the tenants of concept horror and, moreover, the purpose of self in place.

Elias Marsten returns per his dedicated schedule with a “weird” take on antipastoralism, and Adam S. Cantwell takes time to show you that, yes, he can breathe and write below the PhD level—and we think he does this brilliantly so. Bram Stoker Award nominee and Kerouac/Lovecraft illuminatus Nick Mamatas joins us for a private cross-conjuration with David Foster Wallace, while Fiddleblack newcomer Copper Sloane Levy proves that hard work is real—dedication yields results. We hope to hear more from him. Brian Kubarycz returns, back from Fiddleblack #4, with a complex prose-poem channeling dark stings of Olympian thunder, and Jon Sealy greets us with a true and purely gaslight story, perhaps predating Lovecraft’s quiet oeuvre but echoing instead a seaworthy influence.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!