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Looks like we’ve done it! Having cracked the lid open on cosmic horror in The Shambler From the Stars, it is, perhaps fitting to follow it up with more cosmic horror. In this week’s Mad Alex Presents, we settle down with H. P. Lovecraft, the very one who sought to define cosmic horror through his stories and exposition. Here is The Festival, a story of lurid curiosity shackled to terrible duty: a man is summoned to participate in the rites established by his forefathers much to his chagrin and tenuous sanity.

If this is your first foray into Lovecraft’s work, here you will find your introduction to that most evil fictitious text, the Necronomicon by the Mad Arab Abdhul Alhazred, and end your stay in the fictitious town of Arkham with its resident Miskatonic University, mainstays in many of Lovecraft’s stories and prose. Though this is the first mention of the Necronomicon on this Backstage publication, this is certainly not the first mention of it in Lovecraft’s writings, having first appeared in 1922 in his story The Hound. Given space and opportunity, we may present The Hound at a later date. For now, be grateful our narrator in The Festival chooses to omit much of what he reads in that accursed tome, as, perhaps, our own sanity would be compromised in this reading.

As here is one instance in which the more troublesome aspects of Lovecraft’s writings are not found, we have been generous in ascribing it two clowns, in accord with our in-house JEST Content Rating System. Thus do we invite you to pull up a chair with your favorite reading beverage and indulge in this story of cosmic horror.