Happy Spookaween

For october I wanted to do an audio book club/review of some hp lovecraft stories. I got into listening to them last year after I listened to Peter Draws read The Color Out of Space.

Tonight I'm listening to The Horror From the Middle Span. It's about this guy with a weird uncle who dies and the nephew goes to live in his house. I'll summarize it more in the morning. Update to follow.

The Horror From the Middle Span

as remembered by Andy

Ambrose Bishop goes to this skunky part of Massachusetts because his uncle Septimus Prime is believed dead. Septimus was, by all accounts, a total spooklord and a weird guy in a shop gets all creeped out when Ambrose shows up and tries to buy some stuff.

Ambrose thinks his uncle's house is pretty cool. It has a cupola. Ambrose knows that Septimus was super smart and that's probably why Septimus was mistrusted by the ignorant, idiotic locals. It's very important that we continue to repeat just how stupid everyone is around here. Anyway, Septimus's house is old and spooky and covered in mildew and books and pentagrams and stuff. Ambrose isn't sure what to make of the pentagrams because he knows that his uncle was a man of logic and science and not superstition like these disgusting yokels and bumpkins all around.

Ambrose finds a spooky cellar below the house and below that is a spooky hallway and below that is a spooky sanctum with an altar in it and there is even another trap door that leads to lower than the sanctum but Ambrose doesn't open that door.

Ambrose is like, oh man, this is weird. He goes for a walk and he sees a spooky collapsed bridge. But there's one part in the middle that is not only still standing but has been strengthened recently. It's the middle span of the bridge. At this point the reader knows that this is where the horror was/is. The general path that all Lovecraft stories of this kind tend to take is that some creepy guy, Septimus, was working on some sort of dark magic in secret and it turned him super creepy and then it gets out of control and he dies but not before freaking everybody out and going bonkers. 

We learn from some lettters that Ambrose reads that Septimus was in communication with all the other spooklords of the world, including Wilbur Weightly, who is the star of another story that I cannot remember the name of right now. Wilbur is a creep-o beep-o and his story is pretty similar to this one.

Anyway, Ambrose is slowly learning all this and getting freaked out so he keeps going down to the cellar because his horror and curiosity draw him in and then it turns out Septimus is still alive and he was probably abducting people to use for blood sacrifices and be immortal and junk.

Oh yeah, Ambrose finds some bones and he's like "oh cool, bones!". He finds the bones over by the middle span after a big flood. And he takes the bones and puts them in his spook cellar. Later he eats some lunch and then goes back to play skeleton with his bones but the bones are missing! surprise. Uncle Septimus is back now because he was either the bones or he was a thing that ate the bones to come back to life. Ambrose passes out when he sees his uncle and the uncle disappears for a while.

People from the town start to go missing and everyone is like "oh my gosh, this happened the last time Septimus Bishop was all weird and now his nephew is here and it's happening again!" And Ambrose is scared. And the townsfolk show up at his house and they burn it down and presumably the Uncle and Ambrose get sealed away in that bridge from earlier.

the end.