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Quite a lot of Smith's writings take this perspective of mostly being narrator perspective, but also tossing in some bits of omniscience here and there where the author needs to make points the narrator can't possibly know. Or to ensure the tale is related somehow where the internal logic of the story makes it impossible for the narrator's perspective to ever have become known. It's a strange mix.

They all thought she was out on the mountains. Nobody saw her slip back into the hotel. Now there is a matter of smell, someone should have smelled something as soon as they opened the door to prepare the room for our narrator, so there's that...

@@sststr I was especially thinking of the smell. In the alps you get a lot of smell, but that is either sour milk/cheese, or cow and the assosiated smells. Rot on the other hand, is rather seldom.

The ending was indeed unexpected!

McClusky does make for a very different style of weird tale for sure! Once the story moved to Severance's perspective, I figured out about half way through how the story was going to end, but McClusky didn't draw it out overly long the way Blackwood would, so it was fun to see the details of the remainder unfold.

Indeed - sea vampires! I don't know maritime mythology very well so don't know if there are any real sailor stories about marine vampires, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were. If not, then it was a good idea to invent!

@@sststr I've been living on a houseboat down in the Florida Keys anchors out for about 30 years and I've come across some gigantic palmetto bugs almost 2 inches long. If you use bug bombs or spray and they can't find nothing to eat they will climb on your body and eat your face. A friend of mine stopped over and he had the little triangular bite mark on his neck I asked him what it was and he said he didn't know I thought it was a palmetto bug bite they only come out at night and they're so light and slow that you don't feel them when they crawl on you in your sleep. The next day he stopped over and he has another Mark about a half inch from the first two little triangular shaped patches of missing skin red underneath. I told him that he had a vampire roach on his boat. He likes to shut off bug bombs all the time and the poison gets on everything but him. He said he didn't have no roaches and no bugs. I got a moment while he was sitting across the table from me one crawled out of his longish brown hair and down his neck. I asked him what that was embroidery freak out. He believes in Vampires on boats he lives on one too. I wish I had stuck in that bug bomb company. Since then I've captured a lot of them and studied them and I can't figure out how to kill them and that begets another story

He was very imaginative, to be sure! Glad you are enjoying them.

There's a historical François Villon that this character is clearly meant to be based off of, and the historical guy was also quite the scoundrel!

@@sststr Based on.

Oh boy, this is one of those poems I had always meant to re-record. It is difficult one and I did a poor job of it. But that's nothing to do with your questions, so: "had no more"... That is indeed difficult to interpret here. In the preceding lines he mentions the night and the moon, while in the following lines a yellow star coming up, which surely must be the sun. If the birth place of young Beauty is either the night or the moon, then the rising of the sun would dispel the night and make the moon fade away, thus "no more". That's my best guess. "Tho’ not with Faith - with godliness" - this is another one where I agree, the meaning is not at all clear. The spirit strives without faith, but with godliness, or is it that the spirit strives without faith or godliness? There's a case to be made in either direction, as both could make sense relative to the remainder of the stanza. I tend to lean towards the second one - the spirit seeking to find God through sheer passion alone, but absent any notes from the author about his meaning here, there is no way to have confidence in what was actually intended. I would note, however, there is a phrase in Christian theology "the Passion of the Christ", where passion in this usage means to suffer or endure. If we use that meaning in the preceding line, the stanza may take on a different character, in which case I might suggest the "without faith but with godliness" interpretation. Although I am unclear how one has godliness without faith, at least here in our mortal human forms. But yes, that line is very difficult to get a handle on, and multiple interpretations are reasonably possible.

I would not have ever thought to use this picture for this chapter, but for your mentioning of Böcklin a while back! Not sure what I would have done instead, but since you had brought him up, here you are.

I was dimly aware there was some Biblical connection in the name of Smyrna, but don't know the Bible as well as you do to know what it was.

Very nice catch! Lovecraft uses only a handful of architectural terms - alien structures are all cyclopean, human structures all have gambrel roofs, I vaguely recall he uses a couple of other terms here and there, but only a very few.

@@sststr one more is "Eldritch"

At least worship of the Earth is pretty benign. The problem occurs when people decided they need to start worshipping the state. We saw what happened with that in the 1930s, and it continued after the war in the Soviet Union, and continues to this day with the "woke" left (who are, by and large, tankies).

This story isn't proving very popular according to the analytics, to be sure. It is slow to develop. Well, at least there's plenty of back catalog for those who aren't interested in this story to go explore in the interim ;-)

The way the story is structured, we know O'Malley has already passed by the time the story is being told, but we are weaving two threads, one of O'Malley on this business trip, and one of O'Malley talking to the narrator some time after this trip and before his death. The way the narrator describes him, it sounds like he is seeing a normal human being. So whatever happens to O'Malley, he still retains a human form.

No worries, you get to it when you get to it. Glad you're on the mend!

But hey, at least we finally have a story by an English author where the German character isn't a cartoonish villain! The story was, of course, written *before* WW1, so the "need" to villainize the German wasn't there, and indeed, the Germans at that time were largely the ones leading the field of psychology, hence the use of a German in this role.

Also the Germans historically were perhaps more heavily steeped Romanticism than anybody else, which you will see as the story goes on, that becomes relevant as well.

@@sststr yep that is at least something. 😀 WW1 and WW2 destroyed so much in the mental state of Europe. Most of the bad developments start after both world wars.

@@sststr Oh yes the time of "Romantik" was one of exquisite artistic abillity and expression in Germany. Just to name a few names: Arnold Böcklin, Caspar David Friedrich, ETA Hoffmann, Johann von Eichendorff, Novalis and many more. Tragically all that mystic romance, that love for all mankind, was wiped out totally with ww1. High and mighty feelings die quickly in a foxhole.

@@BloingDidoing dude, the chapter I recorded last night referenced Böcklin explicitly! Mind you, that's chapter 25 - I'm pretty well ahead of what is being published at this point, so it'll be a long time before you encounter it, but it's in there!

Well, you'd be pretty pissed too if someone kept trying to overheat you to death.