Friday, December the 26th, 2014
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I was exceedingly pleased to receive as a Christmas gift The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, a splendid scholarly edition of selected works by the troubled genius of Providence, Rhode Island. It is packed with informative footnotes, but one was missing, so I am taking the opportunity to provide it here as an addendum.
Among my favourite snippets of Lovecraft is this passage from The Thing On The Doorstep. My footnote is appended.
It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise—“glub… glub… glub”—which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub… glub… glub-glub.”
NOTE : In the early 1990s, “Glub … glub … glub” was the recorded answerphone message of Ed Baxter, benevolent despot of ResonanceFM.