{"id":5197,"date":"2025-10-05T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephaleo.com\/blog\/?p=5197"},"modified":"2025-11-06T21:28:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T05:28:50","slug":"the-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/josephaleo.com\/blog\/the-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"The Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As I set forth this day to attend my grandson\u2019s Little League game, I prepare to join the throng of parents and kin who cheer the young players with cries of \u201cSwing batter, batter,\u201d while consuming hot dogs laden with mustard and relish. Yet, unlike my companions in this innocent ritual, I know that beneath the benign autumn sun, my skin will creep with remembrance of Lovecraft\u2019<\/a>s tale,\u00a0\u201c The Festival<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

In that dread story, an unnamed traveler comes at Yuletide<\/a> to Kingsport<\/a>, the ancient seaport of his forebears. He beholds crooked alleys, sagging houses, and the church that looms untouched by centuries. A mute elder, gloved and bland of countenance, guides him through ancestral halls where the\u00a0Necronomicon<\/a><\/em>\u00a0lies among worm-eaten tomes. At the appointed hour, he joins a silent multitude of cowled figures, descending beneath the church to a subterranean shore where green flames belch and an amorphous flutist pipes to the abyss. There, winged horrors\u2014neither beast nor man\u2014bear the worshipers into gulfs unguessed. The traveler recoils, for his guide reveals proof of kinship and a face not human. In terror, he flings himself into the oily waters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

He awakens in a hospital, told he had walked from a cliff into the sea. Yet when he later reads in Arkham<\/a> the blasphemous words of the\u00a0Necronomicon<\/em>, he finds them echoing all he has seen, speaking of corruption that spawns monstrous life and of things that walk when they were made to crawl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

Critics have marked the tale\u2019s import. Lin Carter<\/a> names it the first of Lovecraft\u2019s works to root itself in witch-haunted Kingsport and the earliest to yield a lengthy citation from the dread\u00a0Necronomicon<\/em>. S. T. Joshi<\/a> recalls that\u00a0 \u201cThe Unnamable\u201d<\/a> first introduced Arkham. Yet, he concedes that\u00a0\u201cThe Festival\u201d\u00a0binds itself more deeply to the Mythos.<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"