erin mccann |Verified account

Sometime after I read it, my brother moved the volume into another box of books and we have no idea where it ended up. Or it just vaporized back into the hellfires where it came from. Either way.

Quick description of this story: "it combines that weird sense of otherworldly dread with a parasitic creature that is half Alien and half The Exorcist," as one Cthulhu fan site tells it https://angryscholar.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/the-cthulhu-mythos-pt-1-the-events-at-poroth-farm/ …

So we're at 2000 or so. It's years since I first read the book, and years before the internet made everything easier to find. The sense of dread and nightmare it engendered has stuck with me.

I casually look for the collection of short stories in used book stores all around the country. My brother knows this. He also knows I check his room whenever we're back home just in case it's rematerialized from the Upside Down.

I never was able to find it to reread it, and though in 2017 I know it was probably pretty easy to dig up online, I never have. (It's like if you don't look under the bed, the monster you know is there isn't really there.)

So cut to Christmas morning: turns out good old TED, in 40 years of writing, has only really produced two novels in addition to his tiny handful of short stories.

And one of those novels is actually a 400-page version of the short story that had terrified my nightmares for years.