Music to Flee Shoggoths By

I discovered H.P. Lovecraft the summer I turned 14 or 15.

That’s not quite right. My elder siblings—excuse me, I should capitalize that ominously—my Elder Siblings had a couple of books of Lovecraftian tales around the house, and I’d dipped into them once or twice. But the summer I first really got into Lovecraft was the summer I turned 14 or 15. I remember golden afternoons sitting in my room at the top of the house, with windows open on both sides of the room and a fan going to keep the air flowing, reading and reading and reading.

And the whole time I was reading, I was listening to the radio. Now, this was around 1976 or 1977; and certain songs were in heavy rotation. I mean heavy rotation. They were repeated so many times during those days of golden horror and delight that to this day I cannot hear them without thinking of H.P. Lovecraft; and when I think of H.P. Lovecraft then as often as not I hear them distantly in the background.

The funny thing is, there’s nothing particularly outré or macabre about either of these songs; they were just in the air at the right time and the right place, and there was a certain portentous gravity about them that resonated with shoggoths and shantaks and Pickman’s Model in my teenage head.

The first (and lesser of the two, IMHO) is this one: “Dream On”, by Aerosmith:

But the one that really grabs me, that evokes those golden afternoons vigorously, is this one: “Carry On My Wayward Son”, by Kansas.

Finally, for bonus points, here’s a track I associate with reading The Mastermind of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for reasons that now elude me: “Without You”, by Harry Nilsson.