Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Underground civilizations

Entities & creatures

Ghouls

Lovecraft’s ghouls are corpse-eating, dog-featured beings associated with graveyards, tunnels and the boundary between human and nonhuman life. Pickman’s Model presents them as a terrifying reality behind an artist’s work, while The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath develops their language, friendships, political cooperation and capacity to assist a human traveler.

7 min read · 1,413 words

Literature

The Mound

The Mound expands an Oklahoma haunting into an account of an ancient underground civilization. A modern ethnologist discovers a sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript describing K’n-yan, where extraordinary technical powers coexist with captivity, exploitation and accelerating cruelty. His eventual descent beneath the mound tests the manuscript’s claims and reveals what became of the man who wrote it. The following account includes the ending.

12 min read · 2,326 words