It is with great disgust that I set aside my edition of The Arkham Eugenics Quarterly and pick up — again — the instruments that allow me to eke out my feeble living as a writer of cheap pulp stories. However, the embarrassment that this undertaking will cause me is almost too great for a man of my breeding to bear. My skin pales to near translucence just thinking about it.
It was not so long ago that the Philips family was one of the wealthiest in New England. Of noblest blood we were and our debilitating genetic disorders were held in highest admiration in all the best social circles. My grandfathers lived lives of idle pleasure, whiling away some days doing nothing more than comparing their collections of only the most fashionable ethnic groups.
That all ended after my father’s investment in Dowsing Enterprises Ltd. and now I, their henpecked son, am forced to earn a living writing horror stories for closet dwellers who commune in Internet support groups for high-functioning autistics.
These degenerate mongrels of low social standing continually e-mail me, causing me to lose my connection to and severely angering my guildmates. These cretins do not realize I only write these stories over microwaved pizza on nights my wife throws me from her bedchamber. I recently revealed to her that I was a celibate and that I consider sexual congress useless except for the purposes of producing screaming womb droplings.
Our marriage has been on uncertain terms since.
What makes matters worse is that my agent assigned me a new book that is far below even the low reputation I now have. “Howie,” he says, befouling the air around him with the odor of whatever ethnic food he was cramming in his maw. “Scholastic wants you to write a book of Halloween jokes. Ya know, for kids! I told them you’d love to!”
I cursed the cosmos that would make me choose between seeing the Lovecraft name further degraded on the tissue-thin pages of a Scholastic order form or not having enough money to buy this book for my wife as a passive-aggressive Christmas present.
So this fall look for “H.P. Lovecraft’s 101 Howl-oween Punnies” in the Doritos-stained fingertips of a GameStop clerk near you. The cover, I’m told, depicts a laughing werewolf using a gag flower device to spray some ichor or other into the face of a Dracula.
I’ve included a few of jokes that will appear in publication- may Thule forgive me.