A very weird story I stumbled across today, from Syracuse, New York:
The FBI has evidence that for the past 15 years someone in Syracuse has been panicking office workers with powder-filled letters threatening an anthrax attack.
The pattern is the same: A letter arrives with a mound of white powder inside. The writer claims it’s anthrax. It terrorizes the poor soul who opens the letter and has to wait as long as 36 hours to find out it was only baby powder.
Then the terrorist disappears for months, even years.
Strange enough, but this guy apparently is a Lovecraft fan:
One peculiarity stands out about the letters — many of them contain passages from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as “weird fiction.” He died in 1937.
Lovecraft’s guiding philosophy was what he called “cosmicism,” or “cosmic horror.” It’s the idea that the universe is hostile to the interests of mankind, and his stories often express an indifference to human beliefs and affairs.
There is a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of this person. Read the entire article here.
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J.D., I think you’re putting the literary scholar levels of a police detective a little too high. We get to research through our countless books or online all we need to. This guy might be juggling multiple cases. So he “crammed” and got some Lovecraftian facts wrong. Poor bastard. He’s not a lifelong geek like us. I don’t want a “Lovecraft Terrorist” (you know how this will be spun by the media) running amok. And likely, somebody in our community already knows this hoaxter without realizing it. We ought to look out. I mean, this is without victims, physically, but it causes terror. Not cool. Who cares about the minutia? Only dorks like us. Not actual humanity.
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The all-seeing eye is more likely to come from the back of the dollar bill.
Nothing in HPL suggests Cthulhu has an all-seeing eye, nor is that eyeball image anything uniquely Lovecraftian. Seeing the actual quoted passages would be more helpful.
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you know, if they wanted people to ‘recognize the Lovecraft references,’ it would have been helpful if they’d told us what they were.
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Having read the entire article now, I must say I see the Lovecraft connection (based solely on this information) to be tenuous at best. For example, the “eye” which the investigator says “may” represent Cthulhu, due to a reference in a story describing him/it as “having tentacles coming out of his face and one all-seeing eye”. I don’t see any sign of tentacles in the examples given, nor do I recall any reference to any “one all-seeing eye”, not even in the revisions. The closest which springs to mind is “the three-lobed burning eye” from “The Haunter of the Dark”, but that was not Cthulhu, nor is it indicated that it is “all-seeing”. Perhaps he is taking the Polyphemus reference a bit too literally, but in any event, this seems a rather serious stretch…..
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well this seems to be a case of some mis-guided, and weak minded fool
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I would be very interested in knowing just WHAT the quotations from HPL are, and how they are connected to the bilge such as we see in the examples above. What we have here, it seems to me at first blush, is either a particularly nerdy social misfit hoaxer, or someone who genuinely is against the wars in the Middle East and approaches the entire matter with more than a bit of delusional tninking. Either way, someone who does need to be caught, but is likely in need of some industrial-strength psychological help more than anything else… unless they have been engaging in something having actually physically dangerous consequences…..
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“The curse of Allah be upon you!” – sounds like a mad Arab.
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I SWEAR it’s not me……
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