Site icon gordsellar.com

Literary Easter Egg

I love finding literary easter eggs in unexpected places, as in this description of a drive up to a summer camp to drop off a boy dreading the experience to come:

— They drove through a lot of beautiful scenery, for hours and hours and hours. The camp was far to the north. That was one of its special qualities. — Great forests now received the travelers, as they had once received the French; and the car passed though towns with historic churchyards followed by stony farms that bore witness to various sublethal crop diseases which had originated in Dunwich, Arkham, Lyme, or Innsmouth. Now it got cooler and breezier as they turned off past the summer homes organized around the lake, and the trees and clearings took you on and on past ruined stone walls, and oak trees marched over the mountains into wild gorges and up granite ledges at the start of Mr. White’s private moose reserve. — Cottages alternated with blues squares of lake. — At last the horrible camp loomed close…

There’s definitely the chocolate-and-blood whiff of Lovecraft, but aren’t the marching oaks maybe just the slightest hint of Tolkienesque ents fleeing disaster, as well?

Oh, by the way, this is from William T. Vollman’s You Bright and Risen Angels. I’m on the page this was on, page 154. The book is an absolute mess, but I don’t mean that in a bad way, really.

It’s not like anything else I’ve read in ages. Maybe ever.

Exit mobile version