Jun 30, 2023

"Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" by Neil Gaiman (2014) from The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy edited by Mike Ashley, Carroll & Graf

An American student, following a guidebook on a Walking Tour of British Coastlines, discovers that in the "off season" that not much of anything is open along the rainy grey coast.  He stops at a village called Innsmouth.  He finds a pub with an odd name and checks to see if they serve food.  They do, of a sort, but he decides the British serve food as a punishment.  Two fellows sit by him and he buys them a round of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar.  He's never drank alcohol before and listens as the two men talk to him about H.P. Lovecraft and how they're acolytes.  He wakes up in the morning with a terrific headache, but no village.

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