There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.

incurable lover of the grotesque

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.