"IT WAS LIKE TRYING TO THINK ABOUT THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS ZERO"
There's this guy, The Youngest Crotchety Old Man I Know, and he stumbled over this other (and very dead) guy, Harry Stephen Keeler and pointed him out to me. After reading one paragraph of this guy's work, I was instantly run over...err... won over. He's like the Grant-Morrison-with-a-nail-gun-injury-to-his-cerebellum of early pulp crime novels or something. I immediately secured the McSweeney's edition of The Riddle of the Travelling Skull, from which this is a snippet, thickly encrusted with a dried-up ichor of weird.
From the aforementioned tome:
Thank Viking Jesus that someone in the early twentieth century had enough dain bramage to publish this guy who, not surprisingly, was experimented upon in insane asylums.
From the aforementioned tome:
For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!
Thank Viking Jesus that someone in the early twentieth century had enough dain bramage to publish this guy who, not surprisingly, was experimented upon in insane asylums.