Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s keen interest in our mysterious felines.

The opening illustration by Edd Cartier, for L. Ron Hubbard’s story in the newly digest-sized Unknown (February 1942), channelling the European fairy-tale tradition.

Lovecraft once had a long restaurant conversation with the flame-haired and young Hubbard, according to Frank Belknap Long. While impressed by the “extraordinary” lad, he evidently felt Hubbard was too professional and un-cosmic a writer to strike up a correspondence with. One wonders if Hubbard may have written a cat horror story as something of a salute to the recently deceased Lovecraft, on learning about the old gent’s keen interest in felines?