A consequence of my current enterprise is that I’ve been reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft. Not that it’s a chore, of course; it’s just that… one notices things. My efforts to copy his literary style cause me to focus on phrasing and there’s something I’ve noticed in two separate places:

“Diseased fancy.”

A term found in two very different stories. The more famous of them is ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, a story that serves as the gateway drug for many people who fall into Lovecraft’s universe of c...