The Book of the Black Sun: Eldir. The Black Sun, #3

One of eight quartets from G. W. Thomas' The Book of the Black Sun, a collection of Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction. Each quartet is made up of a micro fiction piece of 100 words or less, a flash story 300-500 words, a short story of around 2000 and a longer one of 3000-5000 words. This one features "Cat House", "Helping Hand", "The Suit" and "There Was an Old Lady". James Ambuehl wrote: "There Was An Old Lady" is a strange piece, owing an obvious, if unexpected debt, to Mother Goose nursery rhymes, while "The Man Who Would Be King" follows in the footsteps of the Maine Man -- successfully wedding King's themes to the Master, HPL's.
Yet the WAY they emulate their models, especially in the former, is ingenious! Jim Lee wrote in Scavenger's Newsletter #175: "... But the better Lovecraft pastiche here ["There Was An Old Lady"] is probably the one by G. W. Thomas, where a carny recruiter blunders into the "hills west of Arkham" and ends up dictating an audio cassette account of his nightmare adventure just before...well, before the expected (yet fairly effective) ending."