I had mentioned to my Secret Santa that I have a bit of a taste for the macabre. Scrying into the depths of the darkness, he delivered a collection of reading material to send chills down anyone's spine. The crowning glory is the most recent and massive collection of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. This massive 1100 page tome will suffice to bend the mind and send this intrepid explorer closer to the edge of the deep, unknowable abyss that lays beyond madness.

To supplement the work of the Great Mr. Lovecraft, two additional volumes were included in the package: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I remember reading these books as a young lad and I seem to recall some of them being quite unsettling. I look forward to re-examining these relics of my early life. The story about the lady with spider eggs in her face still haunts me...

As if this weren't enough, my dear Secret Santa included the film Akira (one of his [and my] favorite animes) and the first season of Cowboy Bebop. My Santa has some sort of sixth sense on DVDs, as I love both the movie and the series, and have owned them before - however, I lost my Akira disc a couple of years ago and my Cowboy Bebop is a terrible Chinese bootleg with almost incomprehensible subtitles. So these DVDs come out to just about the perfect way to polish up the anime shelf on my DVD rack.

Finally, a CD of Santa's band has been included in the package to give me a bit of glimpse back at the fellow who has made my holiday season significantly brighter -- well, actually darker, but darker in a good way! Thanks much, it is greatly appreciated!