‘And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt.’

It may be a sign that the end of times is upon us. Or perhaps just a sign that some people believe it is so. Or a sign of a strange convergence, that the stars are right, or becoming so. Or just one of those things that strikes me as odd yet is utterly benign in nature and just an odd little twist of coincidence. More likely still it is none of these things, but in the darker echelons of my mind it strikes me as vaguely sinister and amuses me at the same time.
You’re probably wondering at this point what I am going on about… perhaps I should explain.

Recently, in its wisdom, WordPress informed me that I had posted 200 posts. Which in itself is not entirely correct, because a fair number of posts available on this blog were actually ported over from my old Blogger blog, but all the same was still a bit of a milestone. As such, I thought it would be a good time to ‘audit’ my blog, for want of another word. I don’t generally pay all that much attention to the statistics the blog generates, beyond a vague interest in how many views a new post gets in the first couple of days and the overall stats for the month. Vague interest being the word, no part of this blog is commercialised, the number of hits is not significant, I care far more that those who do read it enjoy it, than the I do about the footfall it generates, and I write what I want to write here, rather than try and produce clickbait. I abhor clickbait sites almost as much as I find myself enjoying the odd wander through them …  As such I don’t really look that closely at the stats, but there is a degree of wisdom in look at which posts prove to be the most popular all the same.

Which brings me back to Nyarlathotep… With the exception of a couple posts that for one reason or another generated a huge footfall at the time, it the one post is consistently being read. Nyarlathotep, the harbinger of the old gods, he who appeared at the beginning of the end of times and…

…prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not…

It strikes me as odd… and slightly worrying, that of all the posts on this blog, which I will admit has a fair degree of Lovecraft, but let’s not dwell on that, of all the post on this blog it is Nyarlathotep which draws the crowds in these latter days of the Facebook, Instagram, twitter generation… I mean, Nyarlathotep is not a name you type into google by accident now is it? Not unless you drunk enough to collapse on your keyboard and roll your face around a while. Or perhaps if your cat walks across the keyboard… No Nyarlathotep takes some typing… You have to actually seek out Nyarlathotep, you don’t just stumble over it with a typo…

And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.

Yet here he is, drawing in a crowd of the virtual kind. He who is the harbinger. He who talks of the end of times and preseeds them. And I get hits on that one page from all over the world. So, by extension, people all over the world are thinking of the end of times, and Lovecraft’s dark Pharaoh. Of all the click bait I could have generated, of all the impact I could have on the virtual world, it is this post, Nyarlathotep: The complete Lovecraftian #24 that sparks interest. Which draws people in with a darkly bizarre fascination…  A post about a dark stranger issuing in madness and the end of all. If you think about that for a moment, its a little worrying…

Or of course I drank too much coffee yesterday and I was just staring up at the ceiling half the night half imagining the dark terrors that lurked within the shadows while my mind wandered about with, to be frank, a mind of its own… And I decided to write this as an experiment to see if saying Nyarlathotep enough times would magically draw people in… but that would be incredibly cynical of me if that was the case, and I really do find the whole attraction to Nyarlathotep very very strange…

On a side note… If you’re interested the all-time most popular posts in regards to this blog were NaNoWriMo: Or how to first draft… and That Offensive Word… the latter of which proves that click baiting works (not that I set out to write it as clickbait at the time)  because it has a picture of The Hound from GOT and is about the use of swear words and basically offensive language in literature. The Hound was just the perfect character to illustrate the point I was trying to make. Having that picture and a tagline ‘That Offensive Word’ created a surge of traffic. But as I am not interested in producing clickbait as such, I won’t be learning any lessons from that 🙂