Zoggie’s quoting one of my favorite authors – Howard Philips Lovecraft. If I mistake not, this is the opening from “The Call of Cthulhu”. That might be wrong, but Lovecraft it certainly is.
Well done bob, how on earth did you guess? hmm 
Sorry Cal…it wasn’t Lovecraft a’tall. It was Shirley Jackson…
So now does Bob get to post something that we hafta guess?
And also…I’m so glad I can access this page…I couldn’t at all before.
Hey come on…is anyone even still playing anymore?!
Was I really right with Winnie-the-Pooh? Wasn’t sure. I did know the Joyce reference, but I also thought Jackson was Lovecraft.
Anyway, new game:
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in
the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.
Is that from Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?
It is Conrad, I can tell you that much.
Yes to Conrad, different title…
Lord Jim.
I suggest someone else comes up with a new one. I’m at work and not overly noveled up at the moment. Oddly enough, the only two novels on my desk are Lord Jim and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.
Okay, easy one. When someone else gets it, he picks the next game.
IT hath reached me, O auspicious King, that there was a fisherman well stricken in years who had a wife and three children, and withal was of poor condition. Now it was his custom to cast his net every day four times, and no more. On a day he went forth about noontide to the seashore, where he laid down his basket and, tucking up his shirt and plunging into the water, made a cast with his net and waited till it settled to the bottom.
The Arabian Nights?
Correct. Your turn.
"She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment day. Seen near, it was a chaos – hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing – half lava, half glow.
I had heard this woman termed ‘plain,’ and I expected bony hardness and grimness – something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.
For a while – a long while – I thought it was only a woman, though a unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By and by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil."
I guess…we’re all morons.
Hint? 
Please?
OK … British female author; not her most famous work, but still fairly widely read. And it happens to be one of my very favorite books of all time.
Anne Rice?
I don’t know the answer, but Anne Rice is not a Brit.
Should be.
Dumaurier? I’m pathetic, I know :p, but that’s the only female Brit author I know. That I can think of right now, that is…
And yes, i’ve tried searching google for this. It won’t work!
Nope, not DuMaurier, but definitely one of DuMaurier’s major influences…