Okay, this has nothing to do with CAS, but then man does not live by CAS alone...

A few nights ago I was watching the Peanuts Halloween special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! (yes, I watch it every year) and bathing in childhood nostalgia when a certain scene made me sit bolt upright. It's the iconic scene where the kids are putting on their costumes. You remember--Sally holds up her sheet and shrieks at the horrible visage it assumes (shades of M. R. James!), Lucy dons a witch's mask not altogether unlike her normal expression, etc. The hapless Charlie Brown, of course, totally screws up his ghost costume by cutting eyeholes all over it. All these years I (and doubtless all the other viewers) had been feeling safely superior to that blockhead, Charlie Brown, who couldn't even wield a pair of kid-scissors.

My stunned realization was that I had been mistaken all these years, because the costume Charlie Brown inadvertently creates is not that of a ghost. Consider--what creature is described as an amorphous, shapeless mass covered in eyespots? Yes, there's just no way around it--Charlie Brown is trick-or-treating dressed as a Shoggoth!

The possibility that Charles M. Schulz was conversant with H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre is a possibility that had never crossed my mind--indeed, it's difficult to see how it could have. But viewing the program as a coded communique to those capable of interpreting it explains so much--the aforementioned mask which only hints at what lies beneath, the WW1-era visions experienced by Snoopy (so reminiscent of the time-displacement in various HPL stories), even the failed ritual which prevents the Great "Pumpkin" from returning. It gives one furiously to think.

No wonder everyone gave him rocks.

Bill Keane also understood, even though it took someone more bold to fill in the blanks for the rest of us.