And then when I was maybe around eleven years old, my mother took me to Mr. Monk’s Antique Store, in a little suburb of Tacoma. Mr. Monk, a sweet man who was around eighty years old, led me to a back room filled with dusty furniture and a single bookcase crammed with horror, fantasy and science fiction novels and anthologies. Apparently my mother had decided that I could graduate to “adult” fiction – probably she was tired of my throwing fits in the stacks because she wouldn’t let me read novels like The Exorcist – and she trusted his judgment. I picked out five books (which I still have to this day), and on the way out of the store, Mr. Monk slipped a few extra paperbacks into the bag – one was a collection of Lovecraft’s stories. Naturally, I read it and promptly went insane with joy. And that was it. Lovecraft led directly to my discovery of the horror and weird fiction writers I love so much.
—Interview: Livia Llewellyn and the Weird
Some of the best Mythos fiction is not very long: it doesn’t need to be. One of the advantages of an existing mythology is the ability to build and riff of it, to say and imply much more with a single word or phrase than could otherwise be expressed. “Take Your Daughters to Work” is Livia Llewellyn expressing that economical philosophy: four pages of razor-edged ideas, shiny and new, that cut to the core.
Sadie adjusts the heavy gold at her throat—her mother gave it to her this morning. It’s been in the family at least a thousand years.
—Livia Llewellyn, “Take Your Daughters to Work” in The Book of Cthulhu II 69
Our protagonist is Sadie, the eldest daughter of the man that runs the company. When and where are never expressed directly; though readers know this is not Innsmouth, not as Lovecraft or any of those that followed his portrayal slavishly ever painted it. Sadie moves within a deliberately Victorian milieu, the Industrial Age, with all its implications of class and behavior, servants in livery, and the vast machinery of the ever-expanding factory. Like an H. R. Giger biomechanics landscape reproduced in brief, but tied together with all the hallmarks of massive industrialization—the poisoned sky, smokestacks that belch ash and metal filings, looming edifices that block the horizon… In many of Lovecraft’s stories, the environment itself is a character, Innsmouth itself an indelible part of the narrative of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; so it is here.
Sadie has never seen the sea. None of the daughters have. The aspect of a descendant of the Deep Ones that is purposely kept from the water is a reoccurring image in Mythos fiction, a trope that suggests the unnatural separation and longing, as in “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys and “Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection” (2003) by Ann K. Schwader. The reuniting of these lost descendants of Innsmouth to the ocean is not always possible—Brian Lumley explores such a situation in “The Gathering” (2017)—nor is it always happy. There is a very good reason the fathers have taken their daughters to work at the New Y’hanthlei Steelworks today—and Llewellyn packs in a few more surprises, no Chekov’s gun left unfired.
“Take Your Daughters to Work” was first published in Subterranean #6 (2007), reprinted in Llewellyn’s collection Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011), and The Book of Cthulhu II (2012). Livia Llewellyn’s other Lovecraftian fiction includes Her Deepness (2010), “The Girls of the World” (2012), “Lord of the Hunt” (2012), “Allocthon” (2014), and “Bright Crown of Joy” (2016).
Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 