C’TTAR: Nobody said anything about his mother.
TERRY: Makes you think, eh?
—Kelda Crich, “Cthulhu’s Mother” in Dreams From the Witch House 168
That squelching sound you hear is Kelda Crich (Deborah Walker) driving the knife in. Mind the blood.
Sacred cows exist to be butchered, and the Cthulhu Mythos is no exception. There are entire anthologies devoted to humorous takes and takedowns of Lovecraft, his peers, heirs, and their varied collections, and the tradition of Lovecraftian humor is at least deserving of respect as the main branch of Lovecraftian horror it draws upon. Even Lovecraft would chime in on the subject:
Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.
—H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
“Cthulhu’s Mother” is just such a knowing wink. The reader is treated to a juxtaposition of the seriousness of the Mythos and the informal mundanity of an (apparent) homemaker treating Cthulhu as an oversleeping teenager. The flash fiction story is written as a dialogue, the pompous language of the priest with its talk of strange aeons and sacred this-and-that running up hard against the much more informal and relaxed speech of the Mother. The result is a bit deflating—which is the whole point.
In the harsh light of day, a lot of the tropes of the Mythos seem ridiculous. Suspension of disbelief and appreciation of the subtler horrors requires a process of initiation: you have to read the stories, work your way up to the final, culminating revelations that Lovecraft and his heirs so liked to italicize. Yet like all good humor, the witticisms are only effective because of a bit of cutting insight. Crich can only put in the knife by knowing where to put it:
LENG PRIEST: Women aren’t usually part of the mythos. Except as virgin sacrifices, of course.
—Kelda Crich, “Cthulhu’s Mother” in Dreams From the Witch House 168
H. P. Lovecraft actually did toss a couple references to sacrificing young men and maidens into “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “Out of the Aeons,” but the whole “virgin sacrifice” trope is, like a lot of the Cthulhu Mythos, a later growth. The broader part is somewhat more accurate: Lovecraft included fewer female characters (and female horrors) than explicitly male ones. Shub-Niggurath and Mother Dagon; Lavinia Whateley and Mamie Bishop, Keziah Mason, Marceline Bedard, T’la-Yub, the Ape Princess, and Aesnath Waite…along with a number of smaller roles. More than most readers might remember at first, but still a minority over all.
“Women aren’t usually part of the mythos.” could apply as well to women authors of Mythos stories, of course.
The mother of Cthulhu is never mentioned by Lovecraft in his fiction. It seems a curious omission, unless you realize that Lovecraft had little interest or desire in creating a sprawling, cohesive family tree of a pantheon to rival the Greco-Roman gods—that was the work of later hands, embellishing and restructuring the Mythos, establishing relationships, filling in “gaps” real of perceived. Hence the creation of Cthylla, the daughter of Cthulhu. The whole foundation of “Cthulhu’s Mother” is based on that possibility space: by first establishing that Cthulhu has a mother, and that this is a surprise to the cultists (Cthulhu having a mother is not a guarantee in every interpretation of the Mythos).
The pivot to commentary on women in the Mythos as a whole is Crich twisting the knife a little. A knowing wink to the reader about how much of Mythos fiction is built from tropes, expectations, and prejudices—not in the sense of bigotry, but in the sense of judging Mythos fiction by what has come before, and wanting more of the same rather than new voices and new takes. The readers of Lovecraftian fiction often know what they want, be it pastiche or cultists or an ominous pregnancy, and that slow fossilization of tropes, concepts, and authors is part of what has defined the Mythos over the last four decades, for good and bad.
Fans of Lovecraftian fiction need to be able to laugh at themselves and their works—and maybe reflect on what they read, and why. Because there is more to the Mythos than just the old favorites, fresh voices with fresh perspectives that deserve to be heard.
“Cthulhu’s Mother” was published in Dreams From the Witch House: Female Voice of Lovecraftian Horror (2015). Other Lovecraftian works include the poem “Stone City, Old as Immeasurable Time” (2011).
Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 