Estela explained to me that Tloque Nahuaque, the Lord of the Near and the Nigh, had been to the Aztecs the Master of the Near and the Far, for they believed he is near all things and all things are near him.
—Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, “Tloque Nahuaque” in Future Lovecraft 128
“Tloque Nahuaque” is an advanced Mythos story. One for initiates. This story requires readers to connect the dots. To understand where it is coming from and what it is saying requires more than a passing familiarity with Lovecraft’s corpus, and recent-ish developments in experimental physics; a passing familiarity with Aztec mythology is helpful, but García-Rosas provides the short version for readers.
It is marvelous to be able to have a story that can invoke a familiar Mythos entity not be attributes, or some purported quotation from the Necronomicon, but by reference to their attributes. To intimate to readers a new angle on an old mystery, a new interpretation on an existing concept, a new (or old) face for a familiar god.
What makes “Tloque Nahuaque” work, fundamentally, is that Lovecraft’s horrors in the 1920s and 30s were essentially contemporary. Pluto was discovered in 1930; Lovecraft casually associated this discovery with Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” that was written around the same time. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was rewriting physics and the universe as people knew it, and for all the grimoires and incantations, “The Dreams in the Witch House” was as much about advanced mathematics as magic.
Lovecraft’s Mythos works, fundamentally, because he tried to ground it in reality. The dividend that pays is that writers like García-Rosas, who are familiar with advances in physics, can extend and revisit those conceptions. It’s okay if a scientific theory is proved wrong; that only provides the basis for further understanding. New ideas are still applicable to old concepts—be they from the Aztec or Lovecraft Mythos.
Azathoth, by whatever name, can still be relevant to a contemporary audience.
“Tloque Nahuaque” is a narrative of mood and idea more than plot, reminiscent in some ways of “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” (1998) by Poppy Z. Brite. It is episodic, jumbled, fragmentary, yet there is a thread of ideas that progresses from piece to piece. A collection of scraps that point toward a bigger picture. For the subject, it works. The mood sustains. There is no conclusion as such, only a culmination of the initial idea…but the vector of the narrative is clear; everything points to a suggestion of an ending that only initiates might fully grasp.
It works well.
“Tloque Nahuaque” was published in Future Lovecraft (2011) and can be read for free at Innsmouth Free Press. Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas’ other Mythos works include “Ahuizotl” (2011), “Tloque Nahuaque” (2011), “They Came From Carcosa” (2013), “Caza de shoggoths. Colección grotesca” (2013), “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” (2014), and “The Head of T’la-yub” (2015). Many of these stories have been translated into English by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of “Flash Frame” (2010), and editor and publisher of Innsmouth Free Press.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 