A note about pronoun usage: I will be using a mix of “he” and “they” for the character of Rolf Chapvet because the original uses “he” (or more accurately, uses the masculine in the original French) and I don’t want to be misleading.
“Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (“That Which Arouses Fear…”) (1958) contains two twists that occur one after the other. The first is that the protagonist, Rolf Chapvet, has been sacrificing young men to Yog-Shoggoth [sic] in order to transform himself into a ‘Dark Lady’ by night. The second is that the narrator, who admits early on to killing Rolf, is his mother.
I knew something trans was going to happen, because I picked “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” out of a list of weird fiction with transgender themes, but it took until very close to the end for me to realize how exactly that transness would manifest. I was distracted by noting how close of a pastiche the text is, and by the uncanny valley New Englandness of the names. “Jommy,” one of the disappeared men, is one that stuck especially in my thoughts. It’s like “Johnny” but not, just this side of the sort of nickname a real New Englander would acquire over his lifetime. This is New England as written by someone who has only ever seen New England filtered through a Lovecraftian eye.
The almost rote way the authors approached their pastiche meant I was genuinely surprised when it turned out that Rolf was feeding men to a cauldron to fuel their male-to-female transformations. I fell for the woman narrator twist because women, much less mothers, rarely feature at the center of Lovecraft’s stories, nor did they tend to be the protagonists of Robinsonades, or of Flash Gordon, the other two inspirations cited in Jacques Bergier’s introduction. The genre walked me down the garden path and there I stood, shocked at the transness I knew would occur because never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted this particular deployment.
The twist that is more interesting to me narratively is that the narrator is the protagonist’s mother. Mothers are generally not portrayed as so personally violent as to strangle their own child, and that capacity for intimate violence hangs over the entire piece. The narrator tells the reader how exactly Rolf died from the beginning; she only obfuscates her relationship, making it more shocking. Otherwise, she has no regrets. “Yet I attest that it was my fingers that left their marks on his pale skin during the dreadful night in the Shadmeth vault. It was my hands that gripped his frozen neck and it was in my mind, guided by the absolute certainty of ridding the Earth of the most abominable monster it had ever borne, that I drew the courage necessary to go as far as at the end of this hideous contact and to strangle without remorse this creature which should never have been called to life.” (Emphasis mine.)
The work by Lovecraft that comes to my mind when I think about this twist is not “The Outsider,” which concerns more personal, internalized horror, but “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.” There, the titular character realizes that he is the product of literal bestiality and metaphorical “race-mixing,” cannot bear the horror of this revelation, and kills himself. In “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi,” the horror that cannot be borne is the protagonist’s “son” existing in a female body. The narrator finds this feminine form even more shocking than the serial murder.
It is difficult not to read the bestiality in “Arthur Jermyn” as a metaphor for mixed-race couples, especially knowing anything about Lovecraft’s prejudices. There is no real metaphor in “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi,” which bluntly makes cross-gender transformation the result of murder, depravity, and evil gods. But as in “Arthur Jermyn” it is that crossing of an inviolable category that makes the protagonist worthy of death, although Arthur Jermyn at least has the opportunity to choose his end. Rolf’s mother chooses for him.
Transsexual, transgender, and transvestic behavior was not necessarily unknown to the authors of this story. In 1954, Claude Marais published J’ai choisi mon sexe, confidence du peintre Michel-Marie Poulain (I chose my sex, confessions of the painter (masculine form)). As the title suggests, this was the biography of the painter Michel-Marie Poulain, a World War II veteran who medically transitioned in 1946 and died in 1991. She was a relatively high-profile expressionist and was notorious in her time for living openly as a woman.
That Jacques Bergier and his unnamed collaborator decided to tackle transsexual themes in their 1958 short story “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi (That Which Arouses Fear…),” only four years after Claude Marais’s publication, is possibly a coincidence, but it is clear that transsexuality was in the air. I bring up Michel-Marie’s story specifically not because I think it is the definite source of ‘Janus’s’ interest in changing sex, but to show that people in France in the 1950s had ample opportunity to learn about the idea. Ed Wood’s notorious picture Glen or Glenda (I Changed My Sex!) had come out even earlier, in 1953, and transvestite performers were a frequent sight in French cabaret shows. Transsexuality has frequently been an object of fascination, revulsion, desire, all things that can become “too much” to the point that someone “can’t help themselves.” The protagonist is intrigued and repulsed by her child in equal measure, like an audience member driven to a frenzy by an unusual show.
Bergier does not mention the gender element in his introduction. This would spoil his story, and the twist he is excited to share with his reader. All he says is that it is a “black” story, and it is difficult to tell if he means that in a dark sense, or simply that the contents discussed are too horrible for the sensitive soul. All the introduction really tells the reader is that he and his unnamed collaborator like adventure stories, and they want to share their neat tale with their audience. Did he think trans people deserved death at the hands of their own parents? It is impossible to know, because that would be reading too deeply into his work. He certainly considers their existence unusual and unexpected, the kind of twist one does not guess.
Jacques Janus was (were?) right, however, about one element of their story. The introduction of a transsexual element to this story changes a fairly rote pastiche to something a little odder, something that is even a little bit charming. It does not evoke revulsion like ”Arthur Jermyn”, at least not in me. Instead the twist lodges this story in my head so that I return to it over time, a bit like how I am writing this essay. I am thus interested in Rolf because of their ambiguous gender issues, as vague as those turn out to be.
To Janus’s credit, Rolf is not the typical transsexual serial killer stereotype. They are no Buffalo Bill, skinning women out of a frantic desire to take possession of their femaleness. Instead, Rolf’s method of changing sex is killing men, a bizarre take on the trope I do not think I have seen before. It is also this cross-gender sacrifice that makes me think that even if the authors were aware of transsexuality, they were working under the older idea that transfeminity and cis male homosexuality were two sides of the same coin. Rolf has no interest in women before his mother sees him in front of his bubbling cauldron: “I knew perfectly well that Rolf lived alone up there. He had never been interested in women, moreover, whom he considered unworthy of sharing the life of a man such as himself.” He appropriates something he scorns into himself.
Then again, he does not fill these stereotypes because they were still being developed; Buffalo Bill is the product of a similar instinct on Thomas Harris’s part, who openly admits seeking out the sensational and weird for inspiration in his thrillers. Transsexuality is a weird spice in a weird dish, much like Dr. Hannibal’s cannibalism; these are taboo topics which only the bold dare exploit for thrills.
Buffalo Bill is not, as they say, ideal trans rep. He’s a violent serial killer who funnels his gender dysphoria into murderous urges, and the narrative’s clumsy attempt to separate him off from “real” transsexuals only serves to legitimize the weird gatekeeping of the era’s “best practice.” Yet, I love him, and so do many of my trans friends. “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me,” he says, blending transfeminity and stereotypical camp homosexuality in a scene played for horror but easy to take as empowering instead. He’s well-acted, charismatic, insane, obsessed with bugs. He’s camp. He’s got a personality you can latch on to, and actualizes an ache that many trans people feel. Am I attracted to this person, or do I want to walk around inside their skin?
Rolf isn’t really a midcentury French Buffalo Bill. There just isn’t much to them, just as there isn’t much to the story. He is absent from his own story. The work tells his life story, but his mother is the Lovecraftian protagonist, driven insane by that which can neither be revealed nor understood. There just isn’t enough of Rolf to hold on to. The outsider looking in has no sympathy for his desire to be a woman; he might as well be sacrificing men to the cauldron so he can grow bat wings.
The thing that turns Rolf into a woman is “a body, a whole infamous parody of being alive.” It “surround[s] Rolf in a caressing and monstrous embrace.” The narrator has walked in on her son having pseudo-sex with a freaky creature and changing sex, but the transformation is considered just as hideous as the catalyst. This final moment before his death is also the only time Rolf’s mother uses feminine pronouns. “His features trembled, the fog seemed to seep through all his skin. An imperceptible modification began to draw a feminine mask of diabolical perversity on the contours of her face: the atrocious reality of the Dark Lady and her bloody sacrifices…”
Transsexual bodies are still used as cheap shock, but it’s less common than it used to be. While some series like Lovecraft Country still do that thing where a non-cis body flashes nude on the screen for the shock and titillation of the audience, other works like the multiplayer FPS Destiny 2 contain a nonbinary character who simply exists in the world, and have stories only partially related to their gender identity. But for many people, the transsexual body still remains an object of horror. This piece feels like the halfway point between terfs posting out of context post-top surgery pics and the old newspaper headlines about Catherine Jorgensen: “The Girl Who Used to be Boy Isn’t Quite Ready For Dates.”
“Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” is an odd story. It feels silly to say that it’s not an accurate reflection of transition, because of course it isn’t. You don’t become a girl by sacrificing boys to Yog-Shoggoth, but that objection sort of misses the point. The authors behind Jacques Janus were seemingly not interested in accurately depicting trans people, but instead in frightening their audience. The sex-change cauldron follows a very Lovecraftian passage in which the narrator confronts “a kind of rough table on which were placed a dozen statuettes. In the middle of the statuettes shone an unknown object: a sort of green polyhedron with blood-red carvings that immediately caught my eye.” It takes all her power for her to tear her gaze away, only for her eyes to catch her son doing something even worse.
Sex-change is “that which arouses fear,” something unimaginable and horrifying. The authors want to evoke strong emotion; did they think a reader would agree the mother’s actions were justified? Or were they simply looking to shock?
An English translation of “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” can be found at the Internet Archive.
Leonid “Wes” West (he/him) is a grad student residing in various parts of the American North East. Findable @ftmshepard on twitter and @faemagpie on twitch, he likes horror, classics, and writing too much.
Copyright 2023 Leonid West.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 