“A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” (2022) by Erin Brown

Possibilities hinted from under the jaded metropolitan certainties in his mind; old and eldritch ancestral memories, back when beautiful virgins were wrapped in glorious robes and set out on a rock in the sunlight to be cheered by the people—and to await the dragon. The beastling was no dragon, he knew. He was a brief scrawl of hideous calligraphy write on the world, a blunt and blasphemous word.

Erin Brown, “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022), 27

Today, Cthulhu can be quaint. Even snuggly. The majesty and fantasy of the vast, alien horror has been worn away by decades of merchandising, diluted by endless pastiches, a multitude of jokes. Hundreds of artists have tried their hands at depicting the supposedly undepictable, and the general consensus is “giant squid guy.” Often with a crotch as smooth and featureless as a Ken doll. After all, a vast, ancient entity may be one thing, but a penis? Utterly unacceptable. There may be children present. You can’t put that on a plushy.

(You absolutely can. Some people have. I digress.)

Cthulhu doesn’t have to be neutered. Like every mode and genre of horror, there are folks who say Lovecraftian horror isn’t scary anymore, if it ever was. It is ridiculous, it isn’t real, doesn’t raise a bead of cold sweat, no feces exits the rectum without permission, etc. etc. Most of these reactions are to the sanitized, Ken doll version of Cthulhu; the safe version they’ve seen a thousand times in comics and on stickers and t-shirts. Scratch that surface, and in truth, the shudders were largely always metaphorical. Few folks had nightmares about Cthulhu when the ink was still fresh on the pulp paper of Weird Tales, just as few folks died of fright when they read Dracula in the 1890s, or saw it i movie theaters in the 1930s. The idea that horror is supposed to scare the reader is essentially misguided.

At its best, weird fiction gives the reader’s imagination the tools so they can scare themselves. The realization of something, either from a dry but technically accurate description or an elaborate and expensive computer-generated image, can never approach the power of suggestion. In the case of Lovecraftian literature in particular, the suggestion is that there is something unknown and perhaps unknowable, that is so much weirder and worse than whatever familiar horrors we’re used to dealing with.

In one age, the epitome of horror may have been the vampire or werewolf; a few movies and dozens of shorts stories and novels later, and folks can confidently talk about silver bullets and crucifixes, blessed swords and fire, lasers and giant mirrors. The fun may still be there, but familiarity robs these creatures of the element of surprise. Of course, there are always exotic horrors—from other cultures, other subgenres. Crossing mythologies, crossing genres, is an old trick. How does a European exorcist deal with a penanggalan or yōkai? Oooh, what happens if a Sumerian vampire invades medieval Japan?

This is the philosophical underpinning of Erin Brown’s “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022). On the surface, an urban fantasy predator stumbles into a different genre, and it takes them a while to figure that out. The beastling’s ignorance is almost self-destructive, but for the audience, it’s instructive. Readers equate “eldritch” with “scary thing with tentacles” all too often; they snicker and make jokes about Japanese anime, hentai, and naughty schoolgirls. Silver bullets are to werewolves what naughty schoolgirls are to Cthulhu; albatrosses around their necks. Ideas that serve to lessen and diminish the original horror by making their limits and habits more defined, more rational…more knowable.

Brown gets it. What’s better, Brown can write it. While Lovecraftian horror started out in a rather prudish period, and Lovecraft himself asserted that “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,” etc., more recent generations tend to remember that bloody bones can serve a purpose. There is nothing wrong with gore, or a little body horror, especially if they serve the needs of the story and are carried off with sufficient skill. There is a certain grounding that comes with the very frank reminder that people may piss themselves when they’re scared, that murders are very rarely clean events that leave a neat and bloodless corpse.

Ultimately, the beastling’s idea of himself as “a brief and hideous scrawl” is more accurate than he knew. Like most creatures, the beastling sees itself as the center of its own narrative; a singular horror in a big world. It cannot conceive of a greater horror than itself…and that lack of imagination is, at heart, what the story is about. To look out into the darkness, see the shadows play, and not wonder at what strange shapes may cast them isn’t just dull…in some cases, it’s damn near fatal.

“A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” by Erin Brown was published in FIYAH #22 (2022).

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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