The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”
Lovecraftian literature is often transgressive by literary standards. Many works are not stories or plot-driven narratives in any conventional sense, and individual works have sometimes been called prose poems or mood pieces. This is fitting when you think of Lovecraft’s assertion that the weird phenomenon was the center of the story, rather than any central character—something that can be seen in “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Call of Cthulhu.”
“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus is little more than a single scene, like the prelude to a post-apocalyptic film. Like many Lovecraftian tales, there isn’t much to the plot, characterization is limited, and the focus is on the weird phenomenon more than anything else. Yet there is also something Lynchian in its construction, the establishment of that “American weirdness” that Lovecraft noted in Poe, the buried emotions and resignations that underlay everyday life.
August was always hot as sin, and Bea had been disappointed to discover that the heat would redden her skin on the Nebraskan prairie even more than it did back in Boston
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
There is that sense of loss and regret in Bea, who if not our main character is at least our prime witness for what is about to happen. The establishing shot of Bea is reminiscent of Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth, with its vast open sky and unspoken longings. The setting, a sod house on the Nebraskan prairie, is as much part of the story as Dunwich is for “The Dunwich Horror.”
“Get in the cellar! It’s a tornado!”
James dragged her towards the house. Bea kept her eyes on the sky and allowed her gaze to drift, just in time to see the cloud over town extend a long, dark finger towards the ground. When it touched, a puff of dust exploded into the air.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
While the characters in the story grope toward rational explanations, like the characters in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” it doesn’t really work when what’s going on is inherently irrational. The reactions of characters in a horror movie only occur because they do not know they are in a horror movie; it is the audience who knows going in that the situation is not normal, who has seen films and read books like this before and is familiar with the tropes.
In other hands, “One Night in August” could have been extended in any number of ways. Like a low-budget film that quickly corrals all of its characters into a single room, an entire long drama could have been played out in the cellar as Bea and her family wait for things to pass and the sun to shine again. Tensions could rise, long-buried emotions could come to the surface, the seedy underbelly of the family could have been exposed and brought to light like a vivisected frog, its limbs pinned, guts on display for curious children to poke at. Instead, Daucus opts for a swifter ending, a more overt horror, a swifter destruction. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an artistic choice.
If there’s a criticism to be made about the story, it’s that some of the tropes are a little too familiar. For much of the story, Bea is framing things through her own perspective, but near the end of the tale things shift into a kind of gear normally only seen in Italian horror movies in the 1970s and 80s. While it is weird to think of it this way, we as a culture have developed a thematic language for cosmic sin. The idea that something from outside wants or needs a sacrifice, that it requires a priest or cult to serve those wants and needs…it would have been been more horrific in many ways if it had the raging, uncaring, impersonal destruction of a tornado. Something that couldn’t be bargained with, or fought, too alien to be cruel.
But all she could do was feel it happen.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
What works about this story is that it is a cut gem. While it may tie in thematically to a whole corpus of Lovecraftian literature, it stands on its own quite well as an effort to define a single mood in a single scene. Complete unto itself.
“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus was published by Psychotoxin Press, and can be purchased here.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 