“Since you are a church-going type, I wanted to extend an invitation to our service.”
—Bernadette Johnson, Southern Fried Cthulhu 200
There are many cultural fault lines and divides in the United States, fuzzy though they have grown over time as the country becomes more integrated, the population more mobile. The Bible Belt is largely co-terminous with the Southern and Southwestern states and parts of the Midwest. Christian church attendance is high in this area, but the Christian churches involved are varied, multitudinous, and often evangelical, independent, fractious, and unregulated.
Anyone can buy a collar and a Bible. Anyone can preach and call themselves a preacher. The charismatic preachers may be itinerant or fixed; sermons may be preached from multi-million dollar megachurches or from tents or old rented commercial buildings. Some churches are part of large established denominations like the Southern Baptists and Methodists, and may have organized seminaries and organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention, but as many or more may be independent and idiosyncratic.
If you live and grow up in the Bible Belt, affiliation with a given church is a personal as well as cultural choice. Even small towns might support a number of independent churches, sometimes with unfamiliar names, quirks on ideology, theology, and ritual.
Good cover for older, stranger religions.
“”Glory Be to the Father and Mother” by Bernadette Johnson plays on the frisson of the unfamiliar-and-near-familiar. Set in an unspecified small town, a newcomer is courted by opposing congregations, and there is a space of wariness—which is the Mythos cult, and which is just a weird little independent church? Where’s the line between the two? It’s a tension that can’t last very long; especially in a short story, and before too long before the strange altars and human sacrifices come out. Old tropes die hard.
If there’s a criticism for the story, it’s that the premise has enough potential it would have been nice to see more done with it. A more developed setting that spent more time to flesh out the churches and temples involved, the cults, to give them more personality instead of relying on the familiar Mythos Cultist imagery, would have added welcome depth to the story, which races to try and get through its plot points before the end.
In general, few Lovecraftian stories really come to grips with what it means to be a part of a cult, to be recruited, to live inside the group. Stories like “The Book of Fhtagn” (2021) by Jamie Lackey, “The Well” (2023) by Georgia Cook, and “The Things We Did in the Dark” (2024) by Julia Darcey show different approaches to how Mythos cults can work, and it’s not all cowled robes and wavy daggers. The interaction with charismatic evangelical Christianity is rarer; Charles Stross played with the idea in The Fuller Memorandum (2010), and the idea crops up in other stories, but it is a rich and varied field, because of the wide array of churches in the region.
“”Glory Be to the Father and Mother” by Bernadette Johnson was published in Southern Fried Cthulhu (2024).
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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