He noticed only the tiny waist, the flaring lower hourglass of her hips, and the bushy white triangle at the junction of her sturdy legs. He was so distracted that he didn’t notice the malformations on her flanks, her hips, the myriad tiny eyes embedded there, blinking lashless lids in the flickering orange glow.
—Angela Slatter, “Lavinia’s Wood” in She Walks In Shadows 69
Readers and scholars often talk about the body of fiction inspired by Lovecraft in terms of religion and folklore. That is the nearest real equivalent we have to a very unusual phenomenon, where so many different authors are riffing off similar ideas, similar characters and stories. Terms like canon get thrown about a great deal, and some of Lovecraft’s own stories are as close to the Biblical canon get. Most authors agree that the events of “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” happened, though they might fiddle with the details, and expand in different ways on what came before and after.
Yet the Mythos is not a single coherent body of internally-consistent works, or some divine text interpreted by many different authors. It is a sprawling mass of stories by different writers who often work in familiar cycles. The point is that not all of the stories do agree, or can agree. There is no one absolute, true, final, and complete version of any story. There are multiple different takes on the same subject, and they are often strongly divergent. Readers might be able to reconcile “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shuttered Room” by August Derleth, “The Devil’s Hop Yard” by Richard Lupoff, and “The Cry in the Darkness” by Richard Baron as all being episodes in a single tale, but it is harder to fit in Lavinia Rising by Farah Rose Smith, The Dunwich Romance by Edward Lee, or “Lavinia’s Wood” by Angela Slatter.
At some point, there are too many differences to gloss, too many points of disagreement.
Too many different versions of Lavinia Whateley (or, in some versions, Whatley).
“The Dunwich Horror” is Lavinia’s story as much as that of her sons, though she is given short shrift by the folk of Dunwich. Various authors have expanded on her character. In some, she is a pure victim, like her predecessor Mary in Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” In many stories, Lavinia lacks agency, utterly dominated by her overbearing father Wizard Whateley. In a few, she is more active, even malevolent, an active participant rather than a meek vessel to be filled.
It is a rare story that suggests that Wilbur and his brother take as much from Lavinia as they do from Yog-Sothoth. Angela Slatter’s version in “Lavinia’s Wood” is more complicated than most, giving evidence of Lavinia’s dreams, desires, and actions that go far beyond the woman seen in Lovecraft’s account. Someone who dreams of a world beyond Dunwich, and who herself is not quite completely human.
There is a degree of pathos to Dunwich prequels. Readers already know Lavinia’s fate, or at least one of her possible fates. How she gets there is where authors diverge; what details they choose to emphasize, and what aspects of the character they develop in new directions. In “Lavinia’s Wood,” Angela Slatter gives Lavinia context. Social, geographic, biographical, biological. Lavinia as a part of the decayed Whateleys, in contrast to her richer and more educated cousins; as an outsider even among the inbred rural folk of Dunwich; her relation with her father and his books; and even how her body differed from others in ways not immediately obvious.
“Lavinia’s Wood” is not the prequel to “The Dunwich Horror.” It is one of many. Yet it is an interesting, insightful take on Lavinia, one that sheds a different light on the preceding events—and who knows what elements of that might make their way into further stories in the Dunwich cycle?
“Lavinia’s Wood” by Angela Slatter was first published in She Walks In Shadows, and its reprints. It has not otherwise been reprinted.
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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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 