The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz by Katherine Kerestman

An English major toting a brand-new Bachelor of Arts degree, David E. Schultz stumbled into a numinous career in editing and book design by accepting gainful employment as a proofreader with an engineering firm. The way Schultz tells it, S. T. Joshi, wanted an estimate of page count for his edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature and, recognizing a good potential collaborator when he saw one, S. T. co-opted his talents and energy to aid him in his own efforts in Lovecraft Studies and Weird Fiction. Although he vigorously denies being a horror aficionado, Schultz has never been able to find his way back from the weird genre. Through years of scanning endless documents, converting them to Word, and then selecting type-faces for them, in the guise of freelance amateur book designer, Schultz became learned in the field, through a sort of literary osmosis, and has been able to make significant contributions to the burgeoning study of weird fiction.

In our interview, Schultz provides a tantalizing glimpse into early Lovecraftian scholarship (most notably the coediting with S. T. Joshi of thousands of Lovecraft’s surviving letters); the evolution of book publishing in the computer age; and his own exceptional contributions to Lovecraft scholarship (the highlights of which are his annotated Fungi of Yuggoth [Hippocampus Press, 2017] and his soon-to-be-released annotated edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book). The last I heard, he had written only 84 annotations for a future volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s prose poems and epigrams. Schultz is the guy who looks up all the cryptical words that most non-academic readers skim over, trying to divine their meanings from the context and seldom succeeding; his efforts are much appreciated by those of us who read every footnote and endnote.

From a Lovecraftian standpoint, though, the greatest contribution of David E. Schultz is his collaborative work with S. T. Joshi in preserving 25 volumes of the extant correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft, who is thought to have penned tens of thousands of letters. Not surprisingly, this project has spanned three decades. Lovecraft’s correspondence with friends, colleagues, and revision clients engulfed so much of his time that fans lament the fact that he was not always writing stories. To Lovecraft, though, epistolary conversations with far-flung friends were much more important. His letters provide valuable autobiographical information, commentary on his own writing, a window into his evolving philosophy, his beliefs about life and literature, and an inside look at his relationships with Frank Belknap Long, Sonia H. Greene, R. H. Barlow, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and other contemporary writers. With Joshi, Schultz has published a number of other letters projects; in 2024 what he thinks is the last volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s letters came out.

Currently, Schultz is completing work on an astounding 350-page annotated edition of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, the pocket notebook in which Lovecraft jotted down ideas for writing. Not a scholar by design or inclination, Schultz became one by default, thanks to a consistent immersion in Lovecraftian texts. And, as he will tell you below, most recently he has been drafted into service by the August Derleth Society to preserve that author’s texts. At the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Schultz recently scanned in one day about 600 pages of Derleth’s fiction, including both published and unpublished works, which are slated for publication by the August Derleth Society. He has created a spreadsheet of 850 poems from the magazines in the Historical Society’s archives. We were obliged to put this interview on hold for a time, as David needed to put in precious time at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library Special Collections Department: he is preparing a bibliography of periodicals containing Derleth’s poetry (much of it uncollected) for future volumes of Derleth’s collected works, and the Special Collections department is about to close for a year to upgrade its fire system. Here’s a sample of a typical work week for David E. Schultz:

Just this week I’ve designed 4 books from scratch (>800 pp) and had my fingers in probably a dozen others. A day in Green Bay coming up, probably another in Fond du Lac (actually 2), another in Madison.

He’s hot on the trail of missing Derleth works—possibly thousands of poems among them—and he’s sure to bag them and bring them home eventually.

Now, I have the great privilege of introducing David E. Schultz.

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I’ll begin at the beginning, David, by asking you which details of your life and education you would care to share with our readers.

I’ve lived my entire life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Education: Marquette University, B.A. Liberal Arts—in other words, the dreaded “English major.” I entered the workforce completely unprepared. I married my wife Gail in 1977. We had four children and now have 7 grandchildren. We’ve lived in our current house for 44 years. I retired in 2014, but have been immersed in book projects ever since. I still make time to go to organ or early music concerts in Milwaukee or other not too distant locations.

Please talk about your career in publishing.

After brief stint at a local book publisher, and an even briefer one in a factory for a summer, I got a job at—of all places—an engineering company. The company was part of a consortium for a huge wastewater treatment project, and they were responsible for getting a proofreader for the project office. When I was interviewed, the interviewer said, “I think we have a different job for you. Let me get back to you.” Of course, I expected no further communication, but he did in fact summon me again, and I went to interview at the project office. Got the job because the supervisor of the publications department thought my Latin and Greek background would be useful. (He later admitted, “You know, you had no experience . . .”) And so I became a “technical editor.” I spent 5 years with HNTB, 3 with Creative Marketing Corporation (again, hired on as proofreader, quickly bumped up to editor), and 27 with CH2M HILL—once a fellow member of aforementioned consortium. I’ve been retired nearly 10 years, but it seems I work harder than ever.

The engineering companies were rather like publishers. Print runs were very small—environmental impact statements, technical memorandums on various subjects, and so on, typically photocopied and comb-bound in-house. The subject fields were very broad: transportation, civil engineering, environmental engineering, geology, wastewater treatment, you name it. It was particularly fulfilling because the results of our work can be seen all around us. For example, an aging viaduct carrying traffic over the Menomonee Valley, just 2 blocks from my house, was demolished and redesigned by my company, and I worked on various documents associated with the project.

At first, all the “typesetting” in the office was done by our document processing crew. As computers entered the office, I found I could do much of the formatting and editing myself. By reverse-engineering the company’s well-designed templates, I learned the ins and outs of Word, and in time that knowledge led me to book designing—initially against my will.

By that I mean in 1999, S. T. Joshi asked me how big of a book his annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature might be. Well, it could be anything. I had no idea how to design a book that wasn’t 8½ × 11 inches in format, so I picked page dimensions based on a real book, tried to arrange margins to suit, and then picked typefaces. I was instructed to “keep the number of pages down,” presumably to minimize cost associated with the book. So I showed him how it had turned out—thinking only that the design gave an approximate page count. A skilled designer would then execute the actual and final design. His response was “We’re using this!!” And it promptly went to Hippocampus Press. Now, I thought in terms of appearance the thing was barely okay. What I presented Hippocampus with was hard copy—it had to be scanned and cropped somehow by the printer. Very primitive. In time, Hippocampus began to use print-on-demand publishing for most books because it meant the publisher didn’t have to keep inventory in his apartment. And gradually I learned the preferred means of submitting an electronic file for publishing. And I also learned more efficient ways of executing design. I recently made an electronic file of 461 single-spaced pages into two books set up for a conventional 6 × 9 in just a few hours. I hate to think how long that would have taken me, using basically the same tools, 25 years ago.

Being employed full time didn’t allow much time for my own book projects, but I did manage to publish a few booklets with Necronomicon Press and to coedit some books published by university presses. I’ve been publishing a brief rag in the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association irregularly since 1973. So I’ve been “publishing” for more than 50 years.

Were supernatural and science fiction always your chief interests in reading?

My early reading was eclectic. I’d read anything, if I was capable. I was urged, in eighth grade, to participate in a reading program for eighth graders. We got a box of books to read and discuss: Hiroshima, The Diary of a Young Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Seven Story Mountain, Profiles in Courage, and many others The box also contained 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Of that vast array of genres and styles, the last stirred me the most. I swayed toward science fiction after reading Ray Bradbury, thanks to a flyer received in grade school with books recommended for students. It may have been Fahrenheit 451 that first grabbed me. From there I learned of the Science Fiction Book Club and became immersed in the genre. Favorites became Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, R. A. Lafferty, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick. But I think these days my reading—what little there is—leans toward 19th and 20th century literature: Faulkner, Borges, Melville, Wodehouse, Dorothy Day. Mundane stuff, I suppose.

I think I first learned of Lovecraft when I saw a paperback of his stories at a department store. The Colour out of Space from Lancer, with its ridiculous cover depicting a skull amid flames. It may be—I can’t remember—that I first heard of him when I read Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire,” when in the future, all morbidness in life is gotten rid of. Cemeteries are destroyed, and the works of morbid writers are destroyed. He mentioned Poe, but the other authors he named . . . Lovecraft, Bierce, Derleth, Machen. Well, basically Bradbury was telling me “Go look for these authors’ works!” And so I did. Bierce puzzled me, because the book I found had stories about the civil war and a “devil’s dictionary.” But upon closer examination, there were some outré stories. Many years later, I prepared an annotated “unabridged” edition of The Devil’s Dictionary.

The title story of The Colour out of Space was like nothing I’d ever read before. The copyright page of the book stated that the stories were reprinted with permission of Arkham House, Sauk City, WI. The kindly librarian at my high school looked up the address for me and I promptly requested a catalog. And equally promptly ordered The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, At the Mountains of Madness, and Collected Poems. I can’t remember just how I learned of the various fanzines, such as Nyctalops and Etchings and Odysseys, but in ordering them I saw plenty of advertisements for still other ’zines. I think the most influential was H. P. L. by Meade and Penny Frierson, because it contained discussion of Lovecraft like nothing I’d seen before. Particularly arresting was Richard L. Tierney’s “The Derleth Mythos.” How dare he stand up to August Derleth? But he was right. I gradually came to read more non-Arkham House-sanctioned writing about Lovecraft. And I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Dirk Mosig, Ken Faig, Jr., and R. Alain Everts, who dug far deeper than most others writing about Lovecraft had done.

Speaking as one English major to another, how did you develop into an editor and a conservator of twentieth-century weird literature?

Probably I sought to emulate what I’d seen written about other writers. In college I read books about Faulkner and his work and was struck by the scholarship and deep understanding of his writing. The same goes for other writers. I guess, inspired by Tierney’s article, I thought “Why not Lovecraft?” I was not impressed by the writings of August Derleth, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp on Lovecraft. But I was bowled over by Willis Conover’s Lovecraft at Last. Not particularly great scholarship, but it vividly brought the man to life. I was particularly impressed by the chronological list of stories that Lovecraft supplied to Conover. I compared it to the “chronology” found in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. The latter was no chronology at all. If one looked at it closely, one could see that for any given year (sometimes incorrectly) the stories were all listed in alphabetical order. I doubt any author starts any year writing stories beginning with the letter “A” in the title and ending the year with stories starting with “Z.”

I had joined the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association in 1973, not really understanding what it was—which was an outfit much like the United and National amateur press associations to which Lovecraft himself belonged, but instead focused on him in some way. I began to get in touch with other fans. I went to many MinnCons with the Minneapolis/Duluth crowd, who alerted me to a fan who lived in Milwaukee, and I met R. Alain Everts of Madison, Wisconsin. In time he started a Necronomicon Amateur Press Association—supposedly for “scholarly” contributions. I’ll never know why I was invited to join, because I hadn’t written anything to date and was no scholar, then and now. My contributions to the EOD were very bad “poetry.” Since I needed to come up with something “scholarly” for the Necronomicon apa, the very first piece I wrote was an article about the order in which Lovecraft’s stories were written. At the time, only three volumes of his Selected Letters had been published. But I was able to do a pretty good job of getting the stories into the proper sequence, expanding Lovecraft’s own list to Conover, even if I could not pinpoint precise dates.

At the time, S. T. Joshi had independently approached Dirk W. Mosig on the same subject, and for the same reason I had. Dirk—also a member of the Necronomicon apa—steered S. T. toward me, and that was how our close relationship began.

I’d like you to talk about your edition of Fungi from Yuggoth. When I read the sonnets, I knew that they must be brimming with allusions and symbolism, but I did not have a key. And then I read your book, which greatly enriched the reading experience for me.

Having turned in a paper on the chronology of Lovecraft’s stories, I needed something else “scholarly” to do. So I started looking into Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth—his long poem. I don’t recall the details, but it seems to me I issued several little ’zines treating of the poem, eventually writing an “essay” on its composition, meaning, and so on. Some of those little pieces appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu. I provoked a bit of a controversy by stating—contrary to the long-held description of the poem—that there is no linear story in it. The first three sonnets tell a brief narrative, but all subsequent sonnets are completely independent of each other. Some commentators held that there was a cohesive story. I begged to differ and offered proof for my thesis using Lovecraft’s own words.

I was supposed to come up with a book for the Strange Company, but because it was taking me too long to assemble a proper text, it did not appear there. I poked around at the thing for the next 40 years. Over time, more and more information about the poem came to light, so I was always adding to the book. It finally appeared from Hippocampus Press in 2017. Necronomicon Press once issued a pamphlet of the poem printed on three legal-sized sheets, three poems per page. A 12-page booklet. My book is a ridiculous 288 pages. I am completely undisciplined when it comes to making a book. I fill it with everything under the sun.

Please discuss your edition (forthcoming) of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.

Commonplace Book has similar origins to Fungi from Yuggoth. Strange Company was going to publish an edition of Commonplace Book as edited by Ken Faig., Jr. At one of our gatherings in Madison (known as Madcons), Randy Everts handed out proofs of the book for people to proofread. I didn’t know what to make of the thing. Had never heard of Lovecraft’s commonplace book before. I didn’t proof the book at all, but studied it for my own edification. It was a bare-bones presentation of the text. What looked like errors were in fact accurate transcriptions of Lovecraft’s entries as he wrote them. Not long after, I received a copy of The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces. It contained the commonplace book, but the entries were organized differently and were very lightly annotated—mostly to point out which entries were used by August Derleth as Lovecraft’s “contributions” to various stories Derleth wrote that he called “posthumous collaborations.” I thought Heck, I can find all sorts of connections between the entries and Lovecraft’s work, and so I began writing on that for the Necronomicon apa.

With assistance from S. T. (who was attending Brown at the time), and input from colleagues, I began to fashion a book similar in intent to Fungi from Yuggoth. Necronomicon Press published it in 1987 as two fat booklets. I was astonished in 1990 to see a fellow standing on the Quad at Brown (for the Lovecraft Centennial) holding the two books side-by-side against his chest while a colleague took a photo of him proudly sporting my book. Over time, much more came to light about the origin of some of the entries, and then, with the Internet, books.google.com, and the Brown Digital Repository, I had access to an enormous library to sift through looking for material to add to my annotations. I had earlier dismissed Zinge as something Lovecraft whimsically made up, but I later learned that it is real—at least in the sense that it is mentioned in a poem by Thomas Moore—something Lovecraft had in his own library.

After more than 35 years after publication of my first edition of the book, I have now prepared (probably shouldn’t say finished) a new edition. It is not at this time ready for publication, because I have to integrate into text images of Lovecraft’s notebook—a complicated logistical problem. I’m guessing it will run to about 350 pages when done, because again, applying the kitchen sink method, it contains all sorts of related material not in Lovecraft’s original notebook. Once I circulated through the EOD my early annotation of the book. I also included Lovecraft’s text for reference. Being a stingy person, I didn’t want to pay for a lot of xeroxing, so I typed out his text in small type on two sides, in two columns, of a single sheet of 11 × 17 paper. In effect 4 pages. And so, it, too, has bloated into a gargantuan monstrosity.

What place do you accord H. P. Lovecraft and Weird Fiction in the greater rubric of literature?

Long ago, many kinds of magazines would publish an outré story along with more conventional tales. And publishers would publish a weird novel here and there. It seems to me (though I’m no follower of the book business) that now one needs to publish only in certain markets.

Derleth somewhat disparagingly said Lovecraft was a major writer in a minor field (a somewhat backhanded compliment, since he recognized himself as a minor writer, but in a major field. A better place to be, it would seem). I don’t really have an opinion in the matter. Lovecraft is, of course, now published by the Library of America, whose goal is to keep in print “canonical” American writers. And so he rubs shoulders now with Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edith Wharton, James Thurber, Walt Whitman (Lovecraft would be shocked), Gertrude Stein (ditto), Henry James, and many others. August Derleth does not. I guess that says something.

As with everything else, Sturgeon’s law applies to weird literature. “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” I don’t follow any modern weird writers—I’m just not interested. I haven’t read much other than the masters, and what I have I don’t really remember. I imagine M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen will remain the titans, and there surely are some other worthy of note, such as William Hope Hodgson and Walter de la Mare. Again, I haven’t read them. I couldn’t say who is truly a master in the field, but according to S. T. it probably would be Ramsey Campbell.

What can you tell us about your coediting of Lovecraft’s correspondence?

I can’t remember how it came about exactly, but either S. T. or I, c. 1990, came up with the idea for a Lovecraft festschrift. It wasn’t such a book technically, since its subject was long deceased, but the idea of a book commemorating him 100 years after his birth seemed like a good idea. S. T. had plenty of contacts from whom to solicit essays. At the time, I had typed Lovecraft’s letters to Henry Kuttner. They were at the Wisconsin Historical Society of all places. So we annotated them, but ultimately decided they really didn’t belong in the book, and instead we offered our text to Necronomicon Press, which issued them in a small booklet. That was the genesis of the letters project, although at the time we didn’t know it.

S. T. had worked up a prospectus for 13 volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, revision work, essays, and travelogues. I’m sure he said several times “No letters! Too much!” I learned that one could obtain a copy of the microfilm at the Historical Society of Lovecraft’s letters to August Derleth. I ordered it, but then what? S. T. had access to a microfilm printer, and so he printed the entire film—1000+ pages, in triplicate. I used the letters for my own research purposes, but following the Lovecraft Centennial Conference, I felt energized by the whole thing, so on the q.t., I began to transcribe the letters, saying nothing about it. The letters posed some issues. First of all, bad copies, or difficult to read handwriting. Then, most of the letters were not dated, because Lovecraft and Derleth wrote very frequently. Lovecraft’s letters may have said something on the order of “Thursday” and nothing more. So I had to try to determine the sequence of the letters. When I informed S. T. I had typed it all, he was thunderstruck.

Then the possibility of publishing Lovecraft’s letters took off. First we typed all the mss. we could find, preferring them to published (and edited) letters. S. T. typed letters to Donald Wandrei, R. H. Barlow, Duane W. Rimal, and Lovecraft’s aunts. I typed letters to Clark Ashton Smith, Wilfred Blanche Talman, Elizabeth Toldridge, F. Lee Baldwin, and J. Vernon Shea. Then, we were fortunate to be able to borrow a set of the Arkham House transcripts—those held by Derleth at his home. For example, there were a few letters by Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith at Brown University, but others were scattered all around. We merged the Arkham House transcripts among letters from manuscript, but still lacked many. In time, we obtained copies of the photocopies held by Roy A. Squires who had sold the letters, and other letter caches as they appeared: Hyman Bradofsky, Helm C. Spink, Arthur Harris, Frederic J. Pabody, Emil Petaja, and others.

We had issued a few small sets with Necronomicon Press, which always issued booklets in its customary squarish format, but the books we now could compile were far bigger than the press’s capacity. University presses were not interested. Once Hippocampus Press was founded in 1999, we had a sympathetic publisher who could issue big books. And so, in the twenty-first century, we began to publish books first typed in the 1990s.

Again, my models for such books were books compiled by others, such as The Letters of Jack London (Stanford University Press). The Lovecraft letters posed great problems for me, in that much of the material he discusses is not readily available. I was fortunate that the University of Wisconsin–Madison accepted the Fossil Library of amateur journalism, so that I could make short trips every so often to consult the many amateur journals in its collection.

These days, I tend to see Lovecraft more as a lifelong amateur journalist than a writer of spooky stories. His letters show that he thought of himself that way too.

Please share your experiences salvaging, restoring, republishing (or, initially publishing) the works of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (your current project). You’ve saved many of these from being lost to time.

Oh, I don’t know I’ve “saved” anything. The writers stand on their own merits, and their work has long been available. The business of Lovecraft being “saved from oblivion” by August Derleth seems ludicrous to me. If he hadn’t done the work, someone else would have. On the other hand, Sauk City’s pride and joy seems largely to be unknown—when he’s not riding Lovecraft’s coat-tails. His “regional” writings seem to have sold well enough in his time, but the man on the street is more likely by a thousandfold to recognize the name Lovecraft over Derleth—even in Wisconsin. The August Derleth Society is keen on getting his regional writing back into print, and so S. T. (its Veep) has been reissuing his novels, and also quite a bit of uncollected and unpublished material. Much of the latter is available at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and because Madison is a mere 79 miles due west of Milwaukee, I can make trips there to obtain material quite easily. (S. T. would have to travel 1900 miles to do the work himself.) The books are all print-on-demand, with virtually no advertising, so whether people are noticing them at all is questionable. So far ADS has issued 9 titles. There are at least another 13 on my list, but there could be more. ADS won’t do juvenile books, horror, detective, and the like.

I’ve been roped into designing books for the August Derleth Society—books by, of course, August Derleth. Not my favorite author. Because I’m not far from the repository of his papers, I can go there from time to time unearthing uncollected and unpublished writings for various projects. My “research” is somewhat superficial. Merely compiling stuff for others to organize. I had another project I’d long wanted to do, but because it takes me so long to get anything like that done, amid dozens of other books, I have been scooped by another writer. We’ll see.

I have to admit, though, that I really enjoyed and take great pride in The Song of the Sun, by Leah Bodine Drake. I think it is generally overlooked, as I hear very little response to the appearance of the book. Now, her papers at the University of Lexington are available to anyone for consultation. I learned that August Derleth wanted to issue another book of her poetry after her death, but could not himself travel there to consult her notebooks. When I arrived there I was shown a big scanner that was able to flatten out the tight scrapbooks and pull all the text. I scanned all 24 of them in a day, along with other papers of hers. Beyond that, I had to dig in periodicals for appearances of her work. I was fortunate to get assistance from others in tracking them down. No one had ever written a comprehensive bibliography of her work, and much of her poetry was unpublished, or published in obscure little magazines. By careful analysis of the little material available about her, I was able to write a biographical sketch about her. The book is yet another example of the “kitchen sink” method, because it has all her poems that I could find, letters, short stories, essays, reviews, notes—everything. And yet it is unknown, and the disproven myth about publication of her Hornbook for Witches still prevails in the world at large. But I enjoyed doing it.

Same with Eyes of the God [by R. H. Barlow] and Out of the Immortal Night [by Samuel Loveman]. Somehow I got ensnared in them when the books were largely compiled and edited by two others. But for the second editions, I had access to resources that were out of reach when the first editions were prepared. Those were fun to do.

What other projects are keeping you busy these days?

As designer for Hippocampus and Sarnath Press (S. T. Joshi’s micro-press), I do nearly all the book designs. That runs to perhaps forty books a year. The editing of Lovecraft’s letters ended in 2024, with his correspondence with Frank Belknap Long. Same with Clark Ashton Smith’s (far less voluminous) correspondence with his Miscellaneous Letters. S. T. is eager to take on still more letters projects, although letters in a market for weird writings seems like a stretch. Lovecraft and Smith correspondence may sell. But letters to R. H. Barlow? To H. P. Lovecraft? Well, maybe. The letters to Barlow are quite fascinating, very broad in scope, and they shed considerable light on the man, even if the words are not his. I look at most of our projects as building individual research libraries for others to use—and the books do get used from time to time. Midnight Rambles and Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein cite the Lovecraft letters a lot, and it’s gratifying to see that people can stitch together information from those books to make interesting and insightful narratives about Lovecraft.

Ambrose Bierce’s collected journalism—all assembled and designed a year ago—continues to emerge, one volume a month. Fifteen more books remain to be published. Believe it or not, I’ve compiled a fairly large book of the poetry of Winifred Virginia Jackson, amateur journalist and colleague (and lover?) of Lovecraft.

Do tell, what evidence do we have of a possible love affair between H. P. and Winifred Jackson?

I myself don’t have evidence re Jackson. George Wetzel and R. Alain Everts wrote a monograph on her in which that is mentioned. I believe the source of the anecdote is in Sonia Greene’s memoir, in which she says she “stole” Lovecraft away from Jackson. Now, Jackson and Lovecraft may not have been a thing—or even a potential thing. Maybe Sonia was just trying to head off Jackson at the pass.

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I wish to thank David E. Schultz for a most informative conversation. First, through his painstaking overview of the myriad technical and intellectual processes necessary to the physical production of books, he provides a privileged look at the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of publishing. Secondly, and of greater moment, though, are his personal contributions to a broader discourse regarding a philosophy of literature; for, his editorial exertions safeguard the vulnerable texts of worthy writers. Typically, authors hope their works will outlive them — and yet human memory is very short and very fickle; as an example, consider that fashions in literature must change rapidly in a consumer society in which books are a commodity and yesteryear’s writers are relegated to discard bins. Thirdly, while most authors, trusting foolishly in the protection of copyright, have absolutely no idea how much and how often their works will be adulterated once they have sent them into the world, published texts are, in fact, corrupted appallingly often. Finally, today, as so often in dark eras past (the student of history may find cases in every corner of the globe and in every aeon), there are nefarious individuals hard at work, intent upon erasing the ideas of those writers who lived before and who thought differently than they do. Simply by letting authors’ works stand unmolested, we help fight that societal evil.

Schultz’s honorable efforts have helped to preserve the integrity of texts, presenting them to the world as the authors meant the world to see them; and his herculean footnote-endeavors permit the ideas of these writers to be accessible to readers of later generations. David E. Schultz’s deeds in the conservation of manuscripts and letters provide the literary world with an arsenal of invaluable tools that may be used for the defense of literature as an art form, the defense of intellectual property, and the defense of free, individual expression in a modern climate in which both art and thought are threatened with extinction.

Katherine Kerestman is the author of Lethal(Psychotoxin Press, 2023), Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020), and Haunted House and Other Strange Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2024). She is the Editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat (WordCrafts Press, 2023), Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays (WordCrafts Press, 2024), and Witches and Witchcraft (Hippocampus Press, 2025). She is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks; and her name is etched among the inscrutable glyphs of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Dracula Society. Interested parties may stalk her at www.creepycatlair.com

Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman” (1975): A Refusal of Roles by Sapphire Lazuli

Much discussion has been brought to light, in recent times, to ponder what it means to identify with a gender identity. Perhaps ponder is too gentle a word, these discussions have often been led by those who oppose the idea of gender nonconformity and thus are designed to diminish the credibility of those outside of the gender binary. “What is a woman?”—the question is asked tirelessly by this crowd in an attempt to quell the happening of gender nonconformity. It is often put forth as an idea that was only recently made blurry:

… and now our culture is telling us that the differences between girls and boys don’t matter, that if you identify with something then you are that thing. (Walsh, What is a Woman 2022)

Gender is a concept that has grown and evolved over numerous cultures; the modern idea of one gender identity can seem a stark contrast to that of past times. Looking at gender across cultures brings difficulty to a single unified ideal. The idea of asking the question, “what is a woman?” is poised to be one of critical discourse, e.g.:

… if I’m talking publicly about what a man or a woman is, I’m not going to give credence to an argument that has no biological or logical basis. It doesn’t make any sense. (Shapiro 2019)

But there is quite an argument to be made that viewing gender as a single, unified concept is an uninformed idea.

I bring all this to light after having recently read through Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman,” a story I had suspected would fall victim to such uninformed ideas. Knowing of other pulp stories that had explored queer themes such as Fred Hayley’s Satan Was a Lesbian (1966), I had expected a tiring Mulan-type story with much less the feminine liberation and far more derogatory discussion of gender expression. Instead, “Sword Woman” allows its characters to explore an incredibly nuanced idea of what gender and expression can mean both within and outside of the perception of others. I was surprised to find such a story written in the 1930s at first, but this later served as a reminder of the queer happenings that this time period was littered with.

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“Sword Woman” is a burning fire of feminine rage, gender exploration, and a hard, “who cares?” To the question of “what is a woman?” The story’s lead, Dark Agnes, finds themself on a murder spree, killing men time and time again as each threatens seizure of Agnes’ free will. Murder frees them from betrothal, from slavery, and from two attempted assassinations; Agnes begins the story a mere damsel in distress and ends it as a serrated blade, sharpened by the necks of those who would oppose them.

In exploring such a presentation of gender identity and expression, it is important to understand how gender has evolved over time. It is easy to think of gender as a single, static state tied to the presence of particular genitalia, though this has not always been the case for humanity. In fact, even where such ideas have been linked, the presentation of specific genders has changed drastically over time.

In Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), she writes about the nuance of gender in Native American cultures:

In considering gender-based roles, we must remember that while the roles themselves were fixed in most archaic American cultures, with divisions of ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’, the individuals fit into these roles on a basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. (Allen 1986)

This kind of gender expression, one which is determined by the individual’s own experience with their identity, is quite opposed to the modern conservative perception of gender, in which it is a defined state determined for the individual rather than by them.

This is where Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman” follows its approach to gender identity. The story centres around Dark Agnes, a character who whisks themself and anyone around them into a whirlwind explosion of feminine rage and tyranny. Agnes begins this story as a product to be owned; they are betrothed to a man named Francois and the thought leaves a revolting taste in their mouth. So, when their sister, Ysabel offers Agnes with the means “… to free herself. Do not cling by your fingers to life, to become as our mother, and as your sister…” (Howard 1979) by handing them a dagger, Agnes refuses the proposed suicide and instead murders Francois.

Agnes does a lot at this moment: not only are they shattering the chains that bind them to the ownership of men, but they are also leaching the masculine blood to take wholly as their own. As from this point onward, Agnes refuses their position as a woman; refuses being the key word here. Thrown to the side are their betrothal, the temptation for suicide, their placidity, even their feminine garbs are thrown into a river to be forgotten. Agnes refuses everything that had once defined them and takes this moment to reinvent themself. It would have been easy for this moment to mirror the suffragettes and their seizure of the typically masculine roles, swapping one gendered cage for another, but instead, Howard allows Agnes a freedom of exploration that will go on to bring a new, personal definition of gender by the end of the story.

I have been referring to Agnes here with they/them pronouns, though it should be noted that Agnes is referred to with she/her pronouns in the book. I choose they/them here as I feel such pronouns better reflect who this character is; perhaps even he/him would be better fit, as Agnes themself proclaims at the book’s conclusion, “Remember, I am woman no more.” To which their comrade, Etienne Villiers, agrees, “[we are] brothers in arms” (Howard, 1979).

This proclamation taking place near the end of the story further cements how Agnes’ gender evolves throughout the story. As they continue their murder spree of dastardly men, Agnes finds themself constantly covered in blood. They make efforts to wash, though eventually, the blood that stains Agnes’ body sinks so deep into their skin that the blood of man and the blood of Agnes are one and the same. I hear an echo of the struggles that the Macbeths encountered after their murder of Duncan, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather…” (Macbeth 2.2.75). Unlike Macbeth, however, Agnes takes in this stolen crimson stain with pride and sanity. It is as though they becomes more wholly themselves, the more blood they leech.

Importantly, Agnes does not reject this gender identity. It is one that is somewhat thrust upon them, the idea of Agnes becoming a masculine figure is first proposed by Etienne Villiers who fears Agnes will be too recognisable by their father’s scouts dressed in their royal, feminine attire. However, the actual expression of Agnes’ identity as a masculine figure is one defined only by Agnes. Not once do they actually refer to themself as a man, only that they are no longer a woman. I think that it is poignant to point out that had this story been written today, Agnes would likely have aligned more with a non-binary gender identity rather than strictly male or female.

Agnes is the loudest voice when it comes to their newfound identity, often reminding Etienne, here they feel truly as they ought to be. Early after taking the masculine identity, Etienne jests, “By Saint Michele, in all my life I never saw a woman drain a flagon like that! You will be drunk, girl.” Which is met by Agnes’s cold reminder, “You forget I am a girl no longer,” (Howard, 1979) Interesting to note that they say girl here and not woman as they do come the conclusion, a reflection of their growth.

I think what is most pertinent here is the determination of gender. Understanding that gender can be determined not just at a singular point in one’s life, but rather at multiple points allows a much broader description of what gender is. Allen writes:

… the Kaska would designate a daughter in a family that had only daughters as a boy. When she was young, around five, her parents would tie a pouch of dried bear ovaries to her belt… and she would function in the Kaska male role for the rest of her life. (Allen 1986)

We see here a clear presentation of gender as a fluid state, with an understanding of roles existing outside of biology. Here, gender seems to be focused more on the utilitarian aspect of the community. Dark Agnes’ gender identity is not unlike this determination. They take up their masculine identity as it is better fitted to the position they find themself in, and will later take a more personal position at their meeting with Guiscard de Clisson.

Here, Agnes seeks to become a sword woman, to ride among men in the fields of battle. Only, this position they take ends in turmoil as their party is ambushed and killed. Absolutely we can understand that Agnes’ party’s deaths are not caused by their readoption of the female identity, but there is certainly a metaphorical message in that Agnes suffers when they return to the facade. This is where Agnes’s proclamation, “Remember, I am woman no more.” (Howard 1979) takes place, after losing their brothers in arms, after suffering in the position they had rejected in the beginning.

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It should not be ignored when this story was likely written either. The 1920s through to the 1930s were a period of much change; the world itself was both recovering from and about to enter a world war after all. And among all of this change, a woman named Lili Elbe had begun an exploration of her own gender identity.

Lili Elbe was the second trans woman ever to receive sex reassignment surgery ninety years ago in 1931. There is quite a lot to discuss with her story, but what is important here is the timing and widespread knowledge. Lili’s story, along with many others, should have been lost when the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was burnt down by the Nazis in 1933, however, her semi-autobiographical book, Man Into Woman (now titled Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change), received an English publication in that same year. Along with this, her story featured heavily in German and Dutch Newspapers. Lili Elbe was no unknown figure; she had become quite the public idea by the time of her death in 1931.

There is currently no evidence to suggest this novel came into Howard’s hands, importantly, he does not mention it in his letters. That being said, I still find the existence of Lili Elbe and others like her at the time to be incredibly interesting. It is as though they are surrounding each letter of the page without needing to be there at all. Our society has been incredibly queer for a lot longer than it has often been thought to be, and stories such as this, alongside real-life events, help highlight that fact. Perhaps it is no wonder then that “Sword Woman” was so open to pushing the boundaries of what gender really is.

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“Sword Woman” surprised me in ways I never would have thought it could. Often it is difficult to engage with literature from times past when so much of it constructs walls to keep ‘people like me’ on the outskirts. It is refreshing to encounter this story and leave with so few negative thoughts.

Howard’s exploration of gender is one of incredible nuance, never seeming to worry all that much about the perception of others. Instead, gender in Howard’s “Sword Woman” is an experience wholly for the individual, a definition that aligns itself so well with our current. Rather than ask the reader to question, “what is a woman?” Howard rejects the idea entirely, and states, in blood-red ink: gender is created only from the thread one chooses to sew.

While written by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s, “Sword Woman” was not published until 1975, and is still in copyright in the United States. This and other tales of Dark Agnes may be read in the Robert E. Howard collection Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (2011).

Works Cited

Allen, P. G. (1986). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 2015 reprint: Open Road Media.

Folk, J. (Director). (2022). What is a Woman? [Motion Picture].

Haley, F. (1966). Satan Was a Lesbian. 2018 reprint: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Howard, R. E. (1979). Sword Woman. Berkley Books.

Lili Elbe, N. H. (2015). Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change. Canelo.

Shakespeare, W. (2015). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Barnes & Noble Inc.

Shaprio, B. (2019, April 9). An interview with Ben Shapiro: social justice, free speech and transgender pronouns. (P. Nieto, Interviewer) Retrieved from: https://www.laloyolan.com/opinion/an-interview-with-ben-shapiro-social-justice-free-speech-and-transgender-pronouns/article_229644e1-0052-58c0-a441-e47724c05c93.html

Sapphire Lazuli (she/they) is a writer of weird horror and perverted desires based in Australia. She draws on thier experiences as a trans woman of colour and a lesbian, often doing their part to bring more queer voices into the worlds she crafts.

Their prose is often described as beautifully poetic, and adjacent to the writer, Sapphire does not write stories that will hold your hand. Though, be it cosmic entities appearing as places, gross and erotic explorations of the boundaries of form, or deep dives into the darkest ridges of the mind and desire, their horror is bound to allure you.

Twitter: @lazuli_sapphire

YouTube: @sapphicsapph

Blog: www.sapphirelazuli.com

That Which Engenders Fear: Jacques Janus’s “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958) by Leonid West

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.

Seabury Quinn’s “Lynne Foster is Dead!” (1938): A Mistaken Gender Identity by Sophie Litherland

“Lynne Foster is Dead!” by Seabury Quinn was first published in Weird Tales Nov 1938, and was later expanded into the novel Alien Flesh (1977). The story may initially appear as a boy meets girl with a twist, but there is so much underneath the surface of this story than a simple body swap horror. Quinn explores such things as gender identity and the alchemy of the self with the character of Madame Foulik Bay. As someone who is transgender, I was certainly cautious with what to expect with trans people generally being portrayed in a negative way across many media platforms. I was then pleasantly surprised to encounter a story that successfully portrays many experiences of individuals who have changed gender, including my own.

The story is told from the perspective of the academic Dr. Abernathy, but the focus is on the tale of Madame Ismet Foulik Bay, a mysterious woman who is less than forthcoming about her background. As she and Abernathy readily fall for each other and engage in courtship, she gradually reveals her past and the twisted tale that brought her to the company of the Doctor. Transformed by dark magic from a foreign land, she regales her past from her perspective to her lover and the reader.

When we are first greeted by Madame Foulik Bay, she is described as the abject form of beauty of the female form. There is not a single hint that Madame Foulik was assigned male at birth. Having latched onto any transgender representation in media, I was expecting a small physical detail to raise the readers’ suspicions. But after combing through her physical appearance many times I could not find the tiniest iota of evidence of her assigned gender at birth. Any good mystery will give the wiliest reader just enough to figure out a reveal right before it happens. This story was no exception in that regard, but I admire the writer’s decision to not slide a masculine physical detail about her origins into her description.

Instead, we are introduced to the exact opposite. There exists a bit of a tired stereotype about male writers describing the female form in a sort of semi-sexual idolising way, which could certainly be applied here. There is a chance that this is entirely on purpose, to throw any suspecting reader off the scent initially about the truth behind Madame Foulik.

The first real clue we get is when Madame Foulik uses euphemisms to describe her past life. Dr. Abernathy even remarks upon this:

Madame Foulik spoke English idiomatically and with a strong New England accent, yet she said, “I began life” rather than “was born.” No lack of fluency accounted for this choice of words, he felt. The ambiguity—if ambiguity it were—was purposeful, not accidental.

I can certainly address the doctor’s suppositions and say for certain it was purposeful! This immediately struck me as familiar, as this is very much the language of the trans community that oozes with euphemism when referring to our pre-transition life.. My personal favourites are “As a child” or “When I was younger.” It merely allows a bit of dignity while not telling a mistruth about the past. We can see Madame Foulik Bay is no stranger to this concept either.

Here is a good point to discuss the concept of living “stealth.” This term refers to the ability to pass unnoticed to others about being transgender. For some it is the goal of transitioning, while others it can be seen as pandering to gender stereotypes. In relation to Madame Foulik, we can quite readily say she is “living stealth,” able to pass flawlessly in society as female. So, when she accidentally outs herself to Abernathy by singing, he is confused and can’t put the pieces together himself.

When Madame Foulik outs herself to Abernathy the moment is written from his perspective, but really the narrative is sympathetic towards her. There is a real sense of trepidation and fear about telling her potential lover about her past, which a reader could only empathise with. From my perspective, discussing gender history is still something that I’m never sure how to approach with both old and new acquaintances. After the truth about the fate of Lynne Foster is revealed, Madame Foulik then goes into how her circumstances came to be in Cairo.

The basic concept of gender identity is that there is an innate sense of gender within us. For most people their gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth, for others such as me, there is an incongruence between gender identity and assigned sex at birth. This is known as gender incongruence, which can cause dysphoria that may be alleviated by transitioning in ways such as socially or physically. What I find most significant in this story is the character of Madame Foulik and how her magical transformation interacts with her gender identity.

When Lynne Foster is part tricked, part forced to undergo the body swap procedure, he is blissfully unaware of what happens until it is forced upon him. Part of the process inflicted is described as a “Burning pain from a blue glowing dagger” where the agony was “almost more than I could bear.” My preliminary notes just read “Laser hair removal.” The intricacies of what the ritual actually entailed are purposefully obfuscated from the reader and the prose gives a good sense of panic and terror in Lynne Foster. When she awakes as Madame Foulik however, there is no lasting pain:

I woke to such a sense of physical well-being as I had not experienced since the crew broke training when the rowing season ended and I’d had a chance to go to bed as late as I desired with a full meal underneath my belt.

Immediately this kicks off her new life as a woman in a positive and healthy light.

What is really compelling is the gender identity of Madame Foulik. As far as we know her gender identity is male, as it is never made clear she wished to be female before her trip to Cairo, and later in the story she even remarks that she wants to reverse the process and find those who can “change me back into a man.” So as a trans person, this forced gender swap is the equivalent of making people like me detransition and when I think of it that way, it stops becoming a happy accident and starts becoming a horror story.

There is however more to it than this. Many people, including myself, have used the trope of “forced gender transition” as a way of escaping a perceived shame of gender transition. To have the decision in someone else’s hands wrests all responsibility and repercussions away. For some it may be sexual in nature, with some adult entertainment genres catering to this in particular. Interestingly that is not the case here as any thoughts of an overt sexual nature are quickly dismissed. I may have even dismissed this if it wasn’t for the detailed physical description of Madame Faulk when she wakes up.

There is a phenomenon known as “gender euphoria,” as the opposite of “dysphoria.” This can manifest in many ways, but one of the common sources is seeing yourself presenting as your gender identity for the first time. I distinctly remember the early days of transition where I had a giddy rush dressing and looking in the mirror. Of course, I had previously been well dressed and smart in the past on occasion, but this was the first time I was truly allowed to feel pretty.

It’s actually very hard to put into words how this feeling comes across, it’s not sexual in nature but more a way of liking and respecting yourself. When I read the section where Madame Foulik Bay first embraces her femininity it draws so many parallels to my lived experience of gender euphoria. When she thinks “I love to be loved by me” I can’t help but deeply empathise with her and feel a bit of pain that she never got to feel this way before. The whole passage completely took me by surprise at just how well it encapsulates this part of the trans experience that can often be overlooked by other media.

In addition to physical transition, Madame Foulik must assimilate her new role as a woman in a traditional society. This is made clear when Madame Foulik recalls speaking to her new father:

I began to remonstrate with him, speaking as an equal to an equal, but before I’d said a dozen words he broke in with “Istaghfir Allah, ya bent—ask God’s pardon, daughter!” Then he explained my status to me and left nothing to my imagination.

There can be a societal shock when presenting as your new gender, which is especially noticeable when in public or meeting new people. There are mannerisms, unspoken rules, and formalities which are very alien at first and some aspects of life that may have been taken for granted are laid bare. People will treat you differently, not intentionally or with malice, but just as what society dictates along gender lines.

This is especially seen in the case of Madame Foulik, reborn in a traditional society where gender roles are enforced, with her being forced to acclimatise or face death by her new family. We see again this theme of enforced femininity, where female mannerisms and speech are enforced against the subject’s will to ultimately become fully female both physically and socially.

Looking at the title of the story “Lynne Foster is Dead!,” there is a clear parallel between this and the concept of a deadname. The term deadname was made popular in the 2010s and refers to the name a trans person was given at birth and literally means “a name that is dead to that person.” When Madame Foulik exclaims “Lynne Foster has been dead!” It is eerily foretelling and akin to what many trans people feel about their old identities in the 21^st Century. Even after Madame Foulik has revealed her past to Dr. Abernathy, not once is she deadnamed or misgendered either by her lover or the author, leading to reinforce the fact that Lynne Foster is well and truly dead.

For everything the story so accurately engages with, I do think the final ending is a bit weak. Madame Foulik’s sexuality is not really touched upon earlier in the story, but it is clear she adores Dr. Abernathy. It should be stated that when a person transitions through non-ritualistic means that a change in sexuality is not necessarily guaranteed, but it is known to happen. So, when she declares her love for Abernathy, I feel it is genuine, but when she declares she no longer wants to live as male for him, that sours the ending for me. I just feel after exploring gender identity in such a nuanced and positive way, it just falls at the very final hurdle.

Looking at the story as a whole, it could be considered the narrative has been leading up to Lynne Foster wanting a relationship with a man all along, but using a gender swap through body switching horror to achieve it in a time where same-sex relationships were perhaps less palatable to the average reader. Considering the forced nature of the body swap and the immediacy of the courtship it’s not impossible that this is the case, however the intensity of the description of Madame Foulik’s transition suggests to me this isn’t the case.

It may also be considered that Seabury Quinn sees Madame Foulik so much as female, that a heteronormative ending seems like a “happy ending.” There is sometimes a lesser-known pressure for trans people to conform to gender stereotypes, including heterosexuality, in order to fit society’s labels and norms.

There is just a jarring feeling that Madame Foulik really deserved a better and more nuanced ending in character with the rest of the story. It’s not enough to ruin the whole story for me, but perhaps a bit of self-reflection and soul-searching from Madame Foulik before she just settles on a female identity for a man in the final paragraph wouldn’t have gone amiss.

I am actually taken aback by how well this story encapsulates the concept of gender identity using ritual magic. When re-reading passages I am astounded to find how Seabury Quinn portrays such feelings as gender euphoria while treating the character of Madame Foulik with not only humanity, but a sense of reverence and admiration. She is relatable, strong, smart, and beautiful, not just some tragic unfortunate soul and is certainly not just written as a freak show or curiosity. I would go so far as to say this is excellent trans representation overall that I haven’t readily seen in modern media.

“Lynne Foster Is Dead!” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

Sophie is a writer with a focus on science, literature and LGBTQ+ topics. She is also a comic, speaker and presenter who regularly speaks at events. Twitter: @splitherland
Copyright 2023 Sophie Litherland.

Seabury Quinn’s “Strange Interval” (1936): Gender, Gender Every Where…? by Mitch Lopes da Silva

Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sailor, shamed for committing the societally prohibited sin of killing an albatross, experiences a series of deprivations and perhaps divinely-orchestrated punishments, including severe dehydration. The sailor laments his situation because although he is surrounded by water, it is not drinkable water, and therefore the substance is actually something else entirely—in fact a poisonous material—to his thirst-wracked body.

Seabury Quinn’s story “Strange Interval,” first published in Weird Tales in May 1936, has an emotional resonance with Coleridge’s poem: obsessed with shame and social perception of class status, Quinn’s protagonist undergoes a harrowing series of deprivations and punishments while at sea—and although there is a ubiquity of events occurring that appear to be about gender and gender transition, they are actually something else entirely. Rather than poisonous materials, the story contains a couple of fairly common kinks, as we shall see.

If you were looking for a story about gender identity, though, you’re going to go thirsty.

Willoughby, Seabury Quinn’s protagonist of “Strange Interval,” begins the story identifying as a landed gentleman, outright declaring: “I’m a Virginia gentleman.” Willoughby is white, and possesses all the advantages of his race and class in 1686, including owning a boat that he likes to sail on the Potomac. One day while he’s out sailing, he encounters something that should be impossible: pirates on a river that is normally protected by white colonialism:

The notched shoreline of Carolina swarmed with buccaneers, he knew, but there never had been corsairs in Potomac waters.

The pirates destroy Willoughby’s boat, and the captain, Black Rudolph (the color likely refers to his beard and/or his cruelty, but not his race), disregards Willoughby’s claims of entitlement and rights as a gentleman and enslaves him. Not long after that, Black Rudolph encounters a Spanish ship and attacks it, imprisoning a woman named Carmelita who pretends to be mad in order to avoid Black Rudolph’s sexual advances. Willoughby discovers her secret and they fall in love, declaring that they want to marry each other. Black Rudolph finds out about Carmelita’s deception and their desire to marry, so he promptly organizes a wedding to marry them on the spot.

If you were thinking “wow, that was oddly accepting of him,” it’s not, because right after that Black Rudolph violently castrates Willoughby and makes him submit to “the accolade of degradation”: further feminizing him by shaving his beard off, piercing his ears, and forcing him to wear a dress and put his hair up. After that, Willoughby is tied up on a bed and obliged to watch Black Rudolph sexually assault his wife, Carmelita.

This goes on for a bit—they move to an island where Carmelita is regularly sexually abused by Black Rudolph and Willoughby becomes Joaquina—a force-femmed doll who is bullied by other Spanish women imprisoned on the island, but performs fairly light domestic chores (scrubbing floors and serving meals, etc.) that become even lighter after Carmelita intercedes and upgrades Joaquina’s job to her personal maid. Joaquina and Carmelita spend their days eating fruit and kissing and their evenings being traumatized until Black Rudolph leaves to go pirating.

Carmelita and Joaquina take a walk together, and when they see one of Black Rudolph’s employees, a slave overseer, attempt to physically assault an elderly black woman, Carmelita intercedes. The overseer turns on Carmelita and whips her, but Joaquina kills him before he can do further damage. Afraid for their lives, they turn to the black woman who offers them help. She turns out to be Maman Cécilie, “a magic-working obeah woman,” and capable of summoning sharks that can tow boats at incredible speeds. She also reveals to Joaquina that if she wants to become Willoughby again, she just has to put on a pair of pants.

Hot tears came to his eyes and a choking sob rose in his throat as he saw the shining dark hair fall beneath the scissors blades, but a subtle change came over Willoughby as he felt the rasp of coarse wool breeches on his legs. In a moment, like the fading of a specter at the rising of the sun, Joaquina whose sweet form and substance had been his so many months, was dead […]

So Willoughby puts on some pants, and even though that act doesn’t end up magically reversing his castration, he realizes he is a man, and that realization helps him outduel Black Rudolph, forcing the pirate into the sea and a fate of tugboat shark food. Willoughby and Carmelita return to colonial society, Willoughby becoming a gentleman and Carmelita his lady.

Superficially things appear to have settled down, but it turns out that every year, Carmelita takes a strange trip somewhere. Curious, when an opportunity presents itself for him to find out where she’s going, Willoughby takes it, and discovers that she’s been visiting a cemetery where Carmelita has commissioned a little gravestone for Joaquina.

Even if you set aside the magical sharks for a minute, there’s a lot going on here. There is sexual violence in “Strange Interval,” clearly, but is this text a reflection on gender or something else entirely?

Here’s where it gets sticky.

Let’s hold off from the forced feminization and start instead with the subject of cuckolding. Why? Because cuckolding is a popular American sexual fantasy, particularly among cis heterosexual men, (in Justin J. Lehmiller’s survey of over 4,000 American adults online—58 percent of men surveyed reported fantasizing about troilism/cuckolding, and over a quarter of them fantasized about it regularly) and troilism’s presence in the narrative is an important clue to understanding this text’s logic.

As you may have noticed, cuckolding fantasies often feature elements of submission and masochism, and this appears to be especially true in heterosexual relationships where the man plays the role of observer.
Lehmiller, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life (2020) 52

While we like to believe that everything is relatively new, cuckolding is found in many ancient myths and religious texts, including Greek mythology and the Christian Bible. The immaculate conception of Jesus presents the essentials of cuckolding without including any sex. A couple is married (or close enough), the wife has (divine) relations with someone perceived as being more powerful than her spouse, the husband feels shame, but their relationship survives, and they are rewarded with a strengthened bond (and a god for a kid).

It’s likely that cuckolding, and cuckolding fantasies, arose directly in response to the anxieties of marriage itself. Partnership as a landed transaction based on a monogamous contract implies that every perceived loss of a partner is a threat. In this scarcity-bound way of thinking, sex outside of marriage threatens an eventual loss of domestic security. Sexual fantasies about cuckolding arise to address these anxieties, which were obviously extant in the 1930s. The 1933 film Design for Living, based on the 1932 Noël Coward play, is an excellent example of a narrative that plays with cuckolding/troilism anxiety and eroticism. “Strange Interval” is only a few years shy of the cuckolding anxiety-rich narrative that swept American box offices in 1939: Gone With the Wind.

In an ideal cuckolding fantasy, the married couple’s relationship survives the “trials” or psychological stress of the cuckolding, and they are rewarded with a strengthened bond. Carmelita and Willoughby undergo that same strengthening, until they are eventually capable of breaking free from their captor. It is interesting to note that although Carmelita is sexually assaulted, she is not haunted with shame like Willoughby is, or forced to perform domestic tasks. Her class position is never threatened, and while they live on the island she is treated like Black Rudolph’s wife:

She had accepted her position with a fatalistic calm, and lived with Black Rudolph in conditions almost simulating matrimony.

That is because her sexual assault is also part of Quinn’s fantasy. She does not suffer from trauma in a chronic or realistic way throughout the narrative because having her character suffer realistically would not be erotic. For all its violent trappings, this is an erotic adventure story, intended to titillate as much as it shocked its readers.

Forced feminization is a kink, and has very little to do with gender and much to do with arousal and power, specifically the perceived power that performing different gender roles enables or diminishes. The key to unlocking Quinn’s interpretation of this as pure kink, and not a sexual fantasy say, about his own gender identity, is his attention to shame and class. Becoming a woman/maid is “the accolade of degradation,” or a way to degrade his male/gentleman body. The constant thematic fixation on shame indicates a BDSM element at play. Quinn’s protagonist loses his class status, his testicles, and his identity as a man, but it’s crucial to observe that even though he never regains his testicles, Willoughby’s gender identity or “manhood” and class status return to him. Like the end of a rough BDSM play session he leaves with scars, but nothing that could ultimately threaten his gender or class. He is, after all, a Virginia gentleman.

Forced feminization fantasies can arise in response to anxieties about gender or class. While extant in the 1930s, these sexual fantasies would have been regarded as queer, and are therefore more difficult to find in mainstream media. One of the earliest known films about forced feminization is 1906’s Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) – a short about an alternate reality where gender roles are reversed – that was later remade in 1912 as In the Year 2000. 1908 brought us Troubles of a Grass Widower which uses circumstantial forced feminization as comedy. There’s also 1913’s The Little House in Kolomna, a Russian film where a woman feminizes her boyfriend in order to force him to perform domestic chores for her as a maid. At first he’s excited to dress in drag/be in close proximity to his girlfriend, but he appears to visibly dislike performing these chores, and splits as soon as his cross-dressing is discovered by others.

Even if Seabury Quinn was not exposed to these particular films, he was likely aware of drag. Drag has roots in theater and vaudeville, and drag film history starts alongside the silent film era. Frequently most early drag performances were included for comedic effect. When Charlie Chaplin or The Three Stooges dressed in drag, their performances were intended as jokes. What these jokes hid, of course, was anxiety about the flexibility of gender. It’s notable, therefore, that Seabury Quinn’s story articulates this specific erotic fantasy in a mainstream publication.

Seabury Quinn’s sensual preoccupation with texture lingers on almost every page of “Strange Interval.” Black Rudolph is often described as a dichotomy of textures, rough and soft, violent yet perceptive, he is the “strangely sensitive beast” of the story.

Black Rudolph put the girl from him, not roughly, but with a kind of slow, deliberate tenderness, and the startlingly red lips beneath his black mustache were parted in a smile that showed a hard, white line of teeth as merciless as those of any wolf.

He is the aggressive antithesis to Willoughby’s meek submission, the cuckolding large ship that physically demolishes Willoughby’s small buckeye.

Because this is a sensual world, intended for erotic consumption, there is a preoccupation with sensualism. Fabrics are soft or coarse or expensive or cheap, but they’re always well-described. Black Rudolph wears felt and diamonds, cambric and lace and velvet and Spanish leather. Willoughby is, by contrast, described as being “uniformed” when he is reunited with society and regains his status as a gentleman. Willoughby, although respectable, is less texturally interesting as a gentleman than the pirate Black Rudolph who indulges in his sexual impulses. It’s only when Willoughby becomes Joaquina and starts to delight in the dresses that she wears that her fabrics come to life. “Stiff brocade” and “clinging gowns of rustling silk” are worthy of Seabury Quinn’s descriptive attention, in addition to a pair of red heels and a corset.

Wool is the fabric that restores Willoughby’s masculinity to him—a less flashy and far more functional fabric than what Joaquina prefers to wear. Willoughby’s wool is “coarse” and “rasps”; it is the antithesis of the softness or smoothness of silk. This arbitrary binary is enough to break the spell of Black Rudolph’s hell/paradise and end Quinn’s sexual fantasy, only to briefly take us on a shark-filled high-speed boating adventure on the open sea.

I’d like to think that this was America’s first “jumping the shark” moment. It definitely predates that Happy Days episode.

For a long time he remained kneeling, and when he rose there was a look upon his face such as one might wear if he had seen the wraith of one whom he had loved and lost long since […]

In any case, what does the narrative “sting” of Willoughby discovering Joaquina’s grave lend to this discussion? It certainly implies that Carmelita is mourning Joaquina’s absence, while giving the story a nice “look at your own grave” moment that pulp magazines frequently enjoyed employing as a trope at the time. The grave could also be interpreted as a part or version of Willoughby that he buried when he left his kinky lifestyle behind on the island, but it feels like a stretch to associate this with a buried or lost gender identity. Joaquina is:

[…] a piteous, forgotten little ghost, without so much as a dead body to call hers.

But Willoughby does not mourn her loss. If this story is about Willoughby’s lost identity, why didn’t he commission the gravestone and take trips to grieve? The gravestone is outside of Willoughby’s purview; purchasing the plot and having the stone carved were tasks only Carmelita undertook. The gravestone is about her grief and Willoughby’s shock at encountering it. Gender isn’t buried in that plot. But perhaps there is something about gender to be gleaned here.

Even though he doesn’t articulate it explicitly within his text, on some level Seabury Quinn obviously understood that gender is contained within the human mind, and not our genitals. As he wrote out this sexual fantasy he instinctively knew that gender could be as easy as feeling connected to one’s own gender presentation—that a pair of pants was more than enough to prove Willoughby’s manhood to himself—but failed to distinguish any differences between kink and identity.

Quinn would likely have had a great deal of difficulty understanding the concept of a person identifying as trans and asexual, for example, because he appears to perceive transness as an innately sexual (and temporary) identity. While people may have gender-bending sexual fantasies, being trans is not a kink. Being trans is about living as the gender you identify as. Forced feminization is a kink, a temporary fantasy; but being trans is about gender identity, and living in the real world. Being trans is being trans all of the time, because it’s who a trans person is. It’s being trans and waiting in line at the DMV; it’s being trans and running out to buy toilet paper because you forgot to get it earlier that day; it’s being trans at the hospital and receiving a difficult medical diagnosis; it’s being trans and being a little sad because you broke your favorite coffee mug.

Transness is not inherently sexy, it’s just a part of a person, like a blood vessel or a fingernail. Anything else is erotic projection.

So one drop. No more.

“Strange Interval” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

M. Lopes da Silva (he/they/she) is a white Latinx and non-binary trans masc author and artist from Los Angeles. He has previously been employed as a sex worker, an art critic, and an educator. In 2020 Unnerving Magazine published his novella Hooker: a pro-queer, pro-sex work, feminist retrowave pulp thriller about a bisexual sex worker hunting a serial killer in 1980s Los Angeles using hooks as her weapons of choice. Dread Stone Press just published his first novelette What Ate the Angels – a queer vore sludgefest that travels beneath the streets of Los Angeles starring a non-binary ASMR artist and their vore-loving girlfriend – in Volume Two of the Split Scream series. On Twitter he’s @_MLopesdaSilva – on Instagram he’s @authormlopesdasilva.

David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” (1929): A Two-Dimensional Gender War by Ro Salarian

It’s funny how cis people see the trans experience as a horror story, a tale of body-horror sci-fi right alongside Frankenstein. Not much has changed in nigh on a century since Dr. David H. Keller wrote “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” except that in 1929 the idea of a physical sex change was mostly a thought experiment, a curious monster no more real than vampires or werewolves. Science fiction always tells us the values of the time when it was written, what we imagined as progress, and what we feared as dystopia. If something is going wrong in our current time, what worse thing might be just around the corner? In this case, feminism will lead to transgenderism, and this threatens the entire human race.

The fact of the matter was that the men of the United States who owned the greatest part of the wealth of the nation were afraid. […] What they were afraid of was the possibility of feminine control […]
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 248

We open with Miss Martha Belzer being passed up for a well-deserved promotion in favor of a man who ends up foisting all of his work on her anyway. It’s company policy to never promote women, because they would lose the respect of the rest of their industry. Martha is described as brilliant, competent, and capable. The story acknowledges that women are intentionally kept down for the sake of men’s egos and fears, and that women are entitled to their indignation. They deserve to be equals in society.

The story goes on for several pages about the talent and capability of women in America, about the petty terror of the insecure men in power. Keller writes extensively about the extra hoops women must jump through to gain even a fraction of the success of their male peers. The smartest, most talented, hardest-working woman at a company will still make half the salary of a man who can’t count to ten. The surest way to independent wealth for a woman was to be the sole heir of a rich man, which is how Patricia Powers becomes a billionaire in the story. Most other women can expect, at most, a low five-figure salary.

At first glance, the story seems very progressive and feminist. This is 1929, less than a decade since white women gained the ability to vote, and slightly longer since WWI ended, when millions of women were ousted from their wartime jobs to go back to being housewives. The continued existence of women in the workforce was a hotly contested issue of the time, and Keller seems aware of the injustice of holding women back.

Just kidding, though. These women will absolutely be punished. And, to my surprise, I found myself agreeing that they deserved it. This is a story of two groups of horrible people fighting each other, and no matter which side wins, women and trans people and people of color lose.

The tale continues with a Secret Service detective named Taine being sent to China to investigate a hospital run entirely by white American women. Chinese men are being paid $100 to undergo mysterious surgeries, and the United States needs to know why. So Taine, a white man, disguises himself as a Chinese sex worker, and is able to get a job in this hospital. It’s exactly as offensive as you think, with nonstop racial slurs and stereotypes thrown around as Taine spies on their secret operations.

He learns they’re performing “gonadectomies,” removing the testes of unsuspecting poor men. Why they’re doing it, Taine cannot surmise. This discovery is reported and received with a shrug, and nothing comes of it for years. There is no sympathy or justice for these men, whose perspective could be a true horror story.

The main conflict of the story arises when a new group of effeminate young men start taking over Wall Street, upsetting the old guard:

It was not the fact that their rule was being contested by a new group that bothered them. […] It was the personality of their opponents that raised their ire and constant resentment.
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 254

These new fellas are all very intelligent and hard workers, with impeccable hygiene and colorful suits. They’re uninterested in golf, preferring to keep to themselves at their private bridge club, and this fact is mentioned so many times, it’s comical. How dare a successful person be uninterested in golf! Well, one of the golf-players is so upset by these upstarts that he whines to the Secret Service about it, offering a million dollars to fix it.

“It seems that you are afraid of something and yet cannot give me any definitive idea of what it is,” the chief replies. “We cannot raid the biggest private club in New York just because some of you gentlemen are sore because you’re not invited to join.” (ibid. 255)

Still, Taine takes the gig. Worming his way into the bridge club via multiple disguises and secret identities, Taine finds himself in a meeting with the top dogs in this conspiracy as they reveal their big, evil plan. All of these “men” are actually women, who had used their Chinese testicle harvest to create a sex change serum. Five thousand of the world’s most brilliant women, funded by the richest woman in the world, had become men so they could infiltrate male society. But they’re not stopping there. Their ultimate goal is to eradicate all men and create a female-only society. Perhaps men can be used as servants in the meantime.

For the men of 1929, this is their imagined dystopia, a world in which they are replaced, eradicated. Women take over, and men are irrelevant. This is terrifying to them, a monster that must be conquered. In the imaginations of bigots, there always has to be someone on top, and someone being crushed. They can’t imagine equality. The only alternative to patriarchy in their eyes is matriarchy, and if someone has to be in charge, of course it can’t be women.

In this story, the true hero is racism. Yeah. It turns out, all Chinese men carry “a disease” (most likely an allusion to Syphilis) that doesn’t affect them much, but it will drive white people fully insane. The smartest women in the world, having injected themselves with this infected biological material, will all lose their minds within a few years:

You took five thousand of our best women, girls who would have made loving wives and wonderful mothers […] and, through your insane desire to rule, you have changed them into five thousand insane women.
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 274

Give them some arsenic and toss them in the looney bin. The conflict will resolve itself, returning everything to the pre-war status quo. This is science fiction that wants to return to the past.

I can easily see this same story written today with the women as heroes, without the ending where they all succumb to a brain-eating disease. When I first began reading, I could imagine remaking this as a campy, girl-power musical, perhaps starring a whole bunch of drag performers. Female supremacy can feel like feminism at first glance. These women were discriminated against under patriarchy, especially in 1929. The people in power were all men, specifically rich, white men, and they didn’t deserve to have all that power at everyone else’s expense. It’s tempting to imagine being on the other side of the power dynamic. It’s tempting to forget that in every scenario in which one group has absolute power, absolute corruption goes hand in hand. Power requires oppression, and women are not immune from perpetuating it.

While one side argues for male supremacy and the other for female supremacy, both argue for white supremacy. People of color are disposable pawns, never in consideration for the crown, their bodies used and discarded, their humanity never acknowledged by the writer or his characters. The white cis women want what the white cis men have, power and control. They don’t care who they have to step on to obtain it. They aren’t worried that injustice exists, only that they got the short end of the stick. They aren’t punished for how they treated people of color, but for taking power from white men. No one is the hero here. Neither side makes a good point.

The magazine makes sure to mention that Keller is a doctor, and that “glands” are responsible for so many important physical and mental systems in our bodies. Yet there is no acknowledgment that filling a cis woman with masculinizing hormones and altering her secondary sex characteristics would bring emotional anguish akin to what trans women often go through, aka gender dysphoria. As any trans person can attest, a lot of doctors today don’t know a thing about how transitioning works, and this guy from 1929 is no exception. While this was written during the time when Magnus Hirschfeld (considered by many to be the “grandfather” of trans healthcare) was making early breakthroughs in the field, this was also a time when a lot of quack science was getting just as much attention in the news and fictional “gland stories.” Keller was most likely aware of recent advances (and regressions) in hormonal and surgical healthcare, but judging by this story, he took the quackery to heart.

It’s difficult to compare some of the transgender themes in the story to modern-day ideas because, well, this isn’t a story about transgender people. This is a metaphor about cis people, a thought experiment unrelated to the trans experience. These women-turned-men aren’t trans men. These women-in-male-bodies are closer to trans women, but still, it misses that mark. They don’t experience gender dysphoria before their transformation, nor do they have any discomfort in their new bodies. Transitioning is framed as a choice, and a fairly easy one at that. Of course women would choose to be men. That’s the only way to get ahead. It’s not about identity. It’s about subterfuge, trickery, a means to an end. Anyone who attempts to alter their place in society by altering their body is untrustworthy, a fake who could never be real. This is the gender equivalent of the racial dynamics in Eli Coulter’s “The Last Horror.”

To this day, trans men are often treated with sympathy and pity, as women who felt they had no other choice, wanting to escape the brutality of womanhood. Meanwhile, trans women are seen as men trying to escape their culpability in the evils of patriarchy. Both this antique story and modern TERFs claim that in a truly equal society, there would be no need to transition. In the past and the present, no one who believes in rigid separation of the sexes can conceive that those sexes could ever truly be equal. If they did, there would be no reason to fear trans people.

The “man-hating feminist” concept has been around for a long time, longer than this story. The stereotype has varying degrees of truth to it. A lot of women do hate men. On the surface, this seems justified. The patriarchy has done terrible things to women. But it isn’t a flat one-on-one binary of 100% evil men vs 100% good women. Responding to misogyny with misandry might feel like sticking it to the man, but it catches a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.

That said, the women in this story are not real man-hating feminists. The man-hating feminists in “The Feminine Metamorphosis” were written by a man. This is a man’s idea of what women must think about men, perhaps based on what he would do if thrust into the role of a woman. He would transition. He would regain his manhood by whatever means necessary.

This is actually a fairly unique story in that regard. So many cis people, when imagining the trans experience, imagine going from the body they currently have to the “opposite” one. They find it terrible, and thus trans people are bizarre. To truly begin to empathize with trans people, one must imagine already being in the “opposite” form, trying to get to the one you currently have. Keller has managed to do this. He is so far removed from the female perspective that even in fiction, he can only imagine wanting to be a man. Still, this is not a trans story. His empathy only took him halfway before taking a sharp detour into his own biases.

Despite this being an old story by a dead man who didn’t have much knowledge of trans people, the attitudes within it are still alive today. There are women who hate men to the point that they dream about them going extinct. There are women who don’t necessarily want to eradicate men, but keep men and women so far apart they become different species. Heck, people are still writing stories today about what would happen if all men disappeared. Trans people cannot fit into such worlds. It’s impossible to long for a world without men without longing for a world without trans people. Trans people of all genders are extra susceptible to both misogyny and misandry, often at the same time, depending on how their gender is perceived by others.

While it’s easy to frame this as a product of the times, a backlash against first-wave feminism, any modern trans person can tell you that a strong percentage of our population, Evangelicals and “radical feminists” alike, is highly invested in the good-vs-evil, man-vs-woman binary. A two-dimensional gender war is delicious to misogynists and transphobes alike. They both require a strict separation of two binary sexes, and the only debate is which one deserves to be in charge. One side is good. The other side is evil. Sinners vs saints. This simplicity appeals to simple people, both back then and now. If the other side is evil, that must make me good, that must make me incapable of evil. That leads to things like a hospital full of wealthy white women performing unethical surgeries on poor men of color and framing it as “girl power!” Nothing regarding gender or race is ever simple, and the true trickery, the actual subterfuge, comes from those invested in a strict binary.

“The Feminine Metamorphosis” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

Ro Salarian is a trans nonbinary writer and illustrator with over a dozen works published. Their work is focused on queer people with elements of pulp fiction, body horror, and eroticism. Their work can be found at rosalarian.com.

Samuel Loveman’s The Hermaphrodite: A Poem (1926): Societal Devaluing + Desire in the Face of Marginalization by Salem Void

The relationship between H.P Lovecraft and the author of The Hermaphrodite, Samuel Loveman, was a subtle display of H. P.’s ability to pick and choose which characteristics of an individual’s personhood to center, and which to discard. Samuel Loveman was a Jewish American poet, critic, dramatist, and a homosexual who was said to have cohabitated with men often cited as “friends”’ up until the time of his death. Lovecraft and Loveman’s friendship was largely centered around their creative works and the symbiotic benefits within the literary world the two shared with one another.

Among Samuel Loveman’s best-known works is the sprawling, epic poem The Hermaphrodite, in which Loveman writes from the perspective of an unknown narrator only addressed as “brother of mine” being visited by Hermaphrodite in what feels like a dream in the middle of the night. The narrator is largely sympathetic to the plights Hermaphrodite discloses he has suffered, often anticipating a shift toward more positive, grand things coming in the story that unfortunately never comes. The Hermaphrodite as written by Samuel Loveman is a beautiful and painfully accurate depiction of what it is to exist born as someone innately confusing and “other” than those around you, both the awe and the agony. What it is to be born as a marginalized person who is simultaneously coveted and rejected by society at large, which I am sure Samuel Loveman must have related to as a Jewish homosexual among peers that rejected both of these parts of his personhood in order to view him as more human.

H.P Lovecraft sung his praises for The Hermaphrodite, writing in a letter:

I’m glad you’ve sent for “The Hermaphrodite”, which is the most purely classical poem written in this generation. Loveman is an authentic genius, & has kept the Hellenic (or perhaps I should say Hellenistic) spirit more perfectly than anyone else I know of. He belongs vividly & definitely to the colourful civilisation of Alexandria & Antioch.
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 11 Jan 1927, Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja 31

It doesn’t particularly shock me that Lovecraft saw this poem for what it was, a stunning work of art that rivaled Homer and Theocritus, as the poem does end with this abnormal specter of humanity deciding that its best for him to turn to stone and leave the others for good. What startles me about Lovecraft’s involvement with this work of Loveman’s is not his praise of it, but his willingness to spread this work to other authors who very well could have come to the opposite understanding and sought to immerse themselves in the history of Hermaphrodite even further. With how paranoid Lovecraft seemed to be for much of his life about the spread of agendas he saw as harmful, I’m shocked that this wouldn’t extend to what art he shares with his peers depending on what message it might include.

As a writer who is both Black, disabled, trans, intersex and a few other things that are considered marginalized identities, The Hermaphrodite is wildly impactful when it comes to describing the experience of simultaneous desire and devaluing and how confusing and impossible that is to navigate. When Hermaphrodite initially appears to the narrator in this dream, he is said to have winged eyeliner and red lips, the color of fire, with breasts and pale skin. There are many implications throughout the poem of paleness being directly associated with cleanliness, godliness, purity, which is a motif that so many white American and non-American authors and poets and scholars employed in their writing, that I find it unimportant to focus too deeply on. This association with paleness and purity and godliness is one that was enforced in us through the arts, our education, religion and much more, but it is not the central point in the tale, nor does it change the way that people receive Hermaphrodite in any significant way.

The tale that Hermaphrodite tells the narrator first is one where he is accepted into a township, not told to leave, but the energy among everyone shifts so coldly due to assumptions that nobody would even dare to address directly with him. Not only was Hermaphrodite viewed as a bad entity to have around, but also a symbol of further evils to come—Hermaphrodite could not bear this mockery in spite of being “accepted” so he left. This is directly relatable to me as a Black transmasculine intersex person who finds conditional acceptance in many places, the condition being that of accepting that others will speak of my existence as one of potential disorder and disruption. The agonizing choice of deciding to choose loneliness against conditional acceptance.

Hermaphrodite continues on, and a tale is told of famine except for in the vineyards where the grapes burst freely with wine and in this space everyone drunk with wine he allowed himself to let his guard down and be free and laugh and cry with the others as they did. Though, in the morning, as “beauty and lust were made visible” in the night, those who drank were considered to be defiled because of what they saw. Some continued to drink, but this time in silence so they did not attract the attention of those who had not imbibed, but this was not enough, and Hermaphrodite still witnessed the murder and crucifixion of many of his brothers. He recounts the experience of seeing the deaths, the bodies of his brothers slain, and discovering that many had escaped leaving him “to oblivion.”

When Hermaphrodite says this, the narrator rejects it vehemently, insisting that it was a mistake or perhaps that they saw someone like Hermaphrodite “fearless and good, They swept him recreant from their sight”—getting rid of what they saw in front of them that they could not understand, even though he loved them like a brother and they had drank and laughed and cried together. Loveman was close friends with another homosexual American poet, Hart Crane, who he supported and in the end was a primary influence in Crane deciding against suicide. From this knowledge coupled with the sympathetic and hopeful tone of the narrator, we can conclude that Loveman felt a kinship with those of us considered too different to function in this society. Hermaphrodite recounts the tale of his birth, being told “Thou shalt appear in many places, Love, shalt thou love, but not fair faces,” outlining the prophetic vision that Hermaphrodite is capable of love, but it will not be returned in equal measure, doomed to a life of half-acceptance.

Hermaphrodite recounts being brought back into the light and returning to a city again where people crowd him and swoon at his beauty, hailing him as a picture of youth. They declare him a new god that can grant others immortality, and from his heart gushed wine and everyone was happy. The narrator is gleeful at this tale, saying that they know in their gut that Hermaphrodite came forth to liberate them, as everyone yearned for his touch and for his drink. This is the illusion of desire as acceptance. Just because they see Hermaphrodite at this time he has brought riches and beauty to them, doesn’t mean that this condition will stay, that the desire will stay present as a positive force.

At night, Hermaphrodite’s slain friends came to him in a dream, declaring that Hermaphrodite will not find rest there, as immortality is a promise to being alone forever. This dream puts him into a state of shock, feeling frozen like stone, unable to stir when the people lift their hands up in thirst to him. Hermaphrodite is soon after declared evil, though, beautiful and tender, but must be destroyed. The narrator laments how painful it must be to suffer the same thing twice, and again, attempts to reassure Hermaphrodite that this won’t be his perpetual experience.

Hermaphrodite meets someone who tells him to “Be frozen,” and “be marble and be free, Save in thine antique agony”—as a plea to Hermaphrodite to end the pain by ending the cycle of devaluing and veneration that breaks and confuses him so deeply. In the end, he accepts this condition of life where he can fade into the spirit of the world, to be both alive and not, accepting this death as the ultimate choice of his own, instead of the choice of the world. Hermaphrodite experiences the shock of being allowed to indulge in both the horrors of manhood (i.e. war, loss) and the splendors of womanhood (veneration, protection, indulgence), but is not allowed to exist in either space more than transiently, and there is no direction toward what place he would be allowed to exist in more than temporarily. Loveman was drafted in World War I and was not happy about it, a poet of somewhat delicate sensibilities, this gives him insight into the things that are expected of men and echoes of this sentiment are heard throughout this work.

That is the painful purgatory that comes with being intersex, that differs from the matter of being trans. There is no clear transition space that exists when you were born existing in a nebulous state that nobody can clearly define to begin with. So we are just shuffled into the junk drawer of life, as that is easier than examining what it means to have a gender, to be a man, or a woman, or neither or both.

The culmination of Hermaphrodite’s lonely travels through Greece is that Hermaphrodite cannot exist in the world as it is, as he is, so the only way to exist is in dreams and in marble figures left to time, which will lose the colors they have been brightly painted becoming blank and pale, to become a symbol. I relate this condition of life to another phenomenon coined called “social death” which refers to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society. As a Black, disabled intersex person, I feel I exist in a state of premature social death, where I have not yet found a way to fully integrate myself into society because I am not seen as fully human to others because I cannot be categorized and boxed into the neat and orderly boxes that we as humans have created for ourselves so that we can feel in control.

Intersex existence is seen as a deviation from nature, and thus a deviation from order—a sign of the destruction of the structures that have kept us thriving as people. In reality, the true sign of destruction and what holds us back as a society from further thriving is no longer pretending that intersex existence is an unknown that should spur fear.

Samuel Loveman learned after H. P. Lovecraft’s death, that he was a very avid antisemite, and claimed he burned his letters in a scathing essay titled “Of Gold and Sawdust” where he repudiated their friendship, though did make it clear that Lovecraft was “however, loyal in his appreciation of me as a poet.” This reaction to the confirmed understanding that Loveman was only conditionally accepted by his friend Lovecraft, along with the intensely sympathetic narration of The Hermaphrodite, tells me that Loveman didn’t agree with conditional acceptance, and would despise the way that intersex erasure is still propagated constantly to this very day.

The Hermaphrodite is an unfortunately beautiful and tragic show of how little our perception and treatment of intersex people has changed throughout time, and a passionate plea to allow individuals like Hermaphrodite to love, live, experience joy, sorrow and to be lost among the rest who are lost, too.

The Hermaphrodite: A Poem can be read for free online at the Brown Digital Repository.

Salem Void (He/Him) is a man-shaped biomechanical bear that can be “found” in the swamplands of Virginia writing speculative fiction, queer + trans nonfiction, weird dark horror, and more. He hopes his work can be both the salt and the salve on your wounds.

He can be found @thewarmvoid on all socials, as well as Patreon + Substack.

On Barry Pain’s “An Exchange Of Souls” (1911) by Desmond Rhae Harris

First off: I really enjoyed reading this story! I can definitely see how it might have inspired other works like H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing On The Doorstep.” And, it does raise some genuinely good philosophical questions that branch off almost fractally the more you think about them.

The protagonist follows the story of his friend Dr. Myas, a deeply ambitious scientist with many quirks. Dr. Myas delves into the concept of whether or not a person’s ego can be sustained independently of the body and mind–or even moved and switched with that of another. Myas becomes consumed by his quest for answers, growing closer to a woman named Alice whom he plans to marry . . . but only after his experiments, in which she becomes his partner, are finished. Despite numerous ethical and practical questions raised by his peers, Dr. Myas finally crafts a machine that empowers him to explore his ultimate question firsthand, with his wife-to-be at his side. Dr. Myas does, indeed, manage to exchange his “soul,” or ego, with Alice’s. But the cost is dire and the result is a distressed melding of the two people. Mind and body are affected, and the ego is questioned as the protagonist strives to help Dr. Myas clean up the aftermath of this bewildering turn of events.

As I got deeper into the story, I found myself wondering about many of the same things Dr. Myas did. How does one separate the idea of the ego from the electric signals of the brain? From cell memories held in the body? From muscle memories retained in the body’s machinery? If I “exchanged souls” with someone else, would I forget how to play the piano or conduct research? And, of course, this story delves into the complex ideas and questions about identity that people have struggled for so long to fully understand, which touch a very specific kind of nerve for trans people (and surely for many other members of the LGBTQ+ community who have had inherent parts of their identity questioned or invalidated).

As a trans guy myself, I found the idea of Dr. Myas waking up in his wife’s body to be particularly creepy. Aside from the obvious parallels, I’m sure I’m also not the only trans person who’s struggled with medical-related anxiety and weird fears like “What if hormone treatments don’t work?” or “What if things somehow go back to the way they were, and all my efforts and agony were for nothing?” or simply “What if something goes horribly wrong?” Treatments of any kind, no matter how strongly we might desire them, are not risk-free.

This point ties into the story even more: just like Dr. Myas, I and many others have pursued (sometimes rather experimental and cutting-edge) treatments with a dogged, almost grim determination–because even the possibility of success is worth the risks. Even the hope that you might finally fulfill your desires and get some kind of relief for the all-consuming ailment that’s plagued your brain for years is worth the risk of losing everything.

Now for the inevitable: even though I relate to many aspects of the story and can find validation in them, there are definitely some outdated views and terminologies used in this story. I didn’t expect anything different, considering the publication date–of course there would be some sexist and misogynistic views, such as the tendency to view women or AFAB people as simple and shallow and then judge them accordingly. Of course there would be an overly black-and-white description of “men and women.”

After bracing myself for the worst going in, I actually felt somewhat pleasantly surprised as I kept reading. Despite the age and setting of the story, I would actually consider the protagonist’s general attitude towards people to be relatively neutral or even slightly progressive for the times. He seems to see the whole picture and have his personal priorities more straightened out than some people today do. For example: his horror towards the end of the story seems to arise from the jarring changes in his associate, which defy all that he knows of science, rather than anything focused on the gender aspect itself. He also seems to spend as much time critiquing men’s clothing and mannerisms throughout the rest of the story as he does women’s. He does not generally treat women as lesser or offer them a lower level of respect than he offers men, even if the terminology in the story can get a bit . . . dated.

He doesn’t really actively emphasize any sexist or misogynistic stereotypes, either, even though they’re inherently a part of the story’s chronological setting–at most, he mentions them in passing, in a way that seems natural for someone who was brought up to think that way. And at times, he even seems to question these cultural norms, reinforcing the overall inquisitive nature of the story. I especially noticed the part where he felt a bit uncomfortable about the way Dr. Myas simply expected Alice to clean up after a meal, taking her helpfulness for granted. Sometimes little things like that can speak volumes.

As I analyzed the cultural tone of the story, critique at the ready, it actually did remind me of similar debates I’ve run into regarding H. P. Lovecraft’s tone. So many people are eager to judge a writing piece from decades or centuries past according to the cultural backdrop and standards of today. While I completely understand wanting to progress past outdated views built on inequality, discrimination, and a complete misunderstanding of certain marginalized groups . . . I think many people should reevaluate how quick they are to shun a whole piece of writing that still contains good messages. Everything is a mixed bag, after all, and it’s important to be able to read something you don’t agree with and set the disagreeable parts aside while still harvesting any insight you can.

There really is a lot of insight to be harvested from this story, if you really mull it over and chew on the ideas it presents–especially for any LGBTQ+ person or ally. It pushes us to confront difficult ideas that might be uncomfortable or eerie to face as Dr. Myas and Alice begin to fuse. It’d be skin-crawling, I’m sure, for many trans people to think of finally shedding the labels associated with their old body as they embraced a body like Alice’s . . . only to have traits like Dr. Myas’ come through anyway. It must be chilling for others to see the varying stages of nonbinary existence come and go past the point where they’d wish to stay, their ideal state presented as something so fleeting, ephemeral . . . unattainable. And it’s probably chilling for other trans men to see a cisgendered man put in a cis woman’s body, and for her traits to push through as well as his . . . poking at the nerve that’s already been twisted by so many people nastily saying things like “If you were AFAB, you’re a woman and you can’t change that.”

At the same time, aspects of it were strangely validating. Yes, I can see how some people would feel distaste towards the way it was presented, or feel uncomfortable at the way Alice’s qualities persisted and embodied the idea that the body sustains its own form and traits no matter who you are. But it’s just as intriguing and validating to read about Dr. Myas’ ego coming through anyway, with his physical traits even transforming Alice’s body–because it reinforces the other side of the coin: he is still himself, even if he’s now plunked into a woman’s body. He still has many of his same mannerisms, and he retains his personality even if some of his tastes or preferences change to match hers. He is not erased by being put in Alice’s body.

Even if you gain the ability to play the piano or lose the ability to use complex scientific machinery, you are still you. The sum is greater than the whole of its parts, and we are more than just our traits which can be changed.

By the end of the last page, I found myself left with more questions than answers regarding the philosophical themes of the story. And I’m sure that was the whole point. Maybe a very dark and ironic point: even after all Dr. Myas’ and Alice’s sacrifices, we still don’t really have the answers he sought with her. Where does the ego, or soul, end and the mind and body begin? How unforgiving or pliable is the line between them?

In the end, this story grabs us all by the shoulders and spins us around to look in a mirror and ask “Who really are you?” And I wonder how many people can give a solid answer. Maybe if I were suddenly placed in a body more closely aligned with what feels right for me, I would lose some of the mental traits or abilities associated with the one I’m in now. But would I care? (Probably not.) Everyone’s answer to questions like these is different.

I think most, if not all of us can agree: we’d still be ourselves if we no longer remembered things we’d learned from scientific research. We’d still be who we are if we had a smaller stature or had weird muscle memories of playing piano, or other things we hadn’t really thought about before. Because after all, the ego concept is all about identity, and identity is unique in definition for everyone. For all its odd framing around the idea, its outdated terminology, and its overly binary presentation of the genders, I feel that An Exchange Of Souls delivers this message solidly and well.

An Exchange of Souls can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

My name is Desmond Rhae Harris, and I found some fascinating food for thought within Barry Pain’s story. As a writer and artist, I know how it feels to wish for something that you can’t forcibly mold into your exact ideal form–the frustration and the all-consuming desire to get it “right.” I feel for Dr. Myas, despite some of his questionable perspectives. Anyway, my work has been published by Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag, Burning Light Press, and Florida Roots Press. I’m also the Associate Editor / Designer / Illustrator at Starward Shadows eZine. When I’m not working with publications or writing and illustration as a freelancer, I like to go outside for walks at dusk or play music. Video games sometimes even make it on the list, too. You can find out more at TheInkSphere.com.

Must I Wear This Corpse For You?: H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937) by Joe Koch

Let’s start at the end of the story, when the woman is already dead. Not just dead, but self-disinterred, reduced to a mass of “liquescent horror,” a few bones, and a crushed skull. Dental records will identify the skull as belonging to Asenath Waite, the small, dark, witchy woman who seduced and manipulated the narrator’s best friend Edward. She’s one of Lovecraft’s few prominent female characters, and a very striking figure both visually and emotionally according to the other people in the story. Although “The Thing on the Doorstep” owes some conceptual devices to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Asenath Waite seems very unlike Madeline Usher and more a literary descendant of Poe’s Ligeia, with all the romance removed. There’s nothing beautiful about the woman’s demise in Lovecraft, no ecstatic mourning of the beloved dead; only, as in real life, a malodorous heap of unrecognizable remains.

But wait a minute. There’s some sleight of hand at work here. We’re talking about Asenath Waite the way she’s presented early in the story, when in fact Asenath is not really in the story at all. Asenath’s father Ephraim has hijacked her body by magic, locked her mind or soul away in his own aging body, and killed it. All of this happened before the story began. Now Ephraim, from within Asenath’s body, is trying to affect the same scenario with the narrator’s best friend Edward. In fact, Edward and Ephraim (posing as Asenath) are married.

We’re introduced to Asenath as “she” and the pronouns and gendering stick even when, less than halfway through the story, the spirit or mind inhabiting Asenath is recognized as Ephraim by his underground coven. A few paragraphs later, as Edward continues to rant after waking from this involuntary mind exchange with Asenath/Ephraim that has taken his body into the coven’s ceremonial pit of shoggoths, he lays out his suspicions plainly through questions such as “Asenath…is there such a person?” and “Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom?”

I’m struck in re-reading this story how difficult it is to see Asenath as Ephraim when I’m in the thick of the narrative, despite the pointed physical descriptions comparing his/her expression to a wolf, despite clocking frequent, overt parallels between Ephraim and Asenath’s behaviors, and despite the fact that I already know how it’s going to end.

Nothing in the story is kept secret for long, and yet Asenath’s absence eludes me. It’s a testimony to how minds trained to see the world according to binary heteronormative preconceptions cling to this conditioning in knee-jerk fashion. We see what we’ve been taught looks like a woman or a man, and we mentally make a label based on that snap judgment.

Asenath—or the Asenath suit that’s being worn by her father—is referred to as a woman and given predominantly female pronouns throughout the story, even in Edward’s final epistolary confession. Occasionally, Asenath/Ephraim is referred to as “it.” Twice we encounter the construction “he, she…it” as Edward grapples with the knowledge that his wife is not his wife. We see Asenath—who is really Ephraim—only through the narrator Dan’s binary perception and through Edward’s misgendering and denial-ridden reports. The repeated use of incorrect female pronouns applied to the entity that is Ephraim performs a narrative magic trick, making the woman disappear.

Misogyny in early twentieth-century American writing is no surprise, nor is it an unexpected element in Lovecraft. Men are almost exclusively the protagonists of his stories, and women most often appear as names in genealogies or barely mentioned relations with little or no character development or agency. Even in our example, Lovecraft hasn’t given the real Asenath Waite a voice or an active role in determining the fate of her soul, or the uses to which her body is put during her short life and after her death; but I think this story presents an interesting, if unintentional, counter-example of misogyny, despite the “woman in the refrigerator” outcome. Perhaps even because of it. As someone historically mistaken for a woman, it highlights for me some of what’s driving our current cultural arguments about transgender bodies.

Asenath Waite, as shown on the page early on, is a vivid and compelling character. I’d hang out with her. She has the Bohemian, decadent crowd at Miskatonic eating out of her hand. She knows all sorts of dark secrets, winks shamelessly, and leads the occult gatherings rather than being a follower. The narrator Dan finds her repugnant for the same reasons I like her as a modern reader, because she violates Dan’s (and perhaps Lovecraft’s) idea of rigid gender norms. Exhibiting stereotypically male assertiveness, her duality is meant to be uncanny or monstrous, although, writing in 1933, after the sexual freedom of the jazz age, after the women’s suffrage movement had begun, after the founding of Planned Parenthood, Lovecraft was not without positive models of nonconforming women, including his ex-wife. The story requires Asenath be attractive and dynamic enough to seduce Edward and control him for years, as she—or rather he—does.

He, she…it: the binary breaks down as Edward tries to describe how Asenath puts her mind in his body. Except it’s Ephraim in Asenath’s body who is acting upon Edward, acting from within a disguise. The further Edward’s speech moves away from the strict binary and blurs the distinct line between male versus female, the less Dan believes him. Edward denies his own direct experience of reality, too, despite an abundance of evidence. He stays in the torturous relationship for years enduring Ephraim’s mental penetration like a victim of supernatural domestic violence. (Another interpretation is that Edward is gay, and the unique situation facilitates his denial while allowing him a gay marriage. Exploring the implication of a gay love triangle between Dan, Edward, and Ephraim is, however, outside the scope of this essay.) Either way, unable to admit Asenath is really Ephraim, adherence to the heteronormative binary blinds Edward to the facts, hides the villain, and erases Asenath’s true fate as a murder victim.

The pronoun trick works on the reader, using our gender expectations to heighten the story’s impact. It’s interesting that in the real world of contemporary America, some people want to perform—and demand performance of—a similar trick. We see commentators and politicians very upset by nonbinary pronouns, fearful of transgender people who do not fit clearly into rigid biological ideas of male and female. As if we are some sort of uncanny monsters, they seek to control thought and behavior by eliminating words that describe our direct lived experience as nonbinary, gender-questioning, or otherwise gender-fluid people. Why are they so afraid of our words? Our bodies? In life as in the story, let’s ask who this denial of a rich, flexible, and varied language might serve.

In the story, it’s Ephraim. In contemporary America, it’s the people behind numerous bills like North Dakota’s proposed SB2199 that would mandate employers who receive state funding (as well as schools, institutions, and state agencies) to use only male or female pronouns based on DNA testing. The bill states words must fit “the individual’s determined sex at birth, male or female.” Using anything other than state-assigned pronouns, such as using they/them, would incur a fine of $1,500.

This isn’t unique to North Dakota. Rampant across the United States, new laws about the words we can use and how we can use them are clogging up court dockets. Other laws ban books that merely mention anything other than heteronormative gender from libraries and schools. And let’s not even try to figure out what bathroom we’re allowed to use or what team we can play on if we’re nonbinary. In conjunction with laws regulating—and as an outcome of forced detransition, eliminating—transgender bodies, these proposals are medically irresponsible and shockingly repressive. I grew up during the Cold War, when the Soviet “thought police” were supposed to be the bad guys. Rather than dwell on the mystery of what motivates this seemingly anti-American terror of inclusive language and bodily autonomy, let’s return to Ephraim in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” an obsessively gendered story about who controls bodies, how they do it, and what is the goal of such sorcery.

Edward loses control of his body with greater frequency as Ephraim practices inhabiting it. Ephraim believes he needs a white male body and brain to further his magic practice and achieve full power. Eventually, Edward succumbs completely, losing his body to a man masquerading as his wife. His final missive, written with the shaky hand of Asenath’s decaying corpse, calls for Dan to “kill that thing–kill it.”

Shall we call Ephraim a rapist? He fits the horror movie trope of a dangerous man in a dress we’ve been trained to fear and feel disgust for in films like Psycho (1960), Dressed To Kill (1980), and Silence of the Lambs (1991). He doesn’t obtain consent from Edward, who (finally!) fights back, killing the body of Asenath to eliminate Ephraim. But the specter of the murderer or rapist who masquerades as a woman can’t be killed in the story any easier than we can expurgate it from popular imagination. Even though transgender women are more likely to be sexually assaulted or murdered than any other LGBTQ+ group, we’re told by contemporary news media that they are evil men donning a deliberate disguise to sneak into women’s spaces and attack. They’ve created an imaginary bathroom monster, a lurker in the stall, by inverting facts and employing the divisive binary thinking habit that pits women against men and vice versa. Many well-meaning people unwittingly further this narrative.

Ubiquitous divisive humor and dialogues reinforce common heteronormative binary thinking. Jokes about genital size or sexual prowess; dialogues about coping with threats or neediness couched as specific to one gender; reproductive rights conversations excluding every non-woman with a uterus. The same thinking that judges manhood by sexual performance or womanhood by fertility and chest measurements is the soft fascism that says a man can’t have a uterus and a woman can’t have a penis. It’s tied in with eugenicist ideas about race, ethnicity, ability, weight, and so forth that pretend there is one ideal and correct type of body, rather than an infinite number of (beautiful) variations. It’s how Ephraim thinks.

Ephraim is a man stuck inside a woman’s body, but he’s not transgender. Rather, he’s representative of the misconception that bodies must conform to a rigid set of physical standards to be permitted to speak their own language or be seen (alive) in society. The language that traps Edward (and the reader) in complicity with Ephraim solidifies his disguise as Asenath. Wearing a mask is the opposite of being transgender, in which we live authentically, and throw off a wrongly imposed disguise. We experience ourselves as more variable, nuanced, unstructured, or nonbinary than common cultural stereotypes presume possible. I highly recommend it, and hope the government never forces my detransition. Edward and Asenath’s fates show us the result of people coerced into a wrong disguise.

As the patriarch of the Waite family, Ephraim uses vulnerable, female, and non-white bodies to perpetuate his power and avoid death. Edward is described as child-like, dependent, and physically weak, and through scattered bits of history, we get a picture of Asenath that Lovecraft has coded as biracial: half-white, half-Innsmouth hybrid sea creature. She’s held in captivity for her whole life, bred for the purpose of housing his consciousness. The real Asenath screams from behind the door of her locked “padded attic room,” trapped in the wrong body until her death.

Strip away the false veneer of gendered, stolen, and exploited flesh, and we’re really not reading a story about a man stuck in a woman’s body, or a man masquerading as a woman, but about power masquerading opportunistically behind multiple facades; power hiding its true face for the sake of perpetuating systemic control. Ephraim is patriarchy itself, spanning generations and holding power by controlling the bodies of others.

We’re back where we started, at the end of the story with Asenath, a woman reduced to nothing, a thing disintegrating on the doorstep. Her physical, psychic, and textual obliteration indicts Ephraim—and therefore the patriarchy—much more damningly than if she had spoken or survived. We’re meant to remember her. Her name is the last word of the story. It lingers along with the image of her corpse, dead for three months and thrust upon Edward, who is not a man masquerading as a woman, but a man forced to wear a quick-rotting corpse that will kill his soul in disguise.

“The Thing on the Doorstep” can be read for free online at hplovecraft.com.

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Shirley Jackson Award finalist and author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive, their short fiction appears in publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Queer Book of Saints. Joe co-edited the art horror anthology Stories of the Eye and has collaborated with several other authors and poets on short writing projects. He/They. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.

An Asian Writer Looks At Lovecraft

An Asian Writer Looks Into Lovecraft
by Nicole Ortega

To me, “The Cats of Ulthar” is a wish-fulfillment story.

The story reads like a white community desperately wanting to get rid of poor immigrants in their neighborhoods. These neighbors kill cats and even dispatch their beloved pets. In real life, the local police would probably come and take away these cat killers; white people are known to love animals, especially their pets. There were no police and mobs but this town just sat in their fear of the cotter and his wife. I find it curious and baffling that they did nothing when the couple was isolated from the rest of the town and its people. I think of Lovecraft and his famous loathing for immigrants coming to his beloved town and contaminating the culture of white Protestantism that he wholeheartedly loves and seeing it from that viewpoint on the decision to do away with the repulsive cat-killing couple in Uther by another outsider; Menes from a traveling caravan.

The townspeople and the narrator feel helpless and unable to do anything about these notorious neighbors. Lovecraft renders his protagonists unable to confront the dangers of forces alien to them:

In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Cats of Ulthar”

Lovecraft’s stories including “The Street,” “The Terrible Old Man,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House” feature immigrants and place them as a central focus in the stories. Lovecraft clearly imbued his dual fear and disgust over immigrants in these stories. His fear of an outside force infecting and changing a wholesome white community is apparent in his letters and works of fiction.

Is this how Lovecraft felt in his personal life when people who do not belong to his accepted racial and cultural identity moved into his hometown of Providence? The cotter and his wife are symbols of Lovecraft and the white fear of the immigrant. In the story, when the cotter and his wife were suspected and witnessed by the town of catching and butchering cats, I feel that this was a reference to the racist stereotypes of foreigners; a marker of “othering” that is specifically designed to target Asians.

In the United States of America, there have been negative stereotypes of Asians as unhygienic and unsanitary. Asian cuisine, notably Chinese cuisine, was derided as dirty and the meat was rumored to be made of dogs and cats. This was tied to when Chinese immigrants set up restaurants and food stalls and were popular in the U.S. and so racist propaganda against them was made up to sabotage their businesses.

There was no mention whether the couple ate the cats or just killed them but I believe that the mention of cats and their status in the community has made me see them as a placeholder for Asian immigrants to a white community. In the story, the couple lived in a hovel near dark wood. As an Asian and family who are immigrants, I believe that the hovel was in a rough part of town where immigrants who were mostly workers, lower class or living underneath the poverty line come from. Lovecraft mentioned these communities in his letters and looked down on them:

We walked—at my suggestion—in the middle of the street, for contact with the heterogenous sidewalk denizens, spilled out of their bulging brick kennels as if by a spawning beyond the capacity of the places, was not by any means to be sought. At times, though we struck peculiarly deserted areas—these swine have instinctive swarming movements, no doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they are—Jew, Italian, separate or mixed, with possible touches of residual Irish and exotic hints of the Far East—a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose, and imagination—would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place.
H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, May 1922, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 97

To the white gaze; there have been much discrimination and prejudice regarding Asians and the Oriental thinking of white people surrounding food and hygiene.

Racists in the beginning of the pandemic sadly stoked the fires of anti-Asian prejudice. Hate crimes have been rising ever since; the Trump campaign and administration have made white rage and racism their base and it was proven to be sadly so effective that even today the consequences of such rhetoric have manifested into the undue attacks on minorities especially Asians because of the connections racists like Trump has made to them with the pandemic.

Donald Trump constantly referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus” even though experts said that this contributes significantly to anti-Asian sentiment. Racists connecting minority groups and diseases create pogroms. The elderly and/or women are the primary targets of anti-Asian sentiment. Attacks on Asians in public places and outright murder in chilling instances like the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings show how violence follows prejudice. Hate crimes against Asians have skyrocketed in the U.S. in the past year.

I am from one of those countries in Asia that rely on people going abroad where they are vulnerable to abuse and discrimination. There are many horror stories from migrant workers here about cruel employers and some even get trafficked as slaves. There is little to no protection offered by embassies or consulates because of the lack of resources and power of a government that is mostly apathetic. When Trump was elected, I feared for what would happen to Asians and other minorities and what happened was even worse than I could have imagined. Millions of people voted for this kind of administration and the support of white supremacist groups and ideology is ramping up even more.

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. […] And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Cats of Ulthar”

It is a very powerful and potent fear in the minds of white people to be displaced, subsumed —devoured by a strange and foreign culture. The feelings of intense revulsion and disgust the narrator and the townspeople of Ulthar can be likened to the white neighbour who complains too much about the immigrant neighbours. The town retains its innocence and the cotter and his wife are destroyed not by the town but another outsider. Revenge and murder are actions taken by both outsiders and not the white townspeople. Conflict is between different outside forces and not the good people of Ulthar. All is well in the end with the couple dead and Menes and the travelling caravan gone. A good ending is where no outsider lives among a white community. It is clear that the interaction of different groups of people brings discord, chaos and violence.

East versus West—they can talk for aeons without others knowing what the other really means. On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types, & when we try to be tolerant we are merely blind or hypocritical. Two elements so discordant can never build up one society—no feeling of real linkage can exist where so vast a disparity of ancestral memories is concerned—so that wherever the Wandering Jew wanders, he will have to content himself with his own society till he disappears or is killed off in some sudden outburst of mad physical loathing on our own part.
H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 11 Jan 1926, Letters to Family and Family Friends 2.535

The townspeople didn’t try to reach out to the cotter and his wife and understand where they are coming from. Of course, they are butchering cats and all of them deem them really unpleasant but with the entirety of the town at odds with them, it is curious to see nothing to be done. It feels like the town of Uthar has made them into something inhuman, something that cannot be reasoned with or something they themselves cannot stop.

In the story, Ulthar was rid of the cat-killing poor and unpleasant couple without having to do anything by themselves. In the end, the orphan whose beloved pet was killed and who successfully did away with the perpetrator, did not come to live in Ulthar. Lovecraft believed that cultures in contact with one another have an inevitable way to be in conflict with one another and one dominant culture will surface with the other culture diminished or faded. This is one of Lovecraft’s fears:

Racial admixture—all apart from the question of superiority, equality, or inferiority—is indubitably an influence adverse to cultural & environmental continuity. It weakens everything we really live for, & diminishes all the landmarks of familiarity—moods, accents, thoughts, customs, memories, folklore, perspectives, physiognomical types, &c.—which prevent us from going mad with homesickness, loneliness, & ancestral estrangement. Thus it is the duty of every self-respecting citizen to take a stand against large-scale racial amalgamation—whether with newly invading groups, or with differentiated groups anciently seated amongst us. Of course, I realise that “duty” in the sense of cosmic mandate is a myth—but what I mean is, that this is the course which will be followed by every normal American who wishes to avoid spiritual exile & agony for himself & his descendants, & whose eyes are not blinded by the abstract ethical sentimentalities surviving from a naiver period of our intellectual evolution. My own motto is, ‘life in a pure English nation or death’.
H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 29 Dec 1930, Letters to James F. Morton 260-261

The revenge of the foreign orphan and the cat-killing couple to me is one such clash. The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington posits a theory that civilizations or cultures are bound to clash with one another. The fear of the foreigner being a threat to white western culture is not new. Lovecraft was not unique in sharing this opinion. Look what Lovecraft talked about in his letters, he wanted cultures to be pure and find mixing of cultures to be a shame and a sort of destruction. The clash of cultures already exists at the beginning of “The Cats of Ulthar,” and at the end the town is “saved” from the presence of what I see as ethnic immigrants in a white town like Providence in which H.P. Lovecraft lived.

It is not explicitly stated anywhere that the cotter and his wife were Asians, but to me the descriptions and stereotype of killing cats and poor living conditions like hovels as described by letters of the author in which Asians are living in, I believe there is a hint of Asian identity to the characterization or the very least Lovecraft wanted to label them as “other.” Through the narrative and the character of the orphan, he got rid of the “other” by another outsider and thus bringing peace and stability to the community and in which the narrator and the townspeople need not have dirtied their hands or do any proactive role in trying to drive out the offending entities.

I believe this is Lovecraft wanting to maintain white innocence and zero culpability. We see this happening in real life: there is no reckoning on how white supremacy is coming back in full force because white feelings need to be coddled even at the expense of lives of minorities.

Even now, I am not comfortable traveling to the U.S. and other countries because of the reports of hate crimes and I have even asked my friend if I look “Asian.” I wonder if I could “pass” as white and blend in to avoid getting targeted. These are the things I have to deal with because this is what the feelings of white people like Lovecraft have; they want their communities to be pure and untouched by people like me. I remembered feeling numb and shocked when Trump was elected. To think, millions of people voted for him, saw what he was saying about immigrants and foreigners, and supported him. It was eye-opening to see the reach and breadth of that kind of hateful rhetoric today. By giving white supremacists a major platform in society increases violence against minority groups and allows the state to harm them through its institutions and policies.

In Ulthar, there are no people who harm cats anymore. There are no strange people who catch cats and kill them. There are no outsiders who call on magic to exact revenge. There are just the townspeople and the narrator who live happily. I am not advocating for the killing of cats but the town of Uther seems to be intolerant and unwelcoming to foreigners. They did not thank Menes at all or even welcome him and the caravan after the whole fiasco. I believe if Menes and his caravan had not left, they too would be looked upon with fear and revulsion by the people of Uthar.

N.C. Ortega is a writer and artist from Cebu, Philippines. They love horror, sff and romance. Bouncing from one interest to another, they hope to maybe create games, comics, and stories in various mediums and formats in the future.

Twitter: @granadamoon