“Re-Quest Denied” (1998) by Stanley C. Sargent

Dedicated to W.H. Pugmire, the culprit concealed behind every bush of Sesqua Valley.
—Stanley C. Sargent, “Re-Quest Denied” in Mythos Online, Vol. 1, #8 (Feb 1998)

In 1996, Stanley C. Sargent wrote “For Wilum, Gent.,” published in the obscure journal Leathered in Crimson #1. In 1997, Sargent reviewed Tales of Sesqua Valley by W. H. Pugmire; it was Pugmire’s first fiction collection. In 1999, Sargent co-edited and illustrated Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror, Pugmire’s next collection. They were friends, they were admirers of each other’s work. And in 1998, Sargent penned a small tribute to his friend.

“Re-Quest Denied” is a rare tale of Sesqua Valley written by someone other than Pugmire himself, and interestingly it parallels some of the themes expressed in “Vyvyan’s Father” (2013) by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. Both stories essentially deal with an escape into disenchantment, the refusal of the call of beauty and emotion to focus on logic, rationality, mundanity, dullness—and both ultimately come to regret that choice and embrace what they had once rejected.

There is a question as to how much of Sargent himself went into this story. Not in the exact details, but in the emotions. In his own brief bio, he wrote:

Born at high noon on the summer solstice, 1950, in Ohio, Stanley C. Sargent grew up near his grandparents’ 200 acre farm. He populated three large, abandoned gravel pits on the farm with prehistoric and mythological beasts only he could see.

At age 18, Stan pulled up stakes and moved to San Francisco, where he could live as he liked and be openly gay. He attended a conference on Mayan hieroglyphs in Guatemala City in the mid-1970’s, and he spent a month in Iran in 1979. He worked for many years for corporate law firms, as word processing department supervisor.

In 1991, Stan abandoned the business world. He continued his long-time interest in and production of art (ink pointillism and later airbrush painting); in 1999, he completely illustrated a paperback book by W.H. Pugmire. At age 44, he began writing horror fiction inspired by the style of H.P. Lovecraft.

Compare that to:

Victor had dedicated every moment of his waking life to work, to the exclusion of all else. He had never even stopped long enough to get married. Emotions, longings, and his natural romantic lean had been suppressed and ignored completely. The result had been a brilliant career as advisor to the most powerful men and women on Earth; all the world had known and honored him. Now he was retired, and none of it meant anything to him.

At age sixty-five, Victor felt his life had been wasted. Without the endless distractions he had always known, a tidal wave of emotion rose up from deep within his soul, overwhelming him with the realization that, regardless of his worldly success, his life was a total failure.

He had lived a one-sided existence devoid of love and passion. He had spent his life building a magnificent palace in which he dwelled alone; in all his years, he had never found anyone with whom to share the love or passion that resided within him. And now that he was an old man, overweight and wrinkled, loosing his hair, it was too late.

Likewise, it seems clear that “Pug” is inspired by W. H. Pugmire, even if it isn’t meant to be him. A sort of idealized Pugmire, the eternal youth that echoes the kind of masculine beauty that written about in stories like “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Pug is a dream, a promise, a part of Sesqua Valley made flesh, the fire the moth is drawn to.

In terms of writing, this is one of Sargent’s minor works; the prose is straightforward, a bit basic, the plotting fairly straightforward and heavy with foreshadowing. Readers might compare it to The Substance (2025), only in reverse. Perhaps wisely, Sargent doesn’t step on Pugmire’s toes, doesn’t add much to the lore of Sesqua Valley. A single legend, a couple of inhabitants. Nothing that Pugmire would have to write around or contradict in his own works, but also not much to tie it in except for Mt. Selta itself.

“Re-Quest Denied” is far from a lost work, although it remains fairly obscure. Originally published in the now-defunct Mythos Online webzine in 1998, it was reprinted in the print journals Al Azif #3 (May-Jun 1998), Dreaming in R’lyeh #1 (2003), and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Cthulhu’s Creatures (2007), all of which are long out of print. Unfortunately, Sargent never included it in any of his own collections; even more unfortunately, the original art that accompanied this work (titled “Pug” and with the alt text: “Yet it was the nude youth of breathtaking veauty that was the true centerpiece of Victor’s dreamlike vision.”) appears to be lost, as it wasn’t captured by the Internet Archive.

Alas.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Vyvyan’s Father” (2013) by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

In H. P. Lovecraft’s body of work, the town of Innsmouth is mentioned by name only in four stories (“Celephaïs,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House”) and a couple “Fungi from Yuggoth.” The core of Lovecraft’s Mythos, which so many writers have expanded upon over the decades, tends to be fairly scanty. Lovecraft country, that literary realm where the Old Ones walk, was painted in broad strokes and a few fine details, and it is everyone else who has filled in the gaps.

Writers who came after Lovecraft have, when not playing in his sandbox, carved out their own spaces. The most famous are Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley stories set in and around the literary Brichester and Goatswood in the United Kingdom; and W. H. Pugmire‘s Sesqua Valley and associated towns and mountains set in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Since these writers lived much longer than Lovecraft, and had more opportunity to write and publish, it might not be surprising that they have produced correspondingly more lore for their associated locales than Lovecraft did for his.

And yet, these places often feel smaller, because the voices associated with them tend to be singular. While anybody can write a tale of Innsmouth, it is generally considered uncouth to poach a living author’s copyrighted creations without permission. Some of them have consented to letting other writers splash in their ponds—Ramsey Campbell, for instance, consented to Made in Goatswood (1996), a tribute anthology; and in 2013 the Lovecraft eZine #28 did a similar tribute to W. H. Pugmire.

These tales represented a first step at a wider Sesqua Valley Mythos. New ideas, new perspectives, new angles. Pugmire was never dogmatic about his Sesqua Valley lore, preferring to expand it in hints and suggestions, a tale at a time, and there has not yet been an effort to correlate all the contents of his fiction into a single concordance or wiki. Perhaps, in the future, there will be more. For now, one particular tale from Lovecraft eZine #28 is worth discussing, because it does something different than the rest. Something very Pugmire-like in its approach to the Sesqua Valley tales.

“Vyvyan’s Father” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy does not mention Sesqua Valley. Simon Gregory Williams and William Davis Manly do not appear on the page. Uniquely of the tribute stories in the eZine, Satyamurthy chose to write a story that is definably set in the world of Sesqua Valley—for anyone who is familiar with Pugmire’s work, at least, it is obvious from the clues and details as much as the context of the issue—without falling into the same trap of Mythos pasticheurs who load up a story with familiar names. It is an approach that echoes Pugmire’s own insistence that writing Lovecraftian fiction should echo the aesthetics of Lovecraft, not just pay lip-service to Arkham and Innsmouth, Dunwich and Kingsport, Cthulhu and the Necronomicon.

His eyes beguiled me, being slightly slanted and of a silver hue that seemed to contain particles of other shades in their pale irises.
—W. H. Pugmire, “The Horror on Tempest Hill” in An Imp of Aether 142

If his eyes were open, they would startle you with their timeless, silvery-grey depth.
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, “Vyvyan’s Father” in Lovecraft eZine (2013)

There is something very appropriate in how Satyamurthy’s tale is a bridge between India and Sesqua Valley; the lost child, the orphan of the Valley, is caught between two worlds in a way that echoes something of India’s own history as a crossroads of empires, with those who fall outside the established social orders caught like nuts in a pulau: a part of the whole, yet apart from the rest. This between-two-worlds tension defines Vyvyan’s character, but it also echoes the story as a whole: instead of just playing in Pugmire’s backyard, Satyamurthy builds a bridge between the setting of many of his own stories and Pugmire’s. Instead of submitting himself to Pugmire’s aesthetic, he shows how their themes can connect. Like New World tomatoes incorporated into a quintessentially Indian paneer gravy.

The slow expansion of Sesqua Valley beyond the bounds of Pugmire’s fiction is not the trauma-driven diaspora that marks much of contemporary Innsmouth tales. It is a different kind of cultural diffusion, spread by wanderers and their children, artifacts and ideas that spread out and draw strangers in. Where it goes from here…who can say?

“Vyvyan’s Father” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy can be read online at Lovecraft eZine #28, and print edition is also available.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“In Their Own Voices” (2025) by Lavie Tidhar

Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup.
—Irvin S. Cobb, “Fishhead” (1913)

She remembered college well. It was so different to junior high, when the kids used to push her, gathered round in a circle so that she couldn’t escape. Fishhead! Fishhead! they’d cry.
—Lavie Tidhar, “In Their Own Voices” in New Weird & Decadent (2025) 29

The 21st-century story of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is the diaspora. It is a very post-colonialist idea; the concept of identity and ethnicity, which has been forcibly divorced from geography. The people of Innsmouth were forced from their homes by government violence, military force. Arrested, imprisoned, murdered.

Yet they survived.

“The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys, “Legacy of Salt” (2016) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts” (2016) by Sonya Taaffe, and Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys are some of the stories that deal with the way the survivors of the government raid on Innsmouth scattered, and how their descendants connected, formed their own groups, attempted to preserve and reclaim their legacy.

Glad your collaborator found my Massachusetts atmosphere convincing.
The plot I am now experimenting on concerns another fictitious Mass.
town—“Innsmouth”—which is vaguely suggested by the ancient & almost
dead city of Newburyport. Of course, there is no sinister, un-human shadow
over poor old Newburyport—but then, there never was a festival of worms
at Marblehead (Kingsport)!
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 14 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.411

One of the biggest parts of the diaspora mythology is the return to Innsmouth itself. The town that Lovecraft described takes its real-life inspiration from his visit to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and while its literary antecedents include Irvin S. Cobb’s “Fishhead,” Herbert S. Gorman’s “The Place Called Dagon,” and Robert W. Chambers’ “The Harbor-Master.” This is not portrayed as irredentism, however; the return is not a military re-conquest, violence meeting violence, but a peaceful reoccupation. Innsmouth is portrayed as ground of little to no value aside from those who are bound there by ties of ancestry and memory.

Lavie Tidhar’s “In Their Own Voices” is about such a return. It is not a horror story, though horror is part of its history and heritage. This is about the healing that comes after the horror, about reunion, self-acceptance, and finding your tribe. Tidhar has done well to ground the story in the genuine Massachusetts geography, much as Lovecraft himself did.

Silvia linked hands with her sisters; and when she smiled she tasted salt on her tongue, and it took her a moment to realize she had been crying.
—Lavie Tidhar, “In Their Own Voices” in New Weird & Decadent (2025) 29

Readers could easily imagine the Silvia of “In Their Own Voices” and Aphra of Ruthanna Emrys’ “The Litany of Earth” meeting together, stranger cousins at a family reunion—and that’s part of the game. Writers like Tidhar are surfing the same wave that August Derleth, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sonya Taaffe, and so many others have ridden, but they are all on their own journey, and the emphasis is different for each writer. The legacy of Innsmouth is both horror and acceptance, monsters and orphans. That speaks across generations.

“In Their Own Voices” by Lavie Tidhar was published in New Weird & Decadent (2025), also available on Amazon.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Under an Arkham Moon” (2014) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire

(To the memory of Robert Bloch)
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire, “Under an Arkham Moon” in
Black Wings III (2014) 57

Teratophilia is the love of monsters and the monstrous. This can be love of any sort, the fondness of familiarity or a sibling-like bond of friendship to sexual desire or even some unchangeable, devoted, and obsessive agape. There are many forms of teratophilia on display in this short tale by Salmonson and Pugmire. The love of human oddities, so often misconstrued as monsters; the love of Arkham, that fictional town that is so steeped in evil it corrupts the dreams of those within it; and a hot, burning physical desire for the monster in the attic…but above all, there is the love for that very human monster H. P. Lovecraft, and the story is written in such a way to pay homage to his creations, while taking them a step or three further.

The dedication to the memory of Robert Bloch is a nod to his story “The Mannikin” (WT Apr 1937), and this story shares a character with a similar conjoined twin and a connection to De Vermis Mysteriis, and may owe itself to a certain idea from Lovecraft. The plot is essentially a sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” (1925), evident from its references to “The Attic Window” in Whispers (albeit with a nod toward the Indiana Magazine War), and the thing with the blemished eye. However, for the most part this is a story that reveals in the decadent Lovecraftian aesthetic. That really soaks in the sensuous language, the dark atmosphere, the terrible hints and lore.

This was a story written by a pair of monster kids that grew up into adults still in love with a world of dark delights and evil that was something more than the banal of canceling school lunches or denying health care claims to the sick. A story that tells how someone might be drawn back to old haunts to, as Conan the Cimmerian once put it in “The People of the Black Circle”: “like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom from some source of sorcery.”

Sometimes, we return to Arkham for renewal.

I had returned to Arkham from the “real” world with fewer victories than I expected. I had been defeated, I of noble blood, noble of its kind. I needed Ambrose’s familiariaty, even that part of him that could slip from poetry to venom in a single heartbeat.
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire, “Under an Arkham Moon” in
Black Wings III (2014) 59

The twist in this story, when teratophilia proves both sexual and reciprocal, is a delicious one of its kind. Lovecraft always left the nature of the Unnamable deliberately ambiguous, and Salmonson & Pugmire have kept it so here. The terrible truth behind Lovecraft’s original story was very different, but this is still a fine sequel. A return to Lovecraft country, a refreshing dip for dark spirits who remember when Lovecraftian fiction was less hung up in the trappings of the Mythos and evoked more of the strange, decadent mood of Lovecraft’s early fiction, when friends scared each other to look into a house haunted by something they could not give a name to.

“Under an Arkham Moon” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire was first published in Black Wings III (2014); it was reprinted in Pugmire’s collection An Ecstasy of Fear (2019, Centipede Press).

The Terrible Truth Behind The Unnamable

The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable”

Lovecraft gets a bit of a ribbing for “unnamable,” “unspeakable,” or “indescribable” critters – which he never had a monopoly on and was never so addicted to as a lot of critics like to think; the story in question in fact begins by making fun of the tendency in stories like Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” or Guy de Maupussant’s “The Horla.”

Beyond that though, Lovecraft would take his inspirations where he found them, and this includes the family copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which purports to be a religious history of New England but manages to cram in so many weird bits and pieces that you’d be amazed—witchcraft narratives, ghost stories, sea monsters, the works. The bit which inspired Lovecraft’s story is a very obscure bit of gossip about a “thing with a blemished eye”:

At the Southward there was a Beaſt, which brought forth a Creature, which might pretend unto ſomething of an Humane Shape. Now the People minded that the Monſter had a Blemiſh in one Eye, much like what a profligate Fellow in the Town was known to have. This Fellow was hereupon examin’d; and having upon his examination, conſeſ’d his inſandous Beſtialities; for which he was deſervedly Executed.
—Mather, MCM Book VI, Chapter V, Tenth Remark

Which was a hard go, the worse so because while Mather names no names, we know what actually inspired the anecdote.

George Spencer, an ugly balding man with one “pearle” or false eye, had probably been whipped in Boston for receiving stolen goods, and had also been punished in New Haven for botching an attempt to escape to Virginia. He admitted that he had gained no spiritual benefit from the ministry of the famed John Davenport, that he had not said a single prayer during his five years in New England, and that he read the Bible only when ordered to do so by his master. In February, 1642, Spencer’s life took a cruel turn when a sow gave birth to a dead deformed piglet. The “monster” was completely bald and had “butt one eye in the midle of the face, and thatt large and open, like some blemished eye of a man.” Out of its forehead “a thing of flesh grew forth and hung downe, itt was hollow, and like a mans instrum’ of genration.”

The magistrates arrested Spencer and put him in prison. New Haven had not yet tried a capital crime. Spencer had seen enough of the colony’s system of justice to know that the magistrates expected offenders to confess and repent. He had recently seen a man merely whipped for molesting a child, and as Spencer made clear, he thought that child molestation was a more disgusting crime than bestiality. Yet he denied his guilt until one magistrate “remembered him of thatt place of scripture, he that hideth his sin shall not prosper, butt he yt confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall finde mercie.” Spencer then “answered he was sory and confessed he had done itt,” only to learn that his confession would get him hanged and that mercy would come only from the Lord, not the Colony of New Haven. He retracted and repeated his confession several times in a desperate attempt to find a formula that would save his life. But on April 8, 1642, two months after the birth of the monster, the sow was put to the sword in front of the unrepentant Spencer, and he was hanged, “a terrible example of divine justice and wrath.”
—John M. Murrin, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Colonial America”

Lovecraft was no doubt taken by the layers of obfuscation in Mathers’ account, which only really hinted at the appearance of the unfortunate piglet. Stripped of this mystery and romance, we are left with a man who was wrongly accused and ultimately was executed for an accident of nature by an intolerant society of religious fanatics. A much more banal but frighteningly very real moment in history that served as the seed for some very strange stories.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Room Party Fit for an Elder God” (2025) by Elizabeth Guizzetti

Elder Gods liked cupcakes, right? The text said ritual sweet bread.
—Elizabeth Guizzetti, “Room Party Fit for an Elder God” in Cthulhu FhCon 255

The cuddlification of the Cthulhu cult did not happen overnight. It took a few steady years of fanfiction and pastiche for some of the tropes to gel. Cultists in robes, human sacrifices, silly titles, and wavy daggers did not start out as standard parts of Lovecraft’s Mythos, but became familiar over time. With familiarity came the jokes, cartoons, limericks, and funny stories.

The Cthulhu Mythos is old enough that the cult-trope-driven stories are older than some entire genres of science fiction and fantasy. You can draw a line from “Lights! Camera!! Shub-Niggurath!!!” (1996) by Richard Lupoff through “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes. Increasingly, there is a trend toward examination of the prosaic side of Mythos cult activities. Some are relatively serious tales that try and get into the psychology of Mythos cults like “The Book of Fhtagn” (2021) by Jamie Lackey, while others include things like bake sales and potluck dinners a la Innsmouth (2019) by Megan James, but there is that mingling where the extraordinary becomes grounded in the disturbingly mundane.

Cthulhu FhCon (2025) is an odd anthology that rather embraces the cuddlification and tropes by postulating a convention for eldritch entities and their mortal servitors. The convention tale is an outgrowth of SFF culture, and there have been Mythos versions before, such as Strange Stones (2025) by Edward Lee & Mary SanGiovanni. This is the first time there’s been an entire anthology of such stories…and of course, at least one writer had to address the idea of the room party.

Elizabeth Guizzetti’s “Room Party Fit for an Elder God” is very much a Lovecraftian convention story from a cult-trope point of view. Cult membership is falling off, and if one of the Elder Gods makes an appearance, it’ll grow again. If the priestess is lucky, the God will like the chocolate sardine cupcakes and she might even get her deposit back. As such, it fits well into the ongoing cuddlification of the Cthulhu cult. The collateral damage of the room party is a punchline, not unlike an Addams Family cartoon. What’s a little death and madness when the Elder God really liked your cupcakes?

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger

Why not mash up H.P. Lovecraft with poetry and art that reflects the diversity of the 21st century?

One poem for each month of the year, as an ebook, a book, a calendar, or a day planner, accompanied by nine pieces of art and this note from the artist herself.
—Melissa Yi & Sara Leger, Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025)

The work and person of H. P. Lovecraft has been inspiring poetry for a long time (e.g. “H. P. Lovecraft” (1937) by Elizabeth Toldridge, “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman, etc.) and the form and nature of those works have been diverse, covering nearly every style and format of poem, from Cthulhu on Lesbos (2011) by David Jalajel to “Lovecraft Thesis #5” (2021) by Brandon O’Brien, from reflections on Lovecraft’s racism to new stories set in Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Melissa Yi (also published as Melissa Yuan-Innes) and artist Sara Leger bring their skills together for this small art project, which consists of 12 original poems in various styles (from Shakespearan sonnet to Japanese haiku), 10 of the poems that inspired those poems, and 9 original illustrations that capture something of the feel and aesthetic of the poems. The nature of these poems might be best illustrated by a side-by-side comparison of a poem and its source:

What happens to those interned? Is she tucked in a Straightjacket at night? Or dunked in ice water— If he puts up a fight? Do you extract her lady parts Plus her frontal lobe— Or electroshock him and restart? Perhaps seclude them in cells ’til they do what they’re told. Or do they grow bold?	What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
“Arkham” (November) by Melissa Yi	“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

Hughes’ “Harlem” (1951) is one of the most recognized and influential poems of the 20th century, not in least because it inspired the title to Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The metaphor of the raisin in the sun speaks to the social and psychological forces that Black Americans and communities have, and continue, to face in a culture and society that holds high ideals of freedom while continuing to perpetuate prejudice and inequality at every level.

By taking “Harlem” as her model for “Arkham,” Yi is implicitly drawing on both the familiar poem’s form and its imagery by inference. Her “Arkham” is not the witch-haunted city, as Robert E. Howard wrote about in his poetic tribute, but the sanitarium, the good-bye-box where people who don’t fit in are locked away and subject to treatments and mistreatment, deprived of liberty and rights, subject to physical and psychological efforts to get them to conform to what society wants them to be.

“Arkham” doesn’t quite have the rhythm of “Harlem,” even though it is an obvious echo of Hughes’ trumpet blast. The imagery is pointed, but the target is hazy; lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy weren’t a feature of mental health treatment in Lovecraft’s time, and ice-dunking and clitorectomies suggest still older institutions. So “Arkham” isn’t referencing a single institution at a given place or time, but the idea of the mental asylum, the sanitarium, the Bedlam of all times and places, the institutional limbo where a few of Lovecraft’s characters have ended up (which has become a literary trope).

It is a fun experiment. Not every poem works well on its own, but pairing them up with the originals does help show the work. Sara Leger‘s artwork is fun, though the print-on-demand publication doesn’t show it off to its best effect. The single best piece is the cover, with the eponymous Cthulhu’s Cheerleader striding forward, bloody pomp-poms in hand, wings spread, as the Big C looks on. While some folks might argue that Cthulhu doesn’t need a cheerleader, if he is to remain relevant into the 21st century and beyond, I think Cthulhu will need every cheerleader he can get.

Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger was published by Windtree Press.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” (1979) by Janice Arter & “To the Shade of HPL” (1981) by Margaret Carter

Dr. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club in 1965 after a trip to Romania; this was before the publication of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), but after the first full biography of Stoker, Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula (1962). It was the beginning of a serious opening-up of Dracula scholarship, serious scholarship that had fans and researchers scouring archives, uncovering Stoker’s original notes and manuscript, critically annotating and comparing different editions of the text. The work was international, and the fan club contained both enthusiastic vampire fiction fans and literary historians, and it published official journals and other publications.

In 1985, the Count Dracula Fan Club published an annual, a special Lovecraft-themed collectors issue. The highlight of the issue might be Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s brief article “The Revision of Dracula”—the first real address of the Lovecraft/Miniter Dracula revision anecdote from the Lovecraftian scholar’s point of view. However, it was full of more than that, including two neat little Mythos poems by women authors, “The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter and “To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter

Published for the first time in The Further Perils of Dracula (1979), a Count Dracula Fan Club poetry anthology, Arter’s 18-line poem is a lyric poem, opening with the invitation “Come live with me and drink my blood,” and working through a list of familiar activites, including:

Come live with me and we shall learn
The power to make the oceans burn,
The secrets of the Scroll of Thoth,
The chant to summon Yog-Sothoth,
And we shall be as one.

This is a poem for lovers in multiple senses of the term. It is a very romantic invitation, of one horror fan to another, inviting activities that would be horroric to anyone except another horror fan. By the 70s, Lovecraft’s Mythos was being woven into the pantheon of familiar horrors, and Yog-Sothoth could comfortably rub shoulders next to vampires and witches. It is the kind of opening-of-the-heart that would only really work from one true horror fan to another, someone who will both get the references and the appeal of going to the Sabbath or dwelling in unimagined space with someone else who gets it.

“To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter

Published for the first time in Daymares from the Crypt (1981), a chapbook collection of Carter’s poetry, and was re-released in an ebook of the same-name in 2012. Carter’s verse takes the form of an ode in 12 lines, a tribute to Lovecraft and the Mythos he had spawned, which Carter herself had contributed to over the years, and would continue to do so in the years to come. Some of the imagery is in the same vein as Arter’s poem, emphasizing the Mythos experience and aesthetic:

The hand that traced those tales of nameless lore
Never lent its grave-chilled touch to me—
Yet I have groped my way down Arkham’s hills
To watch the rites of Innsmouth by the sea.

The difference is, Carter isn’t just evoking Lovecraft’s Mythos, but Lovecraft himself. The Old Gent had already become a part of his own Mythos, his growing legend entwined with the stories he had written, and the artificial mythology being slowly expanded by fans and pros alike. Carter isn’t directly inviting the reader to participate in nameless rites or to dance with ghouls, but is expressing her own experience of doing so, made possible only by H. P. Lovecraft.

While both of these poems are fairly minor in the grand scheme of fantasy and horror literature, they are examples of the growing acceptance of Lovecraft and the Mythos in the 1980s, even in Dracula fandom, which was only tangential to Lovecraft.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi (최재훈) trans. Janet Hong

THE CALL OF THE FRIEND is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project, where leading Korean speculative fiction writers reimagine the works of horror master H.P. Loveccraft, while honoring his eerie, grotesque imagery and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, they update his ideas for a global audience.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), inside cover flap

The Call of the Friend (친구의 부름) is a standalone black-and-white graphic novel by Korean comic artist and writer JaeHoon Choi (최재훈), first published in 2020. The English translation by Janet Hong was published in 2025 by Honford Star. The story is set in contemporary urban Korea, where university student Wonjun checks in on his friend Jingu, whose sister (a K-pop idol) has recently committed suicide, implicitly because of a scandalous affair. It is in Jingu’s apartment that Wonjun spots a strange idol.

The story that unspools is not a straightforward linear narrative. It is intimate, focused on Wonjun, with everyone other than Jingu essentially faceless. Readers get pieces of the puzzle, but the full story isn’t spelled out for them, readers are forced to interpret the evidence as best they can. In this, they are given a single helpful hint in a short essay at the end of the book:

Some live a life of violence, while others make every effort to avoid stepping on an insect. But no matter the severity or type of sin, the moment we realize we have sinned, we experience fear. The fear isn’t so much the dread of punishment or retribution. It stems from the knowledge that we’ve hurt someone or caused their unhappiness, and the sin manifests as fear. Depending on the intensity of this fear, we can either be liberated from our guilt or ensnared by it.

While I don’t want the theme to be too obvious in this story, I hope readers might be able to tangibly experience Wonjun’s guilt. These long, nocturnal reflections on our current human condition, set against H. P. Lovecraft’s world of unexplained fears, have prompted me to contemplate the words we’ve spoken, the conflict and guilt we’ve endured, as well as the subsequent death and feat they cause.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), 104-105

As an essay, it is slightly reminiscent of Arthur Machen’s prologue to “The White People” on ‘sorcery & sanctity.’ The idea of fear as a fundamental response to a transgression—an instinctive response to some imbalance caused by action or inaction—and that this fear can liberate or ensnare guilt, has its attractions. Yet how does this philosophical approach jive with Lovecraft’s famous proclamation that “the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”?

When you don’t know what the sin was. When the only way you have to measure how badly you’ve hurt someone is the measure of the fear you feel in response to it. Whether this is what JaeHoon Choi intended with The Call of the Friend I cannot say, but the presence of the Cthulhu Mythos in this story is suggestive of something that goes beyond tawdry K-pop star drama and the suicide of the sister of a friend. It suggests that there’s something much bigger at work here, something unseen and unknowable, and it threatens to ensnare Wonjun entirely.

The Call of the Friend is somewhat reminiscent of Minetaro Mochizuki’s Hauntress (1993) in general outline—both of them deal with young university students living on their own, the one checking in on the other to whom something has happened, and with a supernatural horror creeping into their lives—and more importantly, that sensation of an urban legend unfolding in a space of familiar, contemporary surroundings. These are characters ill-equipped to deal with the psychological terrors of their experiences. They have no strong faith, no occult skills or leanings. They are regular people, with limited resources, facing the uncanny.

That works. JaeHoon Choi takes advantage of the prosaic setting and characters to make the distortions of perception all the more disturbing for taking place in setting of absolute reality. Readers will question how much of this is in Wonjun’s head, will wonder when we slip into dream, hallucination, or twisted memory. The idol forms a locus of manifestation, a central image to embody what it is happening, but even until the end, readers have to decide how much of this is really happening.

The comic ends like an unresolved chord. Readers don’t get answers. Only the impression that they have witnessed something. Perhaps that is the answer itself.

Janet Hong’s translation of the graphic novel into English is very readable and smooth. While most of the graphic novel itself has relatively sparse dialogue, the essay at the end is very clear and easy to understand, and a valuable key to understanding the work.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi and translated by Janet Hong is available at the Honford Star website as an ebook or softcover.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“All Is Illusion” (1940) by C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

Four years after H. P. Lovecraft introduced them by mail, on 7 June 1940, Henry Kuttner, Jr. married Catherine Lucille Moore in New York City. Kuttner was 25, Moore was 29. The witnesses were Mrs. Beverly Claire Finlay (wife of the Weird Tales artist Virgil Finlay) and Mrs. Annie Kuttner (the groom’s mother). It would mark both a new personal and professional chapter in the life of both writers.

Moore no longer had her job. Kuttner had no other source of employment; his draft registration card, filed in 1940, lists him as self-employed, and his agent Julius Schwartz as his next of kin. They both needed to buckle down to write, and having already completed their first collaboration in “Quest of the Starstone” (1937), they may well have continued. Certainly, after their marriage, they formed one of the most formidable writing teams in pulp magazine history:

Chacal: Did you ever have any reservations about collaborating with Kuttner?

Moore: Nope. “The Quest of the Star Stone,” our first, worked out well enough to show us we could do it and after that we never gave it much thought. We just went ahead and wrote, either separately or together, depending on how that particular piece of work progressed. Remember, we weren’t turning out stories for posterity, but for this month’s rent. I so often hear of collaborators who tear down each other’s work—even successful, long-established collaborators. We didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. We just traded typewriters; when one got stuck the other took over with a minimum of rewriting. Often none at all. Usually none at all. With us, at least, it worked out fine. It was also very nice to have somebody who could take over when the other guy got stuck. We sincerely loved each other’s writing and enjoyed tremendously what came out of the other guy’s typewriter. It was a fine relationship.
—“Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 30

One friend of the married couple actually got a chance to witness this in practice:

Hank came feeling his was downstairs, and, as he located the coffee, the typewriter upstairs began to make noises. One half hour, maybe three-quarters, we’d had our morning coffee, and Hank said something about going upstairs and getting dressed. He disappeared.

They didn’t pass each other on the stairs, but Catherine turned up very shortly afterward, reconstructed the coffee, which Hank and I had finished, and I had my second wake-up with her—with the typewriter going on at the same rate upstairs. Once more, say three-quarters of an hour passed, and Catherine said something about getting into day clothes, and disappeared. Hanke came down, dressed, and said something cheerful about breakfast—with the typewriter going on as usual. This went on. They worked at it in shifts, in relays, continuously, until about two o’clock that Saturday afternoon, when the one downstairs did not go upstairs when the one upstairs came down. This time the typing stopped.

[…] I learned later, from John [Campbell], that they always worked that way, and worked so well at it that the only way he could tell who had written what was if the word ‘gray’ came in the story. One of them habitually spelled it ‘grey.’
—George O. Smith, The Worlds of George O. Smith (1982) 31

“Grey” is the preferred British spelling, and Moore had a tendency to use it in her private letters (although in publication, editors had their own way, e.g. “The Cold Gray God” (1935) by C. L. Moore). Moore commented on their differences in writing:

CA: People have trouble, don’t they, identifying which stories are yours and which are collaborations?

MOORE: Well, mine were probably a good deal more verbose, and I tended to have compound sentences. Henry wrote very tersely. That’s about the only difference, except that I was greatly prone to adjectives and so forth, and he got his effect over without quite so much embellishment. There was a distinct difference, but in most cases I think not enough for the general reader to be aware of.
—Interview with C. L. Moore in Contemporary Authors vol. 104, 327

Kuttner’s view on Moore’s style is paraphrased by Guy Amory:

Kuttner likes the way C. L. Moore writes (and who doesn’t). He wishes he could write like her—but claims that when he tries imitating it comes out so much trash. If you’ve read any of his stories you realize that Hank is a master of the bingety-boom type of fiction—but with feeling! He puts more Incident in ten pages of Elak than any other author in WEIRD, and makes you feel it. He paints his picture with masterfully abrupt dabs, while Moore lays on her horror with the touch of a mosaic master, building up. Kuttner knocks you down and keeps you bouncing. Moore swirls you in cobwebs and totes you away into infinity. Combining their efforts in ’37 for QUEST OF THE STARSTONE they turned out something to remember … with Hank’s flair for lightning pace and Moore’s for description they went to town.
—Guy Amory, “Is It True What They Say About Kuttner?”
in Future Fantasia (1939) vol. 1, no. 2

Because of the way they worked, it isn’t possible to discern, after 7 July 1940, which stories were written by husband or wife; they both collaborated so intimately that most stories are attributed to them both, even if they appeared under the byline Henry Kuttner. The exception is stories that appeared under C. L. Moore’s own byline, these are believed to be largely or entirely her own work. While everyone has their theories, attributing stories like the Hogben Chronicles to Kuttner or “The Twonky” to Moore, there isn’t any real way to tell. With this marriage of personalities and talents, Moore had ended the first stage of her professional career and entered a new one.

“All Is Illusion” was first published in Unknown Apr 1940, as by Henry Kuttner. It has sometimes also been credited to Moore-and-Kuttner, and not unreasonably so: there’s no reason to suspect that Moore and Kuttner weren’t collaborating before their marriage, and the strong shift in Moore’s later science fiction in stories like “Miracle in Three Dimensions” (1939) and “Greater Than Gods” (1939) show at least Kuttner’s influence on her style, if not some active cooperation. So what can we say about who wrote “All Is Illusion” for Unknown?

Moore looked around for the waiter, but could not locate him in the swirling gray smoke.
—”All Is Illusion” in Unknown Apr 1940

The comment on “gray” vs. “grey” might be seen as a clue, but unfortunately, that only works if we have the original manuscript to work with. Editors tend to impose their own spellings on stories that appear in their magazines, and most American editors during the period preferred “gray.”

The story itself is, if not a shaggy dog story, then something very closely akin to it. To work, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief and a familiarity with at least the broad outlines of Classical mythology, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because it is framed as an anecdote and presented as an intrusion of fantasy into a contemporary setting. There is no world-building as such, and very little explanation; the story even borrows on some of the most well-worn tropes available for such a tale:

Moore turned.

The tavern was gone. Only the empty lot remained.
—”All Is Illusion” in Unknown Apr 1940

This intrusion of familiar fantasy in a contemporary setting with the addition of a strong comedic tone, rather than being played for horror or moralism, is a Hallmark of the 1940s fantasy published in Unknown. Darker shades of similar ideas would be played with by Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch, and more serious attempts would be the playground of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, but here in this story we get the surreal, the fantastic, the hallucinatory all in a setting of very firmly established reality.

There is little about this story that screams “C. L. Moore wrote me.” The early fantasy section, with the disappearing tavern inhabited by the mythological figures, I can easily believe might have been a C. L. Moore section; so too, the reference to Midsummer Eve echoes “Miracle in Three Dimensions” (1939) and the transformations in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The details about New York read more like the kind of thing Henry Kuttner would pick up on. Humor and ridiculous happenings were not a strong aspect of C. L. Moore’s early work, but both are strongly present here. The prose itself does not read hugely different from either of their individual works from the period.

There is no strong reason to either suspect or deny C. L. Moore’s involvement in this story. It was credited to Henry Kuttner on publication, and is only co-credited to Moore afterward because of the revelation of the nature of their collaboration, but the seamless nature of that collaboration means trying to pick and choose between whether a story is a Moore tale or a Kuttner tale is ultimately a false choice. The two writers came together during the late 1930s, and the fusion of their work in 1940 gave way to something new and largely indistinguishable from its parts.

The fat old man arose and went toward the back. He passed close to Moore’s table, and, glancing aside, said in a kindly voice, “All is Maya—illusion.” He hiccuped, drew himself up in a dignified manner, and hastily continued his journey into the smoke.
—”All Is Illusion” in Unknown Apr 1940

Scans of “All Is Illusion” are available online at the Internet Archive.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Chosen” (2015) by Lyndsey Holder

Brown Jenkin was agitated, running circles around me, climbing up my back and crawling down into my lap, staring at me with his beady black eyes. I reached out to him tentatively and he nuzzled my hand, stirring a strange kind of love in my heart.
—Lyndsey Holder, “Chosen” in She Walks in Shadows (2015) 160

Familiar horrors inspire a kind of wish-fulfillment. Thousands of readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat have imagined what it would be like to be undead, ageless and powerful, bound by night and loosed from the morals of humanity. Roleplaying games like Werewolf: the Apocalypse let fans of werewolf movies and lore vicariously embody the power and ferocity of the change. Contemporary witches look back at the witch trials and pay tribute to those hypothetical ancestors, sometimes drawing imaginary connections to the persecuted of Salem Village in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Lovecraftian horrors are not so familiar as vampires and werewolves, and so there are fewer who wish to truly meet or embody those horrors. Fewer readers express a desire to be Pickman-esque ghouls than to become vampires, though more than a few would happily undergo the change into a Deep One and dwell in wonder and glory forever beneath the waves. While there are a few Lovecraftian witches, occultists like Keziah Mason and Joseph Curwen are often still figures of horror, not mentors or figures of nostalgia akin to Dracula.

“Chosen” by Lyndsey Holder thus enters a rather scarce territory. We very often see Keziah Mason presented as the stereotypical witch, the old hag with the familiar, steeped in the blood libel of child sacrifice from old legends. Sometimes, rarely, we see her as the archetypal Lovecraftian witch, the one who embodies the kind of freedom, wisdom, and power—and attracts the kind of prosecution—that embodies the more mythical ancestors of contemporary Wiccans, as inspired by The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret A. Murray.

Holder’s story is very short, just six pages long, short and to the point, and all too easy to spoil. The biggest unanswered question might be why the nameless girl protagonist is a child in Vancouver, very far from Arkham as the broom flies. However, Lyndsey Holder is herself Canadian. Maybe there’s a bit of wish-fulfillment in this story, a fictional accounting of a pilgrimage she would have taken if the dreams had come to her. Certainly, Mythos fans can appreciate why they might save and scrimp to travel thousands of miles just to be there, where horror once walked. More than a few fans stride the streets of Providence and Salem every year, after all, thinking of Lovecraft and witches.

The horror in this story doesn’t really come from Keziah Mason or her familiar Brown Jenkin. They are familiar figures, and there is something comforting in their portrayal. The horror in the story is how the protagonist reacts to them, how her life changes when they become a part of it. The ending is certainly a fitting one. Not every Lovecraft fan would choose that way to become a part of the Mythos, but for those who are given a chance to be part of the story…well, a few readers at least will understand.

“Chosen” by Lyndsey Holder was published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and its reprints, it has not otherwise been republished.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate” I earn from qualifying purchases.