Shadows of Innsmouth (2014) by Gonzo

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with cartoon depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

In 1992, author William Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh published Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), consisting of a book with a 3.5″ floppy disk. It was an art project as much as anything else: the book was treated with photosensitive chemicals so that the words would begin to fade as they were exposed to light; the disk would run once and then encrypt itself. Buyers were purchasing a not so much a physical product as an experience and a challenge: how did they want to experience this, knowing that it would be rendered unreadable by the act of reading? How would they preserve it?

It was a very cyberpunk stunt, and clever programmers eventually cracked the encryption; even before that, copies of the text were available on the web, shared through networks of pirates and fans. The text survives today, even though it was designed to be forgotten, and now on a near-obsolete physical media format, because of determined interest and repeated, if often shadowy, lines of transmission. If you download the text of Agrippa now, you will probably get an accurate copy of the original text—but how would you know? What would you compare it to? The digital archivist finds themselves in a position not unlike a scholar of ancient manuscripts, comparing different and fragmented versions of texts to discern clues as to the route of transmission.

Early digital works, more than most, tend to illustrate the difficulties of preservation. The lack of physical substrate means the technological end of things—what’s the file format? Do we have a program that can open that? What operating system does it use? Do we have a computer that can run that?—means that trying to experience these works as they were originally is increasingly difficult. In many cases, the original project files and source code of a digital work, the programs used to create it, may be long gone. All we have is the end product, which may have been compressed, reformatted, or translated in various ways across its route of transmission.

Which is to say that you’re probably never going to read Shatter (1985) on a Macintosh Plus in MacPaint, or see the magic of how Batman: Digital Justice (1990) was put together on a Macintosh II that boasted a whopping 8MB of RAM. However, you can still buy print collections of those comics—which is more than most digital works can say.

The internet provides a direct market for creators to sell their works, in many cases bypassing middlemen and brick-and-mortar stories; for artists in particular, having a website meant they could sell directly to their customers through various paradigms—memberships, purchasable files, mail order—and the product didn’t have to be physical. Potential buyers who wanted a digital comic could go to the website, fork over a credit card number, and access the gallery of images or download a .zip or .PDF with the images. There was piracy, and various attempts at anti-piracy measures, because nothing was perfect, but they were generally good enough, especially for honest merchants and customers. Systems like this still exist today, although many creators have, for ease and because of issues with payment processors, opted to use middleman websites like Itch.io or DriveThruComics.

There are a lot of benefits to this kind of digital ecosystem: niche artists who would struggle to find a publisher can self-publish and still find an audience for their works; customers interested in such niche works have a better chance of finding such materials, which tends to foster the creation of more of it. This is especially true for works of parody and erotica, which often struggle with traditional print distribution channels.

Digital artist Gonzo began (as near as I can tell) with his own website, Taboo Studios, circa 2008. Gonzo created erotic comics using 3D rendering software, which has become increasingly available as a in the early 2000s thanks to the release of graphic processing cards for home use and improvements in software, often with horror settings and narratives, and frequently focused on monster sex as the kink of choice. In 2014, Gonzo published the first part of one of the first of his erotic monster sex comics based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, “Shadows over Innsmouth.”

Shadows of Innsmouth is an almost faithful retelling of the H P Lovecraft classic, ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’. I say ‘almost’ faithful as all of the core events in the original book happens in the comic, but this time with more sex, a female lead character and its set in 2014 not 1914 – But I’m sure you will consider these changes all good changes 🙂

The story starts with Jennifer the new assistant librarian at Miskatonic University who happens to be going through a rough patch in her life, she finds the Lovecraftian novel and quickly discovers that the Innsmouth of legend is based on a real town. Her curiosity intrigued she sets off to Innsmouth to discover which parts of the book are true and which existed only in Lovecrafts twisted imagination�

This 94 page storyline based comic is the first part and features, weird mysteries, kinky sex, stranger sex, the deep ones, amphibian creatures from the sea, tribal island girls, cheating, monster breeding, emotional turmoil, selling out the future of a town in a demonic pact� and much more.

A must for any Erotic Horror fan and the first in a series of re-imaginings of his work.
—Gonzo, read me.txt file that accompanies “Shadow over Innsmouth”

Foreword to “Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo

This is a work that should be seen in the same vein as “The Statement of Randolph Carter Twisted” (2024) by Lisa Shea or The Colour Out of Space (2024) by H. P. Lovecraft & Sara Barkat: artistic re-interpretations of the original work. “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is a likely suspect for an erotic adaptation in particular because the monster sex is already there—just off the page.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo, page 13

Gonzo’s style in this is reminiscent of 1970s European erotic comics, with two large panels taking up the entire page providing room for detail and dialogue or exposition, although Gonzo could and did juggle up his formats occasionally. Like most 2000s-era render artwork, the figures are relatively stiff, and Gonzo wasn’t above borrowing artwork to use as skins for books or wall art—you might recognize the cover of Lovecraft Unbound (2009) on the cover of the books stacked on the table, for example, and there are other borrowings as well.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 71

Gonzo included sexually explicit artwork—it is a pornographic work, after all—but most of the action builds up to the explicit scenes. As is typical, the limitations of the software and modeling tend to show in difficulty rendering non-Caucasian features, and many of the skin textures on objects are distorted.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 83

Gonzo also clearly took inspiration where he found it; the transition from human to Deep One may be reminiscent of an Animorphs, but is a familiar conceit to show the progress of time and transformation. The Deep Ones themselves tend to look a bit like cave trolls from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings (2001), although Gonzo draws in the Gillman from the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) in the second part—as well as another Lovecraftian critter, this one with tentacles.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 117

These erotic render artworks may seem a little strange and quaint today, because the state of the art has moved on. A decade of artists have worked creating custom textures, models, working with more advanced programs and faster hardware. Gonzo’s 2014 art reflects the time and tools with which they were made.

In their stated goal of creating an erotic adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Gonzo was largely successful. It is certainly no worse than similar efforts like The Adult Version of Dracula (1970) or Evil Head (2012). Gonzo hits the beats of the story, with their own little twists for the sake of titillation.

Nor was Gonzo alone in creating Lovecraftian erotic works using rendering software and available through much the same way. Artist Iopriest created two Lexi Crane comics, and the artist known as Jag27/Otto Maddox worked Lovecraftian entities into their horror-themed erotic horror comics as well. This was a niche that obviously found at least some audience.

Besides “Shadows of Innsmouth,” Gonzo (now Gonzo Studios) completed adaptations of “From Beyond,” “Dagon,” “Azathoth,” and “Call of Cthulhu.” While Taboo Studios’ web page is defunct, Gonzo has moved their wares to Renderotica, where they are still available for purchase and download.

For the moment.

It has to be emphasized that there is no guarantee that “Shadows of Innsmouth” will be available in a decade, or a year, or even tomorrow. An issue with a payment processor, an untimely death, an accident with a server…and the files will be gone, less accessible than the text of Agrippa. Like “The Fluff at the Threshold” (1996) by Simon Leo Barber, there isn’t really a dedicated archive for these kind of digital creative works. You can buy them, for now, and pirates probably still circulate copies, but the continued existence of these comics remains tenuous. They might disappear at any time.

The world will be a little less weird when that happens.

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.

“Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner

When Mrs. Phillips Gamwell, Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s aunt, returned to Providence from Cambridge, Mass., she and H.P.L. took an apartment on College Street near my dwelling. I had heard of Mrs. Gamwell before, so it was not long before I was visiting her, thusly bringing about my acquaintance with her nephew.
—Marian F. Bonner, “Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.”
in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) 23

The heart ceases to beat.

The last breath is released.

The countdown begins.

When someone dies, all that is left of them are the physical records—the letters, manuscripts, and other writings—and the memories of them in those still living who knew them. Both are perishable. Unless efforts are taken to preserve them, both will be lost. However, the living memories are the more fragile, the more liable to fade or shift with age, and once the person who holds them gone, they are gone forever, unless some effort was made to save them in fixed form. Some efforts were made to save H. P. Lovecraft’s written legacy: his stories, poems, letters, even the scraps were saved by friends and heirs.

The memories of his life, however, were not systematically preserved. Friends, neighbors, and acquaintances wrote and published their impressions of H.P.L. sporadically; there was no attempt to interview his surviving aunt Annie Gamwell while she was alive, for instance. In hindsight, that looks like an oversight—but in truth, it is the rare individual whose memory is preserved long after their death, except in census records and government databases, dusty family bibles and photo albums. Lovecraft, at least, inspired sufficient publication to catch a few recollections and memoirs before those who knew him passed on themselves.

Marian F. Bonner was Lovecraft’s neighbor and correspondent, although she was primarily a friend of his aunt. In 1945 she put together a brief memoir for the collection Rhode Island on Lovecraft. Bonner was not, apparently, a reader of his fiction; seemed entirely outside of the posthumous cult of personality that was Lovecraft’s fandom, or the politics of amateur journalism. Her random collection of recollections and impressions does not speak to any particular image or issue in Lovecraft by anyone else. It is a brief sliver of a life, and several of her impressions were apparently absorbed from Annie Gamwell, rather than directly from interactions with H.P.L.:

His aunt once told me of the meals he would pick up at various, unearthly hours, perhaps at a diner. He abused his digestion horribly according to her reports. His use of sugar in his favorite beverage, coffee, was enormous.
—Marian F. Bonner, “Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.”
in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) 24

At the time “Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.” was published, none of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Bonner had seen print. Lovecraft’s letters would confirm much of what Bonner had said—the letters with the cat heads that Lovecraft had drawn on them, the Gaol Lane anecdote, the 1936 Christmas tree, his tendency to practically cover a postcard with tiny writing.

It is only a short memoir, and there is almost nothing in it that isn’t covered elsewhere by other memoirs or letters. Yet it captures her relationship with Lovecraft and his aunt. We are richer for its existence than we would be without it, for it is a piece of Lovecraft’s life we wouldn’t have had, otherwise.

As an addendum, at the John Hay Library at Brown University, a note survives which is attributed to Bonner:

Bridget Mullaney was one of the Lovecraft family’s servants during the 1890s. She was apparently unaware that Lovecraft’s cousin Phillips Gamwell had died in 1916, or the cause of the family’s slow financial dissolution. The black sheep uncle was Edwin Phillips. It is interesting to compare these third-hand impressions of a young H. P. Lovecraft with the recollections of the Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess.

“Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.” was first published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) and the 1946 second edition; it was subsequently reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998), Ave Atque Vale (2018), and Lovecraft Annual #9 (2015), alongside her letters with Lovecraft. It has also been translated into German by Malte S. Sembten for Namenlose Kulte (2006).

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.

“A Clicking in the Shadows” (2002) by Chad Hensley & W. H. Pugmire

Roach smell is distinctive. A kind of sickly, musty reek that clings to places; sign of the often unseen dwellers in darkness. At night, sometimes, you can lie awake, dreading the skitter of tiny feet. Knowing they’re there. Knowing they could appear anywhere. On your toothbrush. On the ceiling. Walking across your face… and they often incite a visceral reaction, these alien creatures which cohabit the welcoming space that is human habitation. A kind of horror that has nothing to do with grimoires or ancient gods, but of much more mundane and realistic issues of filth, disease, and the invasion of personal space.

What a wonderful idea for a story, they must have thought, before writing “A Clicking in the Shadows.”

“Can you smell them? Yep, they’re nearby now, right enough. By their stench shall ye know them! Tryin’ to squeeze through the spaces, sure enough. They stink to all-mighty heaven.”
—Chad Hensley & W. H. Pugmire, “A Clicking in the Shadows” in
A Clicking in the Shadows and Other Tales (2002) 7

By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”

W. H. Pugmire was one of the most evocative voices in Lovecraftian horror from about the 1970s until his death in 2019. Chad Hensley is probably better known as the editor of EsoTerra: The Journal of Extreme Culture than as a horror writer, though he’s put out a fair bit of work over the years. The two writers collaborated together, and “A Clicking in the Shadows” is the premiere piece in their (now very obscure) joint collection A Clicking in the Shadows And Other Tales (2002).

From 1997 until 2003, I lived in Seattle, Washington. Wilum Pugmire lived down the street from me. So it was easy to meet up, critic each other’s fiction, as well as collaborate. We’ve written one poem and three short stories together, one of which wound up in the mass market paperback anthology The Darker Side: Generations of Horror. Wilum and I also collaborated on a chapbook of short stories titled A Clicking in the Shadows and Other Tales published in 2002. The lead story received an honorable mention in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. I’m really pleased and proud to have collaborated with Wilum and hope to do so again one day.
—Madhouse Introduction: Meet Chad Hensley (6 Apr 2014)

Oftentimes with collaborations, one name may be more recognizable than the other, and gain the bulk of the attention from critics. In this case, Pugmire is certainly the more well-known in Lovecraftian circles, and in his introduction to A Clicking in the Shadows, Robert M. Price writes:

All seven of their tales herein contained seem to take place in Sesquas Valley or at least in a kindred state of mind. In fact, a perfect image for the mood of these stories would have to be the scene in “A Clicking in the Shadows” where one character frantically wields a can of poison bug-spray to whelm a looming tide of horrific vermin. The spray itself is as poisonous as the I’ll it aims to eradicate, and one is not sure whether its intended path to relief is to destroy the pests or to put the pestered out of their worldly misery! Such is the desperate, sweetly poisonous atmosphere through which we move in these stories. (4)

I don’t think that’s strictly accurate. While one story in the collection, “Hairs of the Mother” by Hensley, is explicitly set in Sesqua Valley, none of the others are. “A Clicking in the Shadows” is set in Mississippi, far from the Pacific Northwest where Sesqua Valley is located, so from a purely pedantic geographical point, it doesn’t hold up. The question of whether it occupies a bit of psychogeography akin to Sesqua Valley is more subjective. Pugmire’s bit of personal Lovecraft country is aggressively rural or semi-rural; there are houses, a small town, but it’s the unmanaged wilderness that is the Valley itself. Hensley’s stories, at least in this slim volume, tend to more urban locales; nor is Hensley building a mythology. Some of the stories in A Clicking in the Shadows are explicitly or implicitly part of the Arkham myth-cycle, but they’re not the legends of some particular eldritch entity or place, but it is primarily an aesthetic anthology. Two different voices that sometimes work in harmony.

“A Clicking in the Shadows” is an effective bit of harmony. The story is brief, and holds to a very down-to-earth horror vibe until near the end, when things ratchet up from the realistic to the uncanny to the frankly eldritch. It reminds of another collaboration, “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson, where the resulting product is reminiscent of the work of both authors but also finds its own voice, which isn’t quite the same as either on their own.

Late in the night, Thorp was awakened by an itch on his nose. Numbly, in groggy stupor, he clumsily scratched at his face. His fingers found a small, flattened body that squirmed in his hand as he grabbed it.
—Chad Hensley & W. H. Pugmire, “A Clicking in the Shadows” in
A Clicking in the Shadows and Other Tales (2002) 8

It would be nice if, one of these days, a new collection were issued with all of Pugmire’s collaborations. Maybe it would lead more readers toward Chad Hensley; maybe not. Certainly, such a collection would be worth reading, if only to showcase the talents involved.

“A Clicking in the Shadows” was first published in A Clicking in the Shadows And Other Tales (2002); it was republished in Inhuman #6 (2015).

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 Horror in the Stable” (2017) by R. C. Mulhare

The winter evening settled down over the town of Bolton, with snow falling past the windows of the office of Doctors Danforth Kane and myself, Herbert West. Christmas Eve, and while I prepared to ‘hold down the fort’, Danforth donned his greatcoat, preparatory to leaving for the night and a Christmas Eve fete with his intended. As I no longer believed in Jesus of Nazareth as the avatar of God who had clearly turned his back upon his own celebration, if he existed at all, I no longer saw much need for me to celebrate it.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 50

Of all of Lovecraft’s works, “Herbert West—Reanimator” is arguably the most deliberately and gleefully outrageous; with West as the caricature of the mad scientist without conscience, and outrage often heaping on outrage. This lends itself equally gleeful parody, as in “Kanye West—Reanimator” (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky, “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon, and Reanimator (2020) by Juscelino Neco & H. P. Lovecraft, and to reinterpretation that unveils new sides of West and his work, such as “Herbert West in Love” (2012) by Molly Tanzer and “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters. Even direct expansions of the Reanimator mythos, such as Peter Rawlik’s Reanimators (2013) and Reanimatrix (2016), and the anthology Legacy of the Reanimator (2015), are often gleefully transgressive. It’s the nature and appeal of the characters and their stories.

But what does the Re-animator have to do with Christmas?

Arguably, the first Herbert West/Christmas episode was “Herbert West—Reincarnated: Part II, The Horror from the Holy Land” (1999) by Brian McNaughton. This was part of a series of sequels to Lovecraft’s original stories, postulating on the continued existence and adventures of West and the nameless narrator of his tales. In this case, McNaughton had the pair working for Nazi Germany, and tasked with reanimating an almost two-thousand-year-old corpse recovered from the Middle East. This second miraculous resurrection was accomplished, although what returned for its second birth was typical of West’s other experiments. The reanimated Jesus, however, only makes this a Christmas tale by technicality. For stories that are set at the right time and setting, we have to look at works like R. C. Mulhare’s “The Horror in the Stable.”

Horror is a Christmas tradition, although that tradition began with rather staid ghost stories, as composed by M. R. James (and as lampooned by Jerome K. Jerome), and today is more common with horror films set during the holiday, from the classic Black Christmas (1974) and Gremlins (1984) to more contemporary fare like Krampus (2015) and Red Snow (2021). Many of these works take advantage of both the natural attributes of the winter holiday setting—the weather, the social gatherings (or lack thereof), and the emotions those invoke—and the juxtaposition of the bright, festive holiday with gore, terror, melancholy, and fear that are hallmarks of the horror tale.

“The Horror in the Stable” does both of these things. It reads like a lost episode from the original “Herbert West—Reanimator” series, save that it is told from West’s own point of view; the nameless narrator has the night off for Christmas (and, as a jest, Mulhare borrows a bit from Re-Animator (1985), giving the narrator’s name as Danforth Kane). West is called by the police to a nearby barn, though he finds no expectant mother or manger prepared to house a holy infant. Instead there are a pair of brutalized child patients, one of whom is a little too far gone…for anyone except Herbert West.

Taking a vial of the serum which Danforth and I had worked to perfect, from a hidden pocket inside my satchel, I filled a clean syringe with the liquid and injected it into the back of the boy’s skull above the top of the spine. “A painkiller to ease their sufferings in this state,” I said, answering the officer’s questioning look and the better to hide our work in plain sight.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 53

Which has the expected results. If there is a criticism to level at this story, it is that despite West’s victim being a child and the events being set at Christmas, it isn’t quite as outrageous as it could be. The one is more melancholy than sanguine; much of the horror of the story is subtle. The children are orphans who lived hard lives, and West, surprisingly, isn’t unsympathetic. Mulhare takes advantage of the opportunity to flesh West out a little, without detracting from his overall menace or obsession. The finale, when it comes, is gruesome—but it is also familiar.

In his arms he clutched, as a child might clutch a new toy given him for Christmas, a small, pale leg, with one tattered shoe covering the foot.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 56

We’ve seen this before, so it loses something of its impact here. Yet neither is it inappropriate. This is an episode that could slot easily into the existing Herbert West mythology, without need for extensive glosses. Like picking up an old book and finding a leaf uncut, never read all these years, and with the swipe of a knife the lost episode is revealed.

What is Herbert West to Christmas? In the canon of Lovecraftian Christmas tales, like “Keeping Festival” (1997) by Mollie L. Burleson and “A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann, “The Horror in the Stable” slots in as a tale that acknowledges the holiday without celebrating it. West is an atheist; he stands apart from the carolers and the revelers, and if he blasphemes against God and Christ, he does so without acknowledging them. The horrors are secular horrors for a largely secular holiday…and in the context of the Re-Animator tales, that works.

“The Horror in the Stable” by R. C. Mulhare was first published in Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017). It has not been reprinted.

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.

“A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann

My first positive utterance of a sceptical nature probably occurred before my fifth birthday, when I was told what I really knew before, that “Santa Claus” is a myth. This admission caused me to ask why “God” is not equally a myth.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922)

From a strictly literal viewpoint, Christmas is a Christian holiday, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. That simple truth, so celebrated and shorn of pretension during Linus’ famous recitation at the end of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965) should not be forgotten or disputed. However, in the last two thousand plus years since the death of Christ, things have gotten complicated. How and when and why Christmas is celebrated has changed; traditions have arisen, fallen out of favor, or been borrowed in. Christmas tress became popular, and stockings, and gifts wrapped in bright paper and ribbons, but many of these are things essentially secular in nature, enjoyed both by devout Christians of various denominations and folks who have never darkened the door of a church.

The Christian origins have been bedecked by a more elaborate and peculiar mythology of traditions, folkore, fakelore, and rituals. The most notable entity outside the baby Jesus itself might be Saint Nicholas or Father Christmas or Santa Claus; but celebrants certainly know others. Song, story, and film have given St. Nick a wife, reindeer, and a troop of elves, at least in many English-speaking countries. A more shadowy and often peculiar extnded Christmas-time pantheon that might include the Krampus, Zwarte Piet, Père Fouettard, Belsnickel, Yule Cat, Befana, Grýla, Perchta, and Elf-on-a-Shelf, among others.

Why not add Cthulhu to the holiday mythos?

While Lovecraft may not have believed in Santa Claus, or even necessarily the historical Jesus, he certainly enjoyed Christmas, and even had a Christmas tree when he could afford it, exchanged gifts and notes with friends and family. Nor was he immune to the general charms that the holiday offered, as evidenced by “The Festival” (written 1923), where he imagines a strictly pagan celebration “that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.”

Followers-on in the Lovecraftian tradition don’t necessarily go that hard. Some stories are just a bit of Xmas fun.

It was the night before Christmas, and in a haunted house on Ash street, a tiny creature in a floppy red Santa hat and coat manifest in the dark beneath an ornamented tree.
—Melissa McCann, “A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016)

This short tale is not a word-for-word riff off Clement Clarke Moore’s classic “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” although it probably takes general inspiration from the idea. Christmas Eve. The house is quiet. Everyone is safely tucked away. Yet something is stirring.

The short tale works because while it is set on Christmas Eve, it is also set in a haunted house whose inhabitants are more than a little eldritch, though many of the details and backstory are very much left hinted at rather than explicit. The story treads a fine line between humor and seriousness, and the overall tone is vaguely reminiscent of Roger Zelazny’s classic A Night in the Lonesome October. It is a very secular Christmas tale; Linus would have no place here, although a reading from the Necronomicon would probably be appreciated by the inhabitants of this particular house. Nor does McCann try to hamfistedly tie Santa Claus into the Mythos. It is a Christmas story in the way Die Hard is a Christmas story, because of setting and props, recognizable elements and old familiar names.

Which works. McCann isn’t trying to save the world and/or Hanukkah, or set up a Hallmark romantasy with tentacles, but she sets out to tell a well-paced, straightforward tale where the tropes of two very different cults mingle and overlap in ways that are both funny and appropriate.

“A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann can be found as a standalone Amazon ebook, and is also included in her collection King of Midwinter (2019).

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.

“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.