The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881) by John Cleland

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 depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

John Cleland, immersed in the clutches of the law, under circumstances which would have extinguished the fire of genius in any ordinary man, wrote himself out of the poor debtor’s prison and into everlasting fame through his immortal romance The Memoirs of Fanny Hill.

Its extraordinary success brought the attention of the authorities to his work and while condemning it for distribution, they recognized its merit, by granting Cleland a pension, stipulating however that the payment of the pension would cease should he produce any other work of the free nature of Fanny Hill.

These circumstances being of common knowledge, few except the indefatigable bibliophile have attempted to seek out and preserve other works than the romance.

It is however a fact that he did write other works and one of his best The Amatory Adventures of a Surgeon has survived the vandalism of the censor.

In this work Cleland shows himself as the pioneer in the realms of psychology and his keen interpretation of the real impulses of the human mind, prompted all its actions as it is by the sex urge, was one of the early incentives which led to the dvelopment of the present school of writers on the sexual question.

He was one of the first to recognize the value of De Sade in the study of mental vagaries and his reference to Justine or the Misfortune of Virtue in this work, led to the first English translation and general interst afterwards awakened in Sadism.

The text in this edition follows exactly the edition of Rotterdam which is a precise reprint of the original.
A. Machen, “Introduction” in The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (undated edition)

John Cleland was the 18th century English novelist who famously wrote Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). The author of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, however, was James Campbell Reddie, a 19th-century Scottish writer of pornography, who used the pseudonym “James Campbell.” In the 1800s, the appetite for sexually-explicit media was no less than today, but the consequences of its production and sale were more severe; pseudonyms were not unknown, and doctoring up a pornographic work as by someone else far away was a reasonable effort to throw off the police.

So why is the book attributed to John Cleland?

While the title page says “experiences,” the actual cover of the book says “experience.” A quirk of this edition.

Cleland’s notoriety as the author of Fanny Hill would seem to be one reason why he was attributed as the author; presumably an ignorant buyer might recognize that name more readily than “James Campbell.” Likewise, Fanny Hill had at least a modicum of literary cachet, so attributing the work to Cleland might have been an obtuse effort to bypass censorship, at least for those who read no further than the introduction.

So who is “A. Machen,” who learnedly pretends that this is a genuine example of erotic art and literature, rather than a literary hoax-cum-masturbation fodder?

Who it is not is Arthur Machen, the Welsh journalist, thespian, and master of the weird tale who so influenced H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and generations of aficionados of the fantastic literature. Whoever wrote this—and it is not clear exactly when it became appended onto the many illicit reprints of The Amatory Experience of a Surgeon—was trying to do for a new generation what Readie was trying to for his original audience in the 1880s: convince them that some notable literary figure had blessed this work by association.

Arthur Machen, you see, had a reputation.

Before Machen made his name as a weird fictioneer proper, his primary fame lay in a series of translations of European slightly risque or ribald stories into English. These were not erotic works in any strict sense of the term; but classical novels and collections of short stories which were slightly more daring or concerns subjects slightly inappropriate for Victorian British society. In the late 19th century rising literacy rates, British classism, public prudery, and private decadence, combined to form discrete levels of erotic content.

Readers who wished to read the 1,001 Nights in English, for example, their options might include Edward William Lane’s expurgated and bowdlerized Arabian Nights Entertainment (1848/1853), suitable for all ages and available relatively cheaply in bookstores or through libraries, or Sir Richard Francis Burton’s uncensored, unexpurgated, scholarly translation A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night which was published in 10 volumes from 1885 to 1888 by private subscription, and to which Burton famously tacked on a 10,000-word essay on pederasty.

Scholarship and academic interest in subjects like medicine, psychology, anthropology, art, and history gave a veneer of acceptability to works about sexuality or the nude form; money for private editions gave access to works not fit for the hoi polloi. Yet these works were neither hardcore erotica or complete shams, though both abounded for the unwary buyer. Rather, there was an appetite at the time that wanted something that was both of literary quality and not censored and expurgated to death. A very fine line for a translator to walk, and the end product might be politely known as curiosa or gallantia.

Machen’s first work was The Heptameron (1886), a 16th-century collection of stories from Marguerite of Navarre modeled on the 14th-century The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. As Machen later described his translation, which sought to preserve something of the style of the early modern prose:

A graceful book, but, as it strikes me now, a little faded. The Heptameron always reminds me of some embroidered, silken dress that has lain in a dark chest for many long years. It is still beautiful; but the embroidered roses have grown somewhat dim.
Arthur Machen in Arthur Machen: A Bibliography (1923) 6

An amended version of this book was issued a year later as The Fortunate Lovers (1887), and was followed up by The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), which was a collection of tales after the medieval pattern and strongly reminiscent of Balzac and Rabelais; and Fantastic Tales or The Way to Attain (1890), translated from Le Moyen de Parvenir (1617) of Béroalde de Verville. In 1894, the same year Machen published his infamous weird tale “The Great God Pan,” he also published the full twelve-volume Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (Giacomo Girolamo Casanova). If the association with the Yellow Book hadn’t sealed Machen’s reputation, Casanova probably did. Not because any of these works themselves were sexually explicit, but because they had the reputation of being books about sex—which they were, in a sense.

It’s easier to illustrate the point with an example:

In the harbour of Coulon, hard by Niort, there lived a boat-woman, who, by day and night, carried people across the ferry. And it came ot pass that two Grey Friars of the aforesaid Niort were crossing over by themselves in her boat, whereupon, seeing that the passage is one of the longest in France, they began to crave love-dalliance, to which entreaties she gave the answer that became her. But they, who for all their journeying were not aweary, nor by reason of the water were acold, nor by her rfusal ashamed, determined to have her by force, and if she made an outcry to throw her into the river. And she, whose wit was as good and sharp as their was gross and evil, said to them: “I have not so hard a heart as I seam to have, but I entreat you to grant me two things, and then you shall preceive that I am readier to obey than you to command.” So the two Grey Friars swore by St. Francis that she should ask nothing of them that they would not grant, so long as she did them the pleasure they desired. “In the first place, then,” said she, “I require of you that you advertise no man of this matter.” This they promised with great willingness. “And in second place,” she went on, “that you have your pleasure of me by turns, for this would be too great shame to have to do with the one before the face of the other. Determine, then, which shall first enjoy me.” This likewise they deemed a reasonable thing, and the younger of the two granted his companion the prerogative. So when they drew near a small island she said to the former: “Holy father, do you tell your beads and tarry here, while I am gone with your companion to yonder island, and if, when he returns, he gives a good account of me, we will lleave him, and you and I will go apart together.” The young friar leapt on to the island, and awaited there his comrade’s return, whom the baotwoman took off to another island. And when they had come alongside, the woman, making pretence to fasten her boat to a tree, said to him: “Do you go, sweetheart, and look for a place where we may dispose ourselves.” The holy man got on to the island and searched about for some nook fit for the purpose; but no sooner did she seem him on firm gorund than she pushed off, and made for open water, leaving these two holy fathers to their deservings, for all the clamour they made to her. “Wait patiently, good sirs,” said she, “for an angel to come and console you, for to-day you willhave of me no pleasuance.”
The Heptameron novel V, trans. Arthur Machen, 1924 edition.

The 1880s and 1890s editions of Machen’s translations were often issued by private subscription in small numbers; their more wider influence came during the “Machen Boom” of the 1920s, when Machen’s works were reprinted in the United States by Alfred Knopf and Vincent Starrett. While it is difficult to judge when exactly the “A. Machen” introduction was affixed onto reprints of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, it would not be strange if the resurgence of Machen’s popularity in the 1920s had something to do with it. The Ethnological and Cultural Studies of the Sex Life in England (1934) makes no mention of Machen’s introduction in discussing the text, but then it’s easy to miss clandestine editions.

The reason why it is difficult to say more with any certainty is simply the nature of the reprints of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon. Being an obscene work by the standards of the 1880s, it was never copyrighted, and relatively easy to pirate; the pirated editions were themselves often later pirated, so that anyone interested in owning a copy will find a delirious range of editions in everything from fine bindings to cheap stapled reprints to print-on-demand editions. Many editions bear fictitious information about their printing, claiming to have been published (in English!) in Moscow or Paris. Some are illustrated, and some are xeroxed and stapled together crudely.

All we know for absolute certain is that some copies of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon have an introduction by “A. Machen,” some do not. Those that have the introduction we might say are of the “Machenian textual tradition,” because obviously later publishers copied the text of the Machen introduction from an earlier work, to some hypothetical first publisher who thought it would be clever, or have retail value. In circumstances such as these, each book becomes an artifact. There are several hallmarks of this particular edition, besides the size and binding:

The introduction by “A. Machen” that attributes the book to John Cleland.
The pages are obviously photo-offset from a previous edition; the ornaments and font match photographs of a clandestine edition of the text attributed to 1925.
While that 1925 edition had three erotic engravings, this booklet is illustrated by black-and-white sexually explicit photos which are difficult to date, but probably from the 1940s or 50s.

So the surmise is that at some point in the 20s or 30s, a publisher printed a private edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon with a spurious introduction by the then-popular Machen and an attribution to John Cleland as a way to drum up sales. Sometime in the 40s or 50s, a clandestine publisher photo-offset the text of that edition, and added a few exciting pictures, resulting in the underground copy above.

The 40s and 50s make sense in context because in 1952 Odalisque Press released an edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon which was attributed to James Campbell, lacked the Machen introduction, and was clearly marked with Odalisque’s name and the date of publication. In other words, we now have the start of an actual datable, traceable series of publications from various publishers who decided to print this work, now in the public domain, for an audience eager for the now-scarce erotica and curiosa of yesteryear.

If there are professionally published copies of the book available, who needs cheaply-made, badly illustrated copies produced by some guy in his basement, or in a print shop after hours? As the end of Prohibition signaled the return of good liquor over bathtub gin, the loosening of obscenity standards as applied to literature made sexually explicit material more readily available through legal means. As more established publishers moved into this market, they pushed out the little guys producing crummy booklets to the edges of the marketplace.

Booklets like this, crudely conceived and executed, have become the target of collectors and scholars where once they might have been sold under-the-counter in bookstores or by shady mail-order catalogs, more important for their representation of an earlier time than their literary content. It took a certain cultural context to make it feasible and desirable to put a book like this together—and it is, if nothing else, a testament to a very odd reputation that haunted Arthur Machen, though his fantastic fiction has come to overshadow his earlier writings.

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.

Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (1968)

Other rejects included Jesse (Jesus) Franco’s Necronomicon (1967) AKA Succubus, an S & M flick without the slightest Lovecraft connection.
Charles P. Mitchell, The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography 20

If you were thumbing through Mitchell’s excellent filmography, this dismissive reference to a film named Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (Necronomicon – Dreamt Sins) by Jesús Franco may catch your eye and cause a moment of pause. The film does not often appear on lists of Lovecraftian cinema, did not make an appearance in that valuable tome The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, and generally gets short shrift in Lovecraftian cinematic scholarship. There are good reasons for this, but the lack of attention hides an interesting story.

The film’s title wasn’t Necronomicon. It was Green Eyes of the Devil.
Jess Franco, “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco”

Jesús “Jess” Franco (1930 – 2013) began making films in Spain, under Gen. Francisco Franco’s tyrannical regime. Talented, adaptable, versatile, and rebellious, Jess Franco’s film career began in the 1950s, doing black-and-white films, comedies, documentaries, and musicals. Censorship dogged Franco’s early films; the conservative Spanish regime was wary of sex or anything that could be construed as a political message.

Inspired by the British film company Hammer’s Gothic horrors such as Brides of Dracula (1960) and the success of the French horror film Les yeux sans visage (1960, Eyes Without A Face), Franco’s made the pivot to horror. His earliest horror films, Gritos en la noche (1961, translated as The Awful Dr. Orloff in English), La mano de un hombre muerto (1962, The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus), Gritos, El secreto del Dr. Orloff (1964, Dr. Orloff’s Monster), and Miss Muerte (1965, The Diabolical Dr. Z) combine a mixture of medical horror, Gothic sensibility, and a voyeuristic approach to sadism. Franco exploited the marketability of sex and violence while keeping the films from being explicitly gory or pornographic. Yet Franco still had difficulty with Spanish censors.

The key to artistic freedom was international financing. In 1966, Franco came in touch with West German production manager Karl-Heiz Mannchen.

After producing the fast-pased comic srip concotion Lucky, el intrépido (Lucky, the Inscrutable) in 1967, Franco came to Mannchen with an eight-page script for a proposed erotic horror feature that would go on to be considered one of his finest films, Necronomicon.
Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980 184

The 2006 Blue Underground release of the film includes “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco” by David Gregory and Bill Lustig which delves into the development of the film. Shipka quotes from the interview:

“I started scouting locations in Spain and Belin and it’s there I met my second co-producer of the film because my partner was Adrian Hoven, but he had an associate a co-producer named Pier Maria Caminnecci. He was very rich, the main stockholder in Siemens. So he had quite a bit of money. And he had a magnificent house. And on his bookshelf, I discovered a book entitled Necronomicon.” Looking for ideas, Franco found a short story in the book that he felt could be translated to film. The problem was the story was only three pages long. Fusing it with a script from a horror movie he’d previously written, Franco came up with a complete screenplay.
Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980 186

There are issues with this narrative. For one, the actual interview on the DVD tells a different and much more involved story about the Necronomicon being an actual book published by the University of Vienna based on an ancient fragment by an Arab named Al Azrad. Weird Tales: Jess Franco meets the Elder Gods describes this as “bullshitting on a heroic scale,” which seems correct. Shipka was paraphrasing and left out all the blatantly myth-making bits. But assuming there is a core of truth there, what book, exactly, could Franco have supposedly found in Caminnecci’s library?

Arkham House had begun to promote translations of Lovecraft’s fiction in languages other than English after World War II; collections appeared in French in the 1950s, and in German, Italian, and Spanish in the mid-1960s (although as a caveat, it should be noted unauthorized translations of English-language Weird Tales were appearing in South America in the late 1930s and 1940s, such as the Argentinian pulp magazine Narraciones Terrorificas). The problem is that none of these collections used the title Necronomicon. Indeed, this was before the rise of the hoax Necronomicons. L. Sprague de Camp’s hoax Al Azif was published in 1973; Schlangekraft would not publish the Simon Necronomicon until 1977; The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names edited by George Hay appeared in 1978, a full decade after Franco’s film. H. R. Giger’s artbook Necronomicon would also not be published until 1977.

A clue to the puzzle may lie in the story mentioned. Based on length and relevance, the most likely piece would be Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.” In the mid-1960s, that work was relatively obscure; while it had first seen print as a fan-made pamphlet in 1937, Arkham House did not publish it in book form until Miscellaneous Writings in 1995, and it isn’t listed in any of the non-English collections or anthologies during the time when Franco might have seen it. However—in 1967, Mark Owings of Mirage Associates published The Necronomicon: A Study, an oversized chapbook that collected what was known about the Necronomicon from what had been published up to that point, including Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.”

However, there is no occult grimoire to be seen in Franco’s Necronomicon, nor is one referred to in the script. No omniscient narrator conveys the action as if it were some forbidden text, magickal lore plays no part in the story, and there are no Arabs screaming curses to ward off daemonic other-dimensional monstrosities. Essentially, Franco just loved the word, although he did claim that he based the story on a genuine grimoire called “The Necronomicon” discovered in fragmentary form and kept by the University of Vienna! Some observers may put this down to Franco’s taste for teasing reviewers, or his dedication to blurring the line between fact and fiction. If it’s the latter, it’s entirely in keeping with the theme of the film, which is precisely the permeable membrane between reality and fantasy.
Stephen Thrower, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, Vol. 1 133-134

Thrower points to why Jess Franco’s Necronomicon is something of a black sheep of Lovecraftian cinema: regardless of where Franco picked up the name, like the hoax grimoires and Giger’s artbook listed about, it is a Necronomicon in name only. There is nothing Lovecraftian in its cinematic DNA.

Except… for about a decade or so, this was the only Necronomicon widely available. It was certainly the only film with the title until the 1993 film Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. However, this is a legacy that might easily be lost on English audiences. In the United States, the film was cut by Terry Van Tell for Titan Productions, Inc., and aside from numerous differences from Franco’s cut of the film, it was also retitled to the much more generic Succubus, negating even the label of a Lovecraftian connection.

Then Ameerican International, who bought the film for the US, Canada, and other territories wanted to change the title. They explained the title Necronomicon was not commercial enough in the US because no one knows what it means. So they adopted the title Succubus. That’s even more bizarre than the original title.
Jess Franco, “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco”

Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden helped make Jess Franco’s reputation, both in terms of controversy and appeal. Franco had successfully “dragged up” an erotic film into something like mainstream prominence by making it a nightmarish art house horror film; a water mark in the emergence of sexploitation cinema that would lead to what has been called Eurotrash or Eurosleaze in the 1970s…and, perhaps Franco’s eventual devolution, his artistic sensibilities increasingly spent low-budget and quasi-pornographic or outright pornographic efforts. While Franco would never revisit Necronomicon directly, he would sometimes reference it in later films.

In Jess Franco’s *Lust for Frankenstein* (1998), actress Lina Romay wears a *Necronomicon* t-shirt in the early part of the film. Draculina magazine published a photo-comic adaptation of the film in 1999.

Franco’s Necronomicon was ahead of the curve in another way, which doesn’t get discussed much: the 1960s was a time when Lovecraft cinema was focused on adaptations of existing works like The Shuttered Room (1966). The tangential Lovecraftian tie-in film, the kind that may have only a trivial connection to Lovecraft or his works—but whose connections, however brief and overlooked, are sometimes tantalizing—basically didn’t exist on the big screen until Franco’s Necronomicon was released. While some folks claim Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959) or The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) as Lovecraftian films, they speak of themes or vibes, not even a vague connection like a Necronomicon prop-book.

So Franco’s Necronomicon stands as at least a spiritual forebear to works like Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy: Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980, City of the Living Dead), …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldil (1981, The Beyond ), and Quella villa accanto al cimitero (1981, The House by the Cemetery). These films have, in turn, inspired others, some without Lovecraft connections such as Saint Ange (2004, House of Voices) to those that are explicitly Lovecraftian such as L’altrove (2000, Darkness Beyond) and Maelstrom – Il figlio dell’altrove (2001, Unknown Beyond). Fulci’s films have also inspired literature like “Phantasmagore” (2021) by H. K. Lovejoy.

That is the nature of influence: an insidious chain of connections; ripples in a pond that echo out far beyond the sight or control of whoever or whatever stirred the waters in the first place. Jess Franco’s Necronomicon may not be Lovecraft’s Necronomicon—but Franco’s Necronomicon is also no less the Necronomicon than Simon’s or H. R. Giger’s, and if it hasn’t quite spawned the cult following as some of the other Necronomicons, it is no less a testament to the enduring influence of Lovecraft’s work, in all of its unexpected permutations.

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.

Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2022) by Margaret L. Carter

“What’s tentacle porn?”

“You don’t want to know,” he muttered.
M. L. Carter, “In the Tentacles of Love” in Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2022)

In Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos, there is a section of about 11 pages tracing the thematic history of tentacles and erotica as it applies to the development of weird fiction. For those curious, go read it. There are citations for those who wish further reading and scholarly sources.

For the purposes of this review, it suffices to say that tentacles have been associated with weird fiction in general since around the turn of the century, and with the Mythos in particular since the days of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, and August Derleth. Tentacles were depicted as alien and unnatural…especially when, as the popularity of Japanese anime and manga boomed in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States and other markets, tentacle erotica became increasingly more available and conspicuously a part of the erotic vernacular lexicon, even if it remained a niche interest.

Tentacle erotica is often mentioned with an expression of disgust, perversion, and transgression against the natural order, and the beings equipped with tentacles are typically inhuman, malign, and rapacious. Quite literally; “tentacle rape” has become a byword for the whole mode of tentacle erotica. It’s become almost a farcical joke: Tentacle Grape soda is a product that uses the nod-and-wink toward the trope of sexual violation by faceless phallic feelers as a selling point. Many later works have leaned into this and begun to play it for sexual titillation or laughs, as in Booty Call of Cthulhu (2012) by Dalia Daudelin or “Le Pornomicon” (2005) by Logan Kowalsky.

Yet what you don’t often see is a sex-positive take on tentacle sex.

Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2022) by Margaret L. Carter is a combination of two light-hearted and sexy novelettes that had previously been published at Ellora’s Cave, an early 2000s ebook publisher that focused on romance and erotica, and which shut down in 2016. While some might cheer Amazon’s dominant share of the market, this does come at the cost of less variety from smaller independent publishers like Ellora’s Cove. Yet now, they are available once again, this time collected together.

“Tentacles of Love” (2007) focuses on a wedding, where protagonist Lauren meets her future husband Blake’s family—a Mythos-inflected version of the Addams family or the Munsters, with Uncle Dexter from Innsmouth, Aunt Lavinia from Dunwich, Great-Aunt Asenath from Arkham, and of course, her fiancé’s twin brother Wilbur in the attic.

Only Wilbur takes more after their father:

A translucent mound of rainbow-colored bubbles filled the space, emitting blue and violet sparks whenever its surface rippled. A pseudopod oozed outward for a second, then withdrew into the mass, leaving a glittery trail on the floorboards.
M. L. Carter, “In the Tentacles of Love” in Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2022)

Wilbur, it turns out, is a shy, introverted soul who lives on the internet, listens to jazz, and enjoys Japanese anime (“Especially the giant robots and the creatures with tentacles.”) Pretty much like any NEET twenty-something. And Wilbur isn’t the only one with tentacles, as his brother soon reveals. For fans of “The Dunwich Horror” who have guessed at the purpose of Wilbur Whateley’s odd anatomy, M. L. Carter has the answers to your questions.

“Weird Wedding Guest” (2013) is the direct sequel; it’s Lauren and Blake’s wedding, and Wilbur meets bridesmaid Roxanne, who had been corresponding with Wilbur over email. In the dim and distant past of 2013 there was no internet dating service for the spawn of Yog-Sothoth, so the meet-cute is a little awkward…but it works.

Okay, so my email pal is half alien. He’s not really scary when you get past that fact.
M. L. Carter, “In the Tentacles of Love” in Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2022)

There are two reasons that these stories work. First, Margaret L. Carter knows her Lovecraft, and all the in-jokes and even the lore is spot-on. Fans of the Mythos will enjoy the Easter eggs and attention to detail, and the imagination at play. Second, the stories are played straight as spicy romance stories with women protagonists. These aren’t Derlethian pastiches, nor outright farces. These are women who take a great deal of weirdness in stride, and slowly come to explore some novel erotic circumstances…and their emotional attachment to their odd-looking but loveable paramours grows deeper. It’s a familiar story; like Beauty and the Beast, but more domestic.

Margaret and Cousin Itt, *The Addams Family* (1991)

Yet that’s why it works. Carter plays the tropes of the spicy romance off of the Lovecraftian callbacks beautifully. The sex scenes are creative and original, but more important than that they feel earned. This isn’t a story of sexual assault by eldritch entities, but a sex-positive exploration of new sensations between two willing and considerate partners.

Tentacle and Wedding Bells isn’t cosmic horror, but it is fun and intelligent. Carter is very deliberately subverting expectations in this story; the references to Wilbur’s interest in tentacle porn make a lot of sense for unstable congeries of iridescent bubbles that can exude pseudopods that double as genitalia.

It is nice, after all these years, to see both parts of Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2023) together at last and relatively available, either through Amazon or other retailers.

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.

“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus

The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

Lovecraftian literature is often transgressive by literary standards. Many works are not stories or plot-driven narratives in any conventional sense, and individual works have sometimes been called prose poems or mood pieces. This is fitting when you think of Lovecraft’s assertion that the weird phenomenon was the center of the story, rather than any central character—something that can be seen in “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Call of Cthulhu.”

“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus is little more than a single scene, like the prelude to a post-apocalyptic film. Like many Lovecraftian tales, there isn’t much to the plot, characterization is limited, and the focus is on the weird phenomenon more than anything else. Yet there is also something Lynchian in its construction, the establishment of that “American weirdness” that Lovecraft noted in Poe, the buried emotions and resignations that underlay everyday life.

August was always hot as sin, and Bea had been disappointed to discover that the heat would redden her skin on the Nebraskan prairie even more than it did back in Boston
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”

There is that sense of loss and regret in Bea, who if not our main character is at least our prime witness for what is about to happen. The establishing shot of Bea is reminiscent of Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth, with its vast open sky and unspoken longings. The setting, a sod house on the Nebraskan prairie, is as much part of the story as Dunwich is for “The Dunwich Horror.”

“Get in the cellar! It’s a tornado!”

James dragged her towards the house. Bea kept her eyes on the sky and allowed her gaze to drift, just in time to see the cloud over town extend a long, dark finger towards the ground. When it touched, a puff of dust exploded into the air.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”

While the characters in the story grope toward rational explanations, like the characters in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” it doesn’t really work when what’s going on is inherently irrational. The reactions of characters in a horror movie only occur because they do not know they are in a horror movie; it is the audience who knows going in that the situation is not normal, who has seen films and read books like this before and is familiar with the tropes.

In other hands, “One Night in August” could have been extended in any number of ways. Like a low-budget film that quickly corrals all of its characters into a single room, an entire long drama could have been played out in the cellar as Bea and her family wait for things to pass and the sun to shine again. Tensions could rise, long-buried emotions could come to the surface, the seedy underbelly of the family could have been exposed and brought to light like a vivisected frog, its limbs pinned, guts on display for curious children to poke at. Instead, Daucus opts for a swifter ending, a more overt horror, a swifter destruction. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an artistic choice.

If there’s a criticism to be made about the story, it’s that some of the tropes are a little too familiar. For much of the story, Bea is framing things through her own perspective, but near the end of the tale things shift into a kind of gear normally only seen in Italian horror movies in the 1970s and 80s. While it is weird to think of it this way, we as a culture have developed a thematic language for cosmic sin. The idea that something from outside wants or needs a sacrifice, that it requires a priest or cult to serve those wants and needs…it would have been been more horrific in many ways if it had the raging, uncaring, impersonal destruction of a tornado. Something that couldn’t be bargained with, or fought, too alien to be cruel.

But all she could do was feel it happen.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”

What works about this story is that it is a cut gem. While it may tie in thematically to a whole corpus of Lovecraftian literature, it stands on its own quite well as an effort to define a single mood in a single scene. Complete unto itself.

“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus was published by Psychotoxin Press, and can be purchased here.

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

“A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” (2022) by Erin Brown

Possibilities hinted from under the jaded metropolitan certainties in his mind; old and eldritch ancestral memories, back when beautiful virgins were wrapped in glorious robes and set out on a rock in the sunlight to be cheered by the people—and to await the dragon. The beastling was no dragon, he knew. He was a brief scrawl of hideous calligraphy write on the world, a blunt and blasphemous word.
Erin Brown, “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022), 27

Today, Cthulhu can be quaint. Even snuggly. The majesty and fantasy of the vast, alien horror has been worn away by decades of merchandising, diluted by endless pastiches, a multitude of jokes. Hundreds of artists have tried their hands at depicting the supposedly undepictable, and the general consensus is “giant squid guy.” Often with a crotch as smooth and featureless as a Ken doll. After all, a vast, ancient entity may be one thing, but a penis? Utterly unacceptable. There may be children present. You can’t put that on a plushy.

(You absolutely can. Some people have. I digress.)

Cthulhu doesn’t have to be neutered. Like every mode and genre of horror, there are folks who say Lovecraftian horror isn’t scary anymore, if it ever was. It is ridiculous, it isn’t real, doesn’t raise a bead of cold sweat, no feces exits the rectum without permission, etc. etc. Most of these reactions are to the sanitized, Ken doll version of Cthulhu; the safe version they’ve seen a thousand times in comics and on stickers and t-shirts. Scratch that surface, and in truth, the shudders were largely always metaphorical. Few folks had nightmares about Cthulhu when the ink was still fresh on the pulp paper of Weird Tales, just as few folks died of fright when they read Dracula in the 1890s, or saw it i movie theaters in the 1930s. The idea that horror is supposed to scare the reader is essentially misguided.

At its best, weird fiction gives the reader’s imagination the tools so they can scare themselves. The realization of something, either from a dry but technically accurate description or an elaborate and expensive computer-generated image, can never approach the power of suggestion. In the case of Lovecraftian literature in particular, the suggestion is that there is something unknown and perhaps unknowable, that is so much weirder and worse than whatever familiar horrors we’re used to dealing with.

In one age, the epitome of horror may have been the vampire or werewolf; a few movies and dozens of shorts stories and novels later, and folks can confidently talk about silver bullets and crucifixes, blessed swords and fire, lasers and giant mirrors. The fun may still be there, but familiarity robs these creatures of the element of surprise. Of course, there are always exotic horrors—from other cultures, other subgenres. Crossing mythologies, crossing genres, is an old trick. How does a European exorcist deal with a penanggalan or yōkai? Oooh, what happens if a Sumerian vampire invades medieval Japan?

This is the philosophical underpinning of Erin Brown’s “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022). On the surface, an urban fantasy predator stumbles into a different genre, and it takes them a while to figure that out. The beastling’s ignorance is almost self-destructive, but for the audience, it’s instructive. Readers equate “eldritch” with “scary thing with tentacles” all too often; they snicker and make jokes about Japanese anime, hentai, and naughty schoolgirls. Silver bullets are to werewolves what naughty schoolgirls are to Cthulhu; albatrosses around their necks. Ideas that serve to lessen and diminish the original horror by making their limits and habits more defined, more rational…more knowable.

Brown gets it. What’s better, Brown can write it. While Lovecraftian horror started out in a rather prudish period, and Lovecraft himself asserted that “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,” etc., more recent generations tend to remember that bloody bones can serve a purpose. There is nothing wrong with gore, or a little body horror, especially if they serve the needs of the story and are carried off with sufficient skill. There is a certain grounding that comes with the very frank reminder that people may piss themselves when they’re scared, that murders are very rarely clean events that leave a neat and bloodless corpse.

Ultimately, the beastling’s idea of himself as “a brief and hideous scrawl” is more accurate than he knew. Like most creatures, the beastling sees itself as the center of its own narrative; a singular horror in a big world. It cannot conceive of a greater horror than itself…and that lack of imagination is, at heart, what the story is about. To look out into the darkness, see the shadows play, and not wonder at what strange shapes may cast them isn’t just dull…in some cases, it’s damn near fatal.

“A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” by Erin Brown was published in FIYAH #22 (2022).

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

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Yuggoth Rising: Erster Act (2012) by Sebastien Dietz

En Episches Abenteuer in den Welten H. P. Lovecrafts
Back cover copy of Yuggoth Rising #1

“An Epic Adventure in the world of H. P. Lovecraft,” is what is promised, and that is what writer/artist Sebastien Dietz sets out to deliver. Yuggoth Rising is a German-language black-and-white 9-issue independent comic series, originally produced by Undergroundcomix.de in 2012. While physical issues were limited in number and now quite scarce, the series is collected in both German and English through Comixology/Amazon Kindle in three acts, beginning with Yuggoth Rising: Erster Act (Deutsch) / Yuggoth Rising: First Act (English, translated by Craig Stanton).

The epic adventure gets off on a bit of a left foot. February 1930, the Great Depression is settling in as our protagonist, an unemployed but educated young woman, returns to New York City—and on the ship runs into Lionel P. Hatecraft, author of popular romances.

At first glance, this is a set-up for a farce; in light of what comes later, it may be more appropriate to think of it as an unsubtle hint that while this takes place in the world of Lovecraft’s Mythos, this is not the world we know, the one that Lovecraft inhabited. Like the future envisaged by Robert W. Chambers in “The Repairer of Reputations,” or the 1920s and 30s envisaged in the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, this is a subtly different setting.

Dietz’ art is detailed, and cityscapes, streets, buildings, and ships are especially well-executed; he has an eye for splashes of darkness that stand out against the page. If there’s a criticism of his work, it is his human figures, whose heads are often slightly oversized in proportion to their bodies—but that’s more in the nature of a stylistic convention than a flaw. When he does break out for splash pages, the effect is worth it.

It’s not a tale told exclusively in comic panels. The end of each issue is punctuated by letters, articles, pages from magazines and newspapers, a convention used in other works to give the series a lived-in feel, to expand on things happening in many places during the same time period. Some of which are connected, and some of which are not.

Dietz’ story takes a broadly familiar shape: different threads, interweaving; widely separated characters working their way together until they meet. A young woman down on her luck, a brilliant expert in Mayan script, a millionaire embroiled in an international conspiracy, a slightly seedy newspaper porter on the werewolf-and-alien beat…ancient mysteries, the hunt for Planet X, and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The story moves at its own pace, neither too slowly or too quickly in this first act, these first three issues…

…but it just the opening act, the preliminaries. What revelations are here are just the beginning; our characters haven’t all met yet, the epic adventure has just begun. Taken by itself, it is promising…but readers shouldn’t be expecting “At the Mountains of Madness” or “The Shadow Out of Time,” although it takes a few cues from those works. Dietz’ inspirations more likely lie in Call of Cthulhu the Roleplaying Game, or the slightly pulpier adventures of August Derleth’s Trail of Cthulhu. The story of Yuggoth Rising—if the name isn’t clue enough—is things moving into place, the stars becoming right, cults and investigators getting into position, to destroy the world or redeem it.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because “when the stars are right” is the natural end-game of the Mythos; the Ragnorok or End Times, the eschatological frontier that looms in the unspecified future. Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows worked with that idea at the end of Providence, Jonas Anderson & Daniel Thollin did the same in 1000 Ögon: Cthulhu, and there are dozens of literary examples, in Cthulhu’s Reign and elsewhere. As with every Mythos story, it is less the tropes that are important than how it is told, how the characters develop and toward what end.

None of which a reader can tell in Yuggoth Rising: Erster Act, not on a first reading. On subsequent readings, readers can pick out more details, foreshadowings, hints that maybe they overlooked. Dietz has done a very credible job in setting the stage…and it is fortunate that this is a case where readers of both English and German have the opportunity to read it to the end, even if only digitally.

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.

De Rode Ridder 124: Necronomicon (1987) by Karel Biddeloo

De Rode Ridder (“The Red Knight”) is a long-running Flemish-language medieval fantasy comic created by Willy Vandersteen in 1959, based on a series of children’s novels by Leopold Vermeiren in the 1940s. Roughly comparable to Prince Valiant, although not quite as consistent in storyline, as de Rode Ridder involves many standalone episodes and more fantasy and even science fiction elements. Vandersteen, who is credited with writing and drawing the strip for the first 43 albums (although gruntwork was done by others in his studio), passed it on to Karel Biddeloo, who wrote and drew the next 150 or so albums of De Rode Ridder’s adventures. About in the middle of Biddeloo’s run was album 124: Necronomicon, with Biddeloo joined by Urssla Lundmark (colorist) and Anita Schauwvlieghe (lettering).

While at sea returning from Byzantium, Johan, the Red Knight, is besieged by harpies…who are defeated with the aid of the Seal of Ishtar, which Johan acquired in the last album, Oniria. Except the amulet that de Rode Ritter pulls out from underneath his tunic may look a bit familiar:

The Goddess of Venus is the most excellent Queen INANNA, called of the Babylonians ISHTAR. She is the goddess of Passion, both of Love and of War, depending on her sign and the time of her appearance in the heavens. […]

This is her Seal, which you must engrave on Copper, Venus being exalted in the heavens, with no one about watching its construction. Being finished, it is to be wrapped in the purest silk and lain safely away, only to be removed when need arises, at any time.
Simon Necronomicon 14-15

The Seal of Innana/Ishtar from the Simon *Necronomicon*

The Simon Necronomicon was first published in 1977, and by 1980 was released as a mass-market affordable paperback, to grace the New Age shelves of bookstores forevermore. While the impact of the Simon Necronomicon on Lovecraftian occult literature is sizable—see Dan Harms & John Wisdom Gonce III’s The Necronomicon Files for details—the artistic impact of it is often more apparent. The Gate Sigil on the cover of the book, created by artist Khem Caigan, has gone on to be appropriated by dozens or hundreds of artists for illustrations, comics, album covers, tattoos, and various and sundry merch.

The other illustrations in the book provided the first real visual occult symbols of the Mythos. While Lovecraft and Derleth had described their Elder Signs, and Robert W. Chambers had mentioned the Yellow Sign, Lord Dunsany the Sign of Mung, etc., there was no consistent popular depiction of these symbols or gestures—it was up to the readers to imagine what they would look like. Now, thanks to the Simon Necronomicon, there was a visual reference for various occult signs and talismans. Not surprising, then, that writer/artists like Karel Biddeloo opted to work them in.

Not the Simon Necronomicon gate sigil on the back cover of the upper-right panel.

The Necronomicon of this Rode Ridder album isn’t a cheap paperback however, but a full-blown grimoire stored in a pillar of flame in a cavern beneath the earth, with a will of its own. A group of cultists working with Johan’s old foe, the sorceress Demoniah, manipulate him into retrieving the book for them. What follows is a rather typical adventure, full of action and a bit more swords & sorcery than horror—and I rather suspect that since the cultists are “der Meesters van de Swarte Kring” (“the Masters of the Black Circle”) that Biddeloo was also inspired in part by Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, which includes “The People of the Black Circle.” The Necronomicon survived the destruction of the Swarte Kring, and would reappear in album 128: De Boeienkoning (“The Escape Artist, lit. “The King of Fetters,” much as how Houdini was sometimes billed “the Handcuff King”).

The *Necronomicon* literally flies off to its next adventure.

De Rode Ridder: Necronomicon is a fairly typical dip-of-the-toes into the Mythos; while Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, et al. don’t merit a mention, that’s probably as much as because Biddeloo was drawing from the Simon Necronomicon rather than directly from Lovecraft for inspiration; if this had been published after The Evil Dead came out in Belgium, the Necronomicon might be bound in human skin with a face on it! The book itself becomes a typical MacGuffin, since for all its portentous power it does not do much of anything by itself. For readers already familiar with the Necronomicon, it might be a fun or cute reference that gives de Rode Ridder another adventure; for those whose first experience with the Necronomicon was reading about it in this comic…perhaps this was their first step toward reading Lovecraft.

In terms of art, Karel Biddeloo is no Hal Foster, and the coloring sometimes muddies what might be better linework, yet it is still a very competent product with occasional dynamic illustrations that break out of the panel borders and breathe a little life into the work.

Regrettably, the adventures of de Rode Ridder have never been translated into English, although the Belgian albums and reprints are fairly available from European booksellers.

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.

Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen (2013) by Erik Kriek

Erik Kriek hat etwas sehr Heikles gewagt: in Zeichnungen einzugangen, was man am besten und effektivsten der Phantasie des Lesers überlässt. Jeder, der ein Erzählung von H. P. Lovecraft, dem Meister der amerikanischen Ostküsten-Horrorgeschichten, liest, macht sich eigene Vorstellungen von den Monstern. Ich lasals kleiner Jungemeine erste Lovecraft-Geschichte, als mein Vater mir eine dicke Anthologie mit englischen und amerikanischen Horrorgeschichten schenkte: Vor und nach Mitternacht. Die sparsamen Illustrationen stammten von Eppo Doeve, unde heute, sechzig Jahre später, steht dieses Buch immer noch in meinem Regal, sind die Erzählungen in meinem Gedächtnis, befinden sich die Bilder auf meiner Netzhaut. Merkwürdige Zeichnungen, unvollständig, sparsam und, so wie es sich gehört, in Schwarzweiẞ. Das BUch hat eine lebenslange Faszination ausgelöst: Immer noch kaufe ich regelmässig Horror. Es erscheint keine Neuausgabe von Ambrose Bierce oder Roald Dahl, in die ich nicht hineinschaue, um ze sehen, ob darin – wie kurz auch immer – nicht doch etwas Neues steht.

Erik Kriek has dared to do something very tricky: to capture in drawings what is best and most effectively left to the reader’s imagination. Everyone who reads a tale by H. P. Lovecraft, the master of American East Coast horror stories, creates Monsters from his own Imagination. I read my first Lovecraft story as a young boy when my father gave me a thick anthology of English and American horror stories: Before and After Midnight. The sparse illustrations were by Eppo Doeve, and today, sixty years later, this book is still on my shelf, the stories are in my memory, the images are on my retina. Strange drawings, incomplete, sparse and, as it should be, in black and white. The book triggered a lifelong fascination: I still buy horror regularly. No new edition of Ambrose Bierce or Roald Dahl appears that I don’t look into to see if there isn’t something new in it – however briefly.

Forward by Gerard Soeteman

English translation

Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen (“From Beyond and other Tales,” 2013, Avant-Verlag) is a German-language collection of graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories “The Outsider,” “The Color Out of Space,” “Dagon,” “From Beyond,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The adaptations are very faithful to the original, often down to the level of the language, which is often directly quoting from the German-language translation of Lovecraft’s stories.

Kriek’s adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space”

Kriek, who is both writer and artist, has lavished most of his creativity on the art itself—with great care and attention to the setting and costumes of the characters, putting them in period-appropriate dress and rooms, giving them little quirks Lovecraft didn’t mention but might well have imagined. The style makes heavy use of shadows for the panes of the face and the set of the body, very reminiscent of the black-and-white artwork of 1970s Warren horror magazines like Creepy or Eerie, but cleaner and starker. The clear-cut reality of the normal frames gives Kriek’s wilder, more imaginative and fantastic pages more impact.

Note how the panels have slanted, no longer even and orderly, and the Dutch angle used. Visual rhetoric for “The world has gone wrong.”

There have been so many graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s fiction over the years by so many artists, it is difficult to find points for fair comparison—or perhaps it is better to say, it’s hard to know where to start.

“The Outsider,” for example, is a 2,595 word short story; Kriek adapted it in six pages. Alec Preston Stevens also adapted “The Outsider” in six pages in Prime Cuts #1 (1987), so too did Bhob Stewart and Steve Harper in Monsters Attack #2 (1989), and Devon Devereaux and Tom Pomplun in Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft (2002); Hernán Rodríguez did it in 14 pages (as “The Stranger”) in Heavy Metal (vol. 32, no. 8, Fall 2008), Tanabe Gou stretched it out to 24 pages for his 2007 collection …and because they are all adaptations of the same story, a really deep analysis could almost go line-by-line and panel-by-panel in comparison.

The same could be said for most of Lovecraft’s other stories. He did not leave a particularly large body of work, but nearly every story and many of the poems he wrote or had a hand in have been adapted in some fashion at some point by somebody—even relatively obscure works like the revision “Medusa’s Coil” is represented by “Medusa’s Curse” (1995) by Sakura Mizuki (桜水樹氏) and “Nelle Spire di Medusa” (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Tommaso Campanini. Probably only Edgar Allan Poe has received better coverage in the comics.

Which might beg the question: why? What does a new graphic adaptation of Lovecraft bring to the audience that wasn’t there before? Was there something lacking about all the previous adaptations of “The Outsider” that moved Kriek to try his hand at Lovecraft in his own vivid style? Kriek’s adaptation in particular is very faithful to the original; he was not adapting the stories to his own times, not injecting any contemporary value or message into Lovecraft’s narrative. These adaptations are a genuine effort to do justice Lovecraft’s original vision, while also showcasing Kriek’s own interpretation.

The candelabra gives a Gothic touch, which makes the sudden high-tech appearance of the resonator all the more disturbing.

Which might be the answer in itself. Comic adaptations of Lovecraft exist because the stories are there in the public domain. No one can stop you. They are mountains to be climbed, caves to be spelunked. The fact that you are not the first to climb to the top of a particular mountain does not take away from the achievement of doing it. Anyone who completes a comic adaptation of “From Beyond” or “The Color Out of Space” may be competing, in some philosophical fashion, with every other artist who seeks to express the inexpressible in some fixed medium, but there is never going to be any final winner. Someone else is bound to come along and try their hand at it…but people can point to books like Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen and say: “Already, here’s what I did. What have you got?”

The Black housemaid, and the use of the narrator’s first name, are subtle differences from Lovecraft’s version of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

Kriek’s collection ends with “Vom Jenseits” (“From Beyond”) by Milan Hulsing, which is not the short story of the same name but a short biography of H. P. Lovecraft illustrated with a few choice pictures based on photographs of Lovecraft and his life. “Jenseits” is the German term for “on the other side” or “beyond,” but it can also refer to the afterlife, the underworld, the next world—in other words, there are some connotations that may or may not quite line up exactly with the English terms. Euphemistically, we are doing the same thing; catching a glimpse of another world…only the resonator is the book in our hands.

Addendum: I could not end this review without including this anecdote from the introduction:

Lovecrafts Erzählung Das Ding auf der Schwelle faszinierte und fasziniert mich noch immer so, dass ich sie, als eine Hollywood-Produzentin mich bat, einen Polit-Thriller zu schreiben, zu einem Drehbuch umgerbeitet habe. Um die geforderte Aktualität hineinzubekommen, dachte ich mir einen sehr wichtigen Berater eines neugewählten amerikanischen Präsidenten aus, der in einer kleinen neuenglischen Stadt à la Lovecraft landet. Man erlebt, wie er durch Seelenwanderung allmählich verrückt wird und zu glauben beginnt, dass das Ende der Welt, wenn es nicht sowieso schon bevorsteht, von ihm herbeigeführt werden muss. Als vollkommen Wahnsinniger reist er zerück nach Washington, um dort als Mitglied des Nationalen Sicherheitsrats dem Präsidenten verhängnisvolle Ratschläge zu geben … Die Produzentin lehnte das Drehbuch ab: „Wahnsinnige würden in Washington niemals in solche Positionen gelangen.“ Und dann … kam Oliver North, um Reagan zu dienen, und – später – taten Bushs Ratgeber ihre segensreich Arbeit so, dass die Vereinigten Staaten in maẞlose Schulden gestürzt wurden, um heillose Kriege zu führen und zu bezahlen … tja.

Lovecraft’s tale “The Thing on the Doorstep” fascinated and still fascinates me so much that when a Hollywood producer asked me to write a political thriller, I reworked it into a screenplay. To get the required topicality in, I thought up a very important advisor to a newly elected American president who ends up in a small New England town à la Lovecraft. You see him gradually go insane through transmigration of souls and begin to believe that the end of the world, if it isn’t imminent anyway, must be brought about by him. As a complete madman, he travels back to Washington to give disastrous advice to the president as a member of the National Security Council … The producer rejected the script: “Insane people would never get into such positions in Washington.” And then … Oliver North came to serve Reagan, and – later – Bush’s advisors did their beneficent work in such a way that the United States was plunged into gross debt to wage and pay for hopeless wars … oh well.

Forward by Gerard Soeteman

English translation

English-language readers in the United States have a bad habit of not paying attention to what happens outside the Anglosphere, but the non-English-speaking world is large, and they pay attention to what we do here…because it affects them too. The resonator lets those from beyond see us as well as we see them; it translates both ways…and the world of H. P. Lovecraft is so much bigger and weirder than we can imagine.

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.

Die Faust des Cthulhu Teil 1: Opfergaben (2014) by Marco Felici

In naher zukunft existiert die menschliche zivilisation, wie wir sie kennen, nicht mehr. Alte wesen sind aus ihrem schlaf erwacht und haben die herrschaft über die erde übernommen. Die wenigen überlebenden ergaben such der beuen religion und ihrer propheten. Dies ist die geschichte eines mannes, der sich nicht unterwirft, sondern den kampf gegen die neuen mächte aufnimmt.	In the near future, human civilization as we know it will no longer exist. Ancient beings have awakened from their sleep and have taken control of the earth. The few survivors surrendered to the new religion and its prophets. This is the story of a man who does not submit, but takes up the fight against the new powers.
Back cover of Die Faust des Cthulhu 1.	English translation

Die Faust des Cthulhu (The Fist of Cthulhu) is an independently published, black-and-white, German-language post-apocalyptic action-horror comic from writer/artist Marco Felici (lettering by Till Felix, cover colors & title design for issues 2-4 by Olaf Hänsel). Published irregularly, the series appears to consist of four separate issues and a collected edition:

Teil 1: Opfergaben (Part 1: Offerings) (2014)
Teil 2: Offenbarung (Part 2: Epiphany) (2015)
Teil 3: Untergang (Part 3: Downfall) (2018)
Teil 4: Übermacht (Part 4: Superiority) (2020)
Sammelband (Collected) (2022)

(Note: the listing I’ve seen for the collected edition says it collects the first five issues, so I may well be missing one.)

The art and story are strongly reminiscent of American underground comix of the 1970s-1980s, with the occasional shade of Richard Corben (especially in the color covers on issues 2-4), or Eastman and Laird’s early, relatively grungy-looking black-and-white issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, long before the children’s cartoon softened their image and sensibilities. Story-wise, there may also be more than a touch of a manga influence, with shades of Fist of the North Star or other post-apocalyptic action-adventure series. Surprisingly, there’s also a touch of luchador influence, with the humanoid monsters sometimes going masked, at least initially.

We open on the scene of a sacrifice to the Old Gods.

Fundamentally, the story is straightforward: a mysterious stranger takes exception to one of the regular innocent sacrifices to the Old Ones, and deals with a cultist and his minion—a half-human spawn of elder beings. Of course, our hero soon shows that he isn’t entirely human either…imagine if Wilbur Whateley decided he related more with his mother than Yog-Sothoth and chose to try and rid the world of eldritch horrors, and you’ve about got the scope of the series. Along the way, a kid sees him fight and becomes witness-cum-sidekick as they travel through the hellscape of the future.

Down below, the dismembered bodies of the sacrifices are fed to… something.

The art is a mix of that underground comix serviceable-enough grunginess and moments of interesting character and creature design. Backgrounds tend to give way to action lines or solid blocks of black or white, which makes sense in black-and-white comics where the focus is on the figures more than the surroundings.

Mythos references are a bit scanty; Die Faust des Cthulhu isn’t a pastiche in the sense that it wants to expand on the lore in vast detail, and while there is a bit of exposition the actions tend to speak louder than words, and the explicit connections to the Mythos are usually relegated to a few exclamations in the heat of battle. There is more of an element of Robert E. Howard to the story than Lovecraft; the nameless hero is of the same mind as Conan that if something bleeds then it can die, even if the thought is not expressed in so many words. Readers hoping for deep pathos or character development may be disappointed, but primarily this is fun. A guy with a pair of knives wrestles tentacled monsters and cuts them apart. It’s closer to sword and sorcery than cosmic horror.

Sometimes that’s silly. Sometimes that’s awesome.

It is not clear how many copies of a given issue are printed, but given the scarcity probably not many; readers interested in tracking down a few should check out German comic shops or eBay.

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

Lovecraft (1994) by Reinhard Kleist & Roland Hueve

Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft. Saft Dir das was?

Nur flüchtig.

Also, paß auf. Schriftsteller. Amerika. 1890-1937. Hat in Edgar Allen Poe—Nachfolge phantastiche Geschichten geschrieben. Origien des Grauens. Versponnen Wissenschaftler und romantische Helder gegen unheimliche und unbekannte Mächte aus den Tiefen des Universums. Ganz eigene, in sich geschlossene Mythologie. Kosmische Götter und Monstren mit merkwürdigen Namen. Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu…

Okay, okay. Ende des Klappentextes. Was hast Du vor?

Ich will was über die Lebensgeschichte von Lovecraft machen.

Und was?

Einen Comic.

Einen Comic? In wieviel Bänden?

Lies erst mal!

Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft. Mean anything to you?

Just in passing.

Okay, pay attention. Writer. America. 1890-1937. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s succesor—wrote fantastic stories. Origins of horror. Weaves scientists and romantic heroes against sinister and unknown forces from the depths of the universe. Completely separate, self-contained mythology. Cosmic gods and monsters with strange names. Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu…

Okay, okay. End of blurb. What are you up to?

I want to do something about Lovecraft’s life story.

And that is?

A comic.

A comic? In how many volumes?

Read it first!

Roland Hüve & Reinhard Kleist, introduction to Lovecraft

English translation

Lovecraft (1994) is a standalone German-language graphic novel in the European format normally associated with bandes dessinée—a slim, full-color hardback. The creation of Roland Hüve (script) and Reinhard Kleist (script & art), the 80-page story is focused on the idea of the character of Randolph Carter as a literary expy and alter ego for H. P. Lovecraft himself. As part of that, it adapts or partially adapts the story of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” as sort of an arching narrative of Lovecraft’s life, drawing on L. Sprague de Camp’s 1975 biography for details.

That bare description doesn’t really do the book justice. While the story is familiar—making Lovecraft himself a central character, part and parcel of the Mythos has been a favored treatment of many comic book creators—the real pleasure of the book is in Kleist’s artwork. The style is impressionistic, shifting, often mixing watercolors and frantic pencils, charcoals, and mixed media to great effect. It is a style very far away from the clean figures and lines of most comics at the time, either in Europe or North America. Much as if Dave McKean‘s lauded covers for The Sandman (1989-1996) were stretched out to fill a book.

Although that still might not be giving Kleist quite enough credit; as an artist, he has his own style, adaptable and varied. It is a visual feast, and readers familiar with Lovecraft’s biography will find many interesting visual references…and some amusing errors. Sonia H. Greene goes from a Juno-esque brunette who was seven years older than Lovecraft in real life to a young, ginger-haired flapper with a bob-cut…until she turns into a succubus.

Following the trend of blending real-life and fiction, more than a few liberties are taken. Don’t try to take it as a straight biography, but as what it is: a flight of fantasy spinning out from Lovecraft’s reputation as a horror writer and the rather neurotic and sexually-inhibited depiction of the man in de Camp’s flawed but ground-breaking biography.

The second story in the book is a separate adaptation by Kleist alone, a much more restrained and deliberately grungier adaptation of “The Music of Erich Zann,” done in black and white and red, a much more sparse style that contrasts neatly with the rather more busy and cluttered compositions of the lead story.

As an adaptation, this one is rather faithful and does more to capture the mood and atmosphere of the story with its bold use of red; it’s an aesthetic choice that serves to suggest and convey the invasion from beyond in a way that a tentacle or a starry blackness doesn’t.

Like many European graphic novels, Lovecraft was never translated into English, so remains fairly obscure among English-reading audiences today. Of course, today it would have to compete with any number of competitors like Lovecraft (2004) by Hans Rodionoff, Enrique Breccia, and Keith Giffen; The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft (2010) by Mac Carter, Tony Salmons, Adam Byrne, and Keaton Kohl, and Some Notes on a Nonentity (2017) by Sam Gafford and Jason C. Eckhardt among many others.

That is a pity, because while the writing may lose something in the translation from the German, the art is compelling and might have universal appeal.

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

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