“Blessed Be Her Children” (2025) by Jessi Vasquez

The religious rites varied according to circumstances and the requirements of the people. The greater number of the ceremonies appear to have been practised for the purpose of securing fertility. Of these the sexual ritual has been given an overwhelming and quite unwarranted importance in the trials, for it became an obsession with the Christian judges and recorders to investigate the smallest and most minute details of the rite. Though in late examples the ceremony had possibly degenerated into a Bacchanalian orgy, there is evidence to prove that, like the same rite in other countries, it was originally a ceremonial magic to ensure fertility.
—Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921)

The conception of Shub-Niggurath as a fertility figure in Lovecraft’s artificial mythology, presented or hinted at in “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft, has always carried with it certain implications. In the early 20th-century anthropological context, “fertility rites” in religion applied to humans, animals, and vegetables. There were rites to conceive and safely deliver children, to grow more crops, to have domestic animals increase in number. The sexual connotations were clear and sometimes salacious.

This was before in vitro fertilization or genetic engineering, before hormonal birth control or effective medical gender transition. Before contemporary labels like ace and aro. The anthropological perspective rarely took into account the vast diversity of reproductive schemes in nature, most of which don’t apply to humans and domestic animals; it did absorb a lot of the cultural norms regarding gender and sexual identity, and the reproductive focus of fertility cults in the literature can bear some strange parallels to reproductive abuse and pregnancy fetishism.

This is the heritage of Shub-Niggurath in the 21st century: one of the rare identified-as-female divinities (or at least entities) in the Cthulhu Mythos, and her cult is often treated as effectively the Quiverfull movement with optional magic and monsters. While that may be a simplification for a diverse array of works that run from “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes to “The Shadow over Des Moines” (2016) by Lisabet Sarai, the important takeaway is that Shub-Niggurath and her cult have been primarily shaped by early 20th-century ideas of sexuality and reproductive biology.

What does Shub-Niggurath have to offer if you’re asexual, transgender, gay, or just never want to have kids?

As for the rest of the idealistic traditional family concept, you know I never had any real interest in men. I guess I should have been more open about my romantic endeavors. I would have been, if I’d known you thought I was holding back for your sake. You suspected there was something with Rachel, and briefly, there was. There were also a few people in college of varying genders, and while I sometimes felt deep affection, I discovered I’m not terribly interested in physical intimacy. And I don’t feel like my life is incomplete without it.

I love cake. I love cozy mystery novels and sad romance movies. I love my friends, I love Liriope, I love you. And that’s enough. I wish I’d made this clearer to you.
—Jessi Vasquez, “Blessed Be Her Children” in Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2025) 192

“Blessed Be Her Children” by Jessi Vasquez is told in mostly epistolary format; as a series of journal entries, sometimes addressed to specific readers, in a contemporary setting involving a young divorced single mother, her daughter, and her older sister. This is a woman’s story, told from a woman’s perspective, dealing with the messy, complicated mess of faith and something more than faith as their relationships get tangled up with a cult that has an unnerving focus on fertility. The story is not explicitly set in the Cthulhu Mythos; it doesn’t need to drop Shub-Niggurath’s name to draw the familiar associations with goatish imagery associated with the cult. Yet it is very much written, at least in part, in response to how we look at Shub-Niggurath now compared to in 1940.

One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious. What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarring sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.
—H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, “The Mound”

Lovecraft never presents Shub-Niggurath from a woman’s perspective. He very rarely addresses pregnancy and birth in the Mythos from the viewpoint of anyone who might have to gestate something and push it out of their body in forty weeks or so. Lavinia Whateley has a few lines in “The Dunwich Horror,” but that’s only afterward. Readers don’t get to see what joy or fear, horror or gratitude, disgust or distress that she felt at the conception of conception, pregnancy, and birth. The whole viewpoint of reproductive horror from a woman’s perspective came to the Mythos relatively late, and is still being explored in stories like “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens and “A Thousand Young” (2025) by Andrea Pearson.

So Vasquez’s approach in “Blessed Be Her Children” is interesting. It is a rebellion against the default program that the cultists are running. The cult, rather than adapt to changing ideas, is still serving what is essentially an ultraconservative agenda: be fruitful and multiply, on our terms. “Blessed Be Her Children” isn’t a polemic in the guise of a piece of fiction, but it is correctly trying to portray a predatory religious group (that happens to be a Mythos cult) whose central ethos doesn’t take into account that nowadays not everyone is heterosexual and looking to have kids.

“Blesssed Be Her Children” by Jessi Vasquez was published in Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2025).

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.

“Greater Than Gods” (1939) by C. L. Moore

If a man could see the end of his act, the end that comes at the far end of Time, and know what it meant—would men be greater than gods?
—Editor’s opening to C. L. Moore’s “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

C. L. Moore had cut her teeth on interplanetary fiction. Yet the syntax of science fiction was changing, and her approach was shifting with it. Instead of the grungy spaceports of Northwest Smith or the alien cosmic soul-mates of “The Bright Illusion” (1934), “Greater Than Gods” opens up with a Science City divided into separate houses (including Telepathy House), and a very ancient, prosaic situation: a man torn between two women.

The story seems to be a further extrapolation of “Tryst in Time” (1936), working through another iteration of time travel theory:

I think of the future as an infinite reservoir of an infinite number of futures, each of them fixed, yet malleable as clay. Do you see what I mean? At every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices among the many possible things we may do the next moment. Each crossroad leads to a different future, all of them possible, all of them fixed, waiting for our choice to give them reality.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

However, it’s also a kind of a gadget story. The protagonist, William Cory, head of Biology House, was on the trail of figuring out sex determination:

The pups were the living proof of Bill’s success in prenatal sex determination—six litters of squirming maleness with no female among them. They represented the fruit of long, painstaking experiments in the X-ray bombardment of chromosomes to separate and identify the genes carrying the factors of sex
determination, of countless failures and immeasurable patience. If the pups grew into normal dogs—well, it would be one long, sure stride nearer the day when, through Bill’s own handiwork, the world would be perfectly balanced bebetween male and female in exact proportion to the changing need.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

The problem that comes as Cory looks down the trousers of time, as Terry Pratchett put it, is that slowly more and more women were being born. The story becomes a thought-experiment on gender politics. Quite literally:

Women in public offices were proving very efficient; certainly they governed more peacefully than men. The first woman president won her office on a platform that promised no war so long as a woman dwelt in the White House.

Of course, some things suffered under the matriarchy. Women as a sex are not scientists, not inventors, not mechanics or engineers or architects. There were men enough to keep these essentially masculine arts alive—that is, as much of them as the new world needed.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

There are parallels here with David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” (1929); a blatant, naked sexism that was not uncommon to the time. However, and here is the second twist, Bill Cory gets a glimpse down the other trouser-leg of time, into a world where his own experiments led to a eugenic future:

The first “X-ray” babies began to be born. Without exception they were fine, strong, healthy infants, and without exception of the predetermined sex. The Council was delighted; the parents were delighted; everyone was delighted except Bill.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

Both futures have their flaws, which is the point. It’s a moral conflict, the results deliberately exaggerated. The solution, when Cory arrives at it, is almost ludicrous—a polite fiction on the standards and morals of the age, when proposals were made and accepted more seriously—but it works, it’s true to its own internal logic.

The weird irony to the tale, the search for a third option when presented with an impossible choice, is very much in the vein of 1940s science fiction. How much influence, if any, Henry Kuttner had on this tale is impossible to tell; it has only ever been published under Moore’s name. Yet if she wrote it all on her own, then Moore had fully absorbed the influence of how science fiction was trending. It is a story that speaks to what her future work would look like.

“Greater Than Gods” was published in the July 1939 issue of Astounding. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.

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

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

“A Thousand Young” (2025) by Andrea Pearson

After years of infertility, failed IVF cycles, and slowly decaying hope, she knew she was not one of the lucky or even one of the blessed, whatever that meant. She wasn’t meant to have children.

So when she first heard the name Dr. Keziah Mason offhandedly mentioned in an online infertility support group, it felt less like salvation and more like an invitation to finally belong.
—Andrea Pearson, “A Thousand Young” in Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2025), 213

Pregnancy has been a common element in weird fiction. The act of conception, the trauma of birth, the aftermath of a sexual act that leads to a natural set-up or sequel for a story, have been familiar elements since Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894) or Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild (1917)—and writers like H. P. Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror”, “The Curse of Yig”), Clark Ashton Smith (“The Nameless Offspring”) are direct literary descendants of that tradition.

The basic idea of the monstrous pregnancy was and remains largely unchanged in a great deal of weird fiction, there are a thousand and one variations on the fundamental idea, and entire academic books have been written on the subject in fiction and film, such as Women, Monstrosity, and Horror Film (2018) by Erin Harrington, The Rhetoric and Medicalization of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Horror Films (2020) by Courtney Patrick-Weber, and The Sinful Maternal: Motherhood in Possession Films (2024) by Lauren Rocha.

Pregnancy is still scary; women still go through a physical transformation and ordeal, even if they are more likely to survive it than a century ago. Unwanted pregnancies, as from rape, remain a real concern. With improvements in medicine involving fertility and infertility, the possibilities of pregnancy horror have shifted, however. Now we have adult fears of persistent infertility, of unsupportable pregnancies of multiples, dangerous pregnancies due to the mother’s health or age that are as yet possible due to science, and a shifting cultural emphasis on pregnancy and against abortion that threatens women’s bodily autonomy.

Yet these are themes, elements, narrative devices. Weird writers have addressed these issues in works like “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens and Flowers for the Sea (2021) by Zin E. Rocklyn, both of which use more contemporary frameworks to set up the narrative framework for the monstrous pregnancy. The main difference between writers like Jens, Rocklyn, and Pearson from Machen, Crowley, and Lovecraft, however, is the change in protagonist focus. None of the older writers focus on the experience of pregnancy, none of them tell of the horror from the woman’s point of view. They are always outsiders looking in.

Andrea Pearson’s “A Thousand Young” is not a fetishistic gaze at pregnancy; we don’t get lascivious descriptions of baby bumps, labor, breastfeeding, etc. Strip away the Mythos elements and it is almost a classic monkey’s paw story, where the dearest wish is granted in a way that is unexpected or undesired. Yet it is told from the woman’s perspective; it is her body, her hopes, her dreams, that are at play, and as the story progresses, the reader gets a sense of the enormity of what is happening, and what will continue to happen, long after the last word is read on the final page. That is why it works—and what makes it a fitting paean to Shub-Niggurath, alongside stories like “Goat-Mother” (2004) by Pierre Comtois and “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” (2014) by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas.

“A Thousand Young” by Andrea Pearson was published in Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2025).

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.

“Hellsgarde” (1939) by C. L. Moore

“You’ll find it by sunset only, my lady,” Guy of Garlot had told her with a sidelong grin marring his comely dark face. “Mists and wilderness ring it round, and there’s magic in the swamps about Hellsgarde. Magic—and worse, if legends speak truth. You’ll never come upon it save at evening.”
—C. L. Moore, “Hellsgarde” in Weird Tales (Apr 1939)

The last Jirel of Joiry story came out 15 months after the previous story, “Quest of the Starstone.” In that time, Moore had been publishing less. The market was changing. New fantasy and weird fiction magazines were out, Weird Tales had been sold and the offices moved to New York City; the editor Farnsworth Wright would soon be fired and, in 1940, would die. Moore’s connections to the magazine were fraying. But there was this one last hurrah.

While it wouldn’t be quite correct to say that the Jirel of Joiry tales to this point were formulaic, they did share very similar plots: Jirel would travel to some other land or dimension, face a supernatural peril, and overcome it through ingenuity and sheer spirit. The details varied, and sometimes she faced sorceresses or wizards and other times alien spirits and gods, but it was a common theme, one largely shared with several early Northwest Smith yarns. “Hellsgarde” still has that theme, but it is developed in a very different way, and with much more style and plot, than the previous tales—and for a good reason.

This is a horror story.

There are strong Gothic setting elements, and readers might well see it as an old dark house tale, with the decaying castle and the creepy family. Yet without sacrificing any of the adventurous elements—Jirel of Joiry is a woman of action, even when trapped in a cell, and her escape is murderous and bloody—this is definitely a story that emphasizes the creepy above the fantasy. It is the darkest of the original Jirel stories, and with neither a typical ghost or typical ghost-hunters, but something much more deliciously weird.

“With the passage of years the spirits of the violent dead draw farther and farther away from their deathscenes. Andred is long dead, and he revisits Hellsgarde Castle less often and less vindictively as the years go by. We have striven a long while to draw him back— but you alone succeeded. No, lady, you must endure Andred’s violence once again, or—”
—C. L. Moore, “Hellsgarde” in Weird Tales (Apr 1939)

The peril to Jirel in this story is exquisite. Once again, she is in a scenario where swordplay is of limited use. She is bound by loyalty to her retainers, she is physically trapped in the castle by the hunters after Andred’s spirit, and her vitality is a beacon to Andred’s ghost itself. It isn’t the first time that something about Jirel’s violent life has attracted supernatural attention (cf. “The Dark Land” (1936) by C. L. Moore), but the threat is more visceral this time, more rapacious. That adds a sense of personal danger, a threat of sensual violence to a tale that is already designed to unnerve. And like a great writer of the weird, C. L. Moore knows enough to leave the last horror unknown, only hinted at.

It’s a wonderful story, and the readers thought so too:

Hellsgarde was the most welcome story of the current issue, for it has the qualities one associates with C. L. Moore: beauty of style, an owtré air, and narrative unpredictability […]
—J. Vernon Shea in “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (Jun-Jul 1939)

Hellsgarde was a superb, grand and everything else kind of story; I loved it to the very last exciting word.
—Ethel Tucker in “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (Jun-Jul 1939)

And C. L. Moore gives us the one and only Jirel of Joiry! Boy! Whatanissue! I hope that C. L. Moore delights us in future issues with more stories of Northwest Smith and Jirel.
—John V. Baltadonis in “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (Jun-Jul 1939)

You do give us thrill-mad fans such nice ‘oogy’ stories. Look at Jirel of Joiry—she certainly does get around. How about getting her and Northwest Smith to meet again. They did quite some time ago. They should get better acquainted, don’t you think?’
—Elaine McIntire in “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (Jun-Jul 1939)

There would be no sequel. Jirel of Joiry had run her course under Moore, and there was little left of Northwest Smith. Which doesn’t mean that the story of “Hellsgarde” ends here.

In 1967, “Hellsgarde” was reprinted in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine (Nov 1967). This digest was published by Leo Margulies, who had bought the rights to Weird Tales, and edited by Cylvia Kleinman Margulies, his wife. Back numbers from Weird Tales tended to fill out the issues in the “Department of Lost Stories.” However, probably for reasons of space, when “Hellsgarde” was reprinted it was significantly abridged, and in parts rewritten. This was likely done by the editor, as reprints of “Hellsgarde” in Moore’s own collections follow the 1939 text.

Did Moore intend “Hellsgarde” as a send-off for Jirel? Did she lose contact with the character, after so many years and stories? Or was it just that she lost contact with Weird Tales, and focused her energies on the future—to her upcoming marriage with Henry Kuttner, and the career they would build together? We may never know.

“Hellsgarde” was published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.

A comparison of the 1939 vs. 1967 texts of “Hellsgarde” is also available on the Internet Archive.

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

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

“Miracle in Three Dimensions” (1939) by C. L. Moore

Strange Stories (1939-1941) was one of the rivals that rose during a fantasy boom in the waning years of Farnsworth Wright’s term as editor of Weird Tales. While many of the rivals had little in the way of style to offer, there was one thing they did that WT didn’t—pay. The magazine had gone a long period delaying payment, even to its most prolific and popular authors, while other pulp magazines often paid at least as well and often sooner than WT did. While we don’t know if that was a consideration for C. L. Moore, it might explain why she was writing a science fiction tale for one of Weird Tales‘ rivals instead of another Northwest Smith or Jirel of Joiry tale.

Strange Stories, of all the rivals, seemed to have collected Weird Tales‘ also-rans, and only ran for 13 issues. Most of the stories are nearly forgotten today, but a few have been reprinted, by dint of their authors’ later fame as their individual quality. Such is the case with “Miracle in Three Dimensions” by C. L. Moore, which was never quite a lost story, although seldom reprinted and never in any of her own collections during Moore’s lifetime.

Fundamentally, “Miracle in Three Dimensions,” published in the Apr 1939 issue of Strange Stories, is a gadget tale: inventor Blair O’Byrne has developed a prototype of the Star Trek holodeck, a kind of three-dimensional motion picture. Harboiled movie mogul Abe Silvers finds himself projected into Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wright, a great Shakespeare fan who had tried to publish a pulp library of Shakespeare plays a few years before—of which A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the only one to make it to print—might have shown interest in the scenario, if he had seen it.

Yet the way that Moore develops the story is very different from any of her previous tales, even science fiction stories like “Greater Glories” (1935) and “Tryst in Time” (1936). While framed as a science fiction story, it has a certain fantasy logic:

Did you ever hear—” broke in Blair softly, as if he were following some private train of thought and had not heeded a word of Silvers’ harangue—”of savages covering their faces when explorerers bring out their cameras? They think a photograph will steal their souls. It’s an idea so widespread that it can’t have originated in mere local superstition. Tribes all over the world have it. African savages, Tibetan nomads, Chinese peasants, South American Indians. Even the ancient Egyptians, highly civilized as they were, deliberately made their drawings angular and unlifelike. All of them declared and believed that too good a likeness would draw the soul out into the picture.”
—C. L. Moore, “Miracle in Three Dimensions” in Strange Stories (Apr 1939)

Colonialist rhetoric aside, that particular style of writing, the combination of science fiction trops, fantasy logic, and contemporary setting, is something that would become very characteristic of the early 1940s pulp magazines like Unknown. It is a remarkable shift away from her previous style that the question must be asked: is this even a C. L. Moore story?

A glance at the names on the table of contents of Strange Stories (Apr 1939) includes familiar names like Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Tally Mason, Marc Schorer, and Tarleton Fiske. Except…Tally Mason was one of Derleth’s pseudonyms. Tarleton Fiske was one of Bloch’s pseudonyms. Marc Schorer was a writing partner of August Derleth, and was republished in their collection Colonel Markeson and Less Pleasant People (1966) as by both. The use of pseudonyms by authors to fill out a table of contents and make it look like more writers were contributing than there were is an old pulp trick. Since Kuttner was already in the book with a story of his own, I suspect what happened is that they left his byline off of “Miracle in Three Dimensions,” and that this is actually the second Moore/Kuttner collaboration to see print. More was, as noted elsewhere, sometimes somewhat reluctant to reprint collaborations.

Was that the case here? Maybe, maybe not. There are no definite answers forthcoming, unless more evidence comes to light. So, whether the shift in style represents collaboration with Kuttner, or Moore’s own developing style in that direction is difficult to distinguish. Certainly, there’s a touch of the old sword-&-sorcery even in this tale which may have come from either:

Puck lured the spell-bewildered lovers into the fastnesses of the forest. They went stumbling through the fog, quarreling, blinded by mist and magic and their own troubled hearts. Swords flashed in the moonlight. Lysander and Demetrius were fighting among the veiled trees. Puch laughed, shrill and high and inhuman, and swept his brown arm down. And from Lysander came a choked gasp, the clatter of a fallen sword.
—C. L. Moore, “Miracle in Three Dimensions” in Strange Stories (Apr 1939)

Not quite Robert E. Howard, but then Moore and Kuttner seldom wrote gruesome or fierce action scenes.

The hybrid nature of the tale works; the ability to enter and leave the Shakespearian setting predates works like the Harold Shea stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. It is, more importantly, a step away from the style of fiction of Weird Tales; there’s nothing really of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, or A. Merritt in this tale. Whatever influences Moore (or Moore & Kuttner) had drawn from these authors, this story was now pushing into a new era, which would be dominated by writers like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Margaret St. Clair, who straddled science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but often with a more ironic tone and contemporary viewpoint.

“Miracle in Three Dimensions” was published in the April 1939 issue of Strange Stories. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.

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

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

“A Loobelier Licking” (1998) by Maxi Dell

Lois Gresh writers her erotic fiction under the nom de plume Maxi Dell. […] She says about her story: “Perception marks the boundaries of reality. What seems strange to us, what we fight the most, may be the only thing that matters. In a world of cold darkness the heat of love ignites sex even if the lover is a so-called demon.”
—Demon Sex (1998), 45-46

Some writers of Cthulhu Mythos fiction approach the project with the care of a pasticheur working another episode into a series of canonical tales—like writing an unofficial sequel to a classic Sherlock Holmes story, they might write “what happened next” for Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; such is the case with “The Shuttered Room” by August Derleth. Other writers prefer to reinterpret the story, providing an alternate take on what really happened, this is what you see with “The Black Brat of Dunwich” (1997) by Stanley C. Sargent.

In her Mythos fiction career, Lois H. Gresh’s approach is closer to that of a DJ, remixing familiar songs and beats but putting her own spin on it. She doesn’t re-tell old stories, she doesn’t try to abide by anyone’s canon, and the result is something that at once has a lot of familiar elements, but is nothing like what you’ve heard before—and perhaps not what you would expect, either. None of which is a bad thing, unless you go into her stories expecting something else.

You’ll be twenty tomorrow, Emilie. It’s time for us to share The Gift.” Rolfe’s voice was hoarse, gravel grating against the fishdead air.

She said, “The Gift is something I definitely don’t want for my birthday. How about if we just say here in Innsmouth and never have sex?”
—Maxi Dell, “A Loobelier Licking” in Demon Sex 48

The story is set in Innsmouth, though not quite the same Innsmouth readers will find familiar. It deals with Yog-Sothoth and Eihort, the latter an eldritch entity that was created by Ramsey Campbell for his Mythos stories. Emilie and Rolfe are best friends, 19 years old, irrepressibly horny, outsiders among outsiders—and is stuck in a tricky situation. Emilie is the cosmic equivalent of an ugly duckling, physically unlovely and ostracized because she carries the genes of a Great Old One. The Innsmouthers want to kill her. The brood of Eihort, the Loobeliers, Yog-Sothoth, and most especially her friend Rolfe want to impregnate her.

Except if she gets pregnant, she dies and Cthulhu gets loose and ends the world.

If that sounds a little complicated—well, yes. It’s also sexually explicit, more than slightly surreal, and probably doesn’t make too much sense if you think about it too long. Emilie’s negative body image, search for love, and the apparent fact of her imminent demise or translation to another reality if she gives in to her teenage lust plays as very nearly a parody, a kind of cosmic teenage sex comedy. While it plays a little more serious than that (at least from Emilie’s point of view), in an era when “monsterfucker” is a tag for a vast swathe of fiction, I think audiences today might have more sympathy for Emilie.

It’s not just that she wants to get laid. She wants love, too.

Rolfe, on the other hand, is utterly inept. By his logic, he and Emilie are two of a kind, and he’s the only option for her to survive—his every effort to get laid, however, reinforces the problem. In the end, he’s been friendzoned so hard the reader would almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t so utterly without romance.

[“]Our only chance is to mate with each other before they get to you.”

He was being ridiculous. As if her only choices were sex with Rolfe or sex with a fish. What an absurd thought. Of course, if it came down to it, she’d choose Rolfe. He wasn’t a fish, after all, and he did have a certain raw masculinity that she found appealing. Plus, she’d known him since they were children, and he was her only friend. But still…

Maybe it was the way he put it: mating.
—Maxi Dell, “A Loobelier Licking” in Demon Sex 49

(Readers may, at this point, wonder what the heck a loobelier is. As near as I can tell, they appear only in this story and nowhere else, so it would be a terrible spoiler to reveal that. Trust me, knowing what they are does not significantly make much more sense in context.)

As an erotic horror story, if you don’t invest too much time in thinking about it, this is fun. Gresh has a knack for entertaining prose and slightly surreal situations (see “Showdown at Red Hook” (2011) by Lois H. Gresh), and this is no exception. While probably never going to appear in any list of canonical Innsmouth tales, I think the subversion of expectations, as much as the anticipation of Emilie’s final decision, is what makes this story work.

“A Loobelier Licking” as by Maxi Dell was published in Demon Sex (1998). 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.

“Quest of the Starstone” (1937) by C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

Glad to hear that you & C L M are collaborating on a dual masterpiece. The result certainly ought to be powerful enough! Staging a meeting betwixt the mediaeval Jirel & the future Northwest Smith will call for some of your most adroit time-juggling—but with two keen imaginations at work no obstacle is likely to be unsurmountable. Good luck to both of you aesthetically & financially!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Henry Kuttner, 8 Feb 1937, Letters to C. L. Moore & Others 262

In May 1936, just three months after the death of C. L. Moore’s fiancé, H. P. Lovecraft wrote to his correspondent Henry Kuttner and asked if he could forward some material to C. L. Moore. This began a correspondence between Kuttner and Moore that would, in 1940, lead to their marriage. Yet during Lovecraft’s brief time together, he heard about their forthcoming collaboration—even if he didn’t live to see it.

The collaboration came at an odd time in both of Kuttner and Moore’s careers. Moore’s output for Weird Tales was declining; the last Jirel of Joiry tale was “The Dark Land” (WT Jan 1936), the last Northwest Smith story was “Tree of Life” (WT Oct 1936). So when “Quest of the Starstone” was published in Weird Tales Nov 1937, it had been over a year since either character had appeared. A year since C. L. Moore had graced the Unique Magazine.

Kuttner got his professional start in the pulps in 1936. In the space of less than two years, 27 stories from him appeared in the pulp magazines, 11 in Weird Tales. In his early career, Kuttner struggled to find his own voice; while prolific, he put out pastiche work like “The Salem Horror” (WT May 1937), riffing off of Lovecraft’s Mythos, and collaborated with Robert Bloch on “The Black Kiss” (WT Jun 1937). It was Kuttner, devoting much of his time to writing, who recommended the collaboration with Moore:

Chacal: Rumor has it that you didn’t particularly care for the story in which Jirel met Northwest, “Quest of the Star Stone.” Could you give us a little background on the tale: the how and why of it?

Moore: I’d forgotten that I maybe like “Quest of the Star Stone ” least—that doesn’t mean dislike. If I said so, I expect it’s true. And if true, my guess would be that in this first Kuttner/Moore collaboration the machinery of working together had to be refined and worked over more before it functioned well. Hank and I had met, I think, a short time before this. Or had we met at all? Or only corresponded? Anyhow, he was urging me to do another Jirel and sent on a kind of opening situation to see if I would feel any interest. I did and we sent the ms. back and forth to the best of my very dim recollection until we were ready to submit it. Remember this was all 40 years ago and a lot has happened since.

[…]

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

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

Crossovers of series characters were rare in the pulps, but not unheard of. Robert E. Howard’s Kull of Atlantis and Bran Mak Morn had met in “Kings of the Night” (WT Nov 1930). This crossover, however, also involved a collaboration, and ends up somewhat disjointed. The opening rhyme is uncharacteristic of Moore’s work, while the Jirel segment is very characteristic of stories like “Jirel Meets Magic” (1935). However, there are references there which seem to owe more to Kuttner than Moore:

“Bel’s curse on you, Joiry! […] Me you may not fear, Joiry,” the wizard’s voice quavered with furty, “but by Set and Bubastis, I’ll find one who’ll tame you if I must go to the ends of space to find him—to the ends of time itself![“]
—C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner, “Quest of the Starstone” (WT Nov 1937)

Bel and Set were gods from Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age stories of Conan the Cimmerian. The Egyptian god Bubastis were notably used in the early Mythos fiction of Kuttner’s collaborator Robert Bloch, especially in “The Brood of Bubastis” (WT Mar 1937). The second section, with Northwest Smith and Yarol on Mars, drinking segir-whiskey and listening to The Green Hills of Earth was certainly in keeping with Moore’s style for stories like “Dust of the Gods” (1934)—but how much of that was driven by Moore’s habit, or Kuttner’s more fannish tendencies to repetition? It’s hard to tell; Moore was still herself, and Kuttner an effective mimic. Working as they did, their styles tend to blend.

The story moves fairly quickly, establishing the essential conflict, introducing the leads, and then effecting the meeting of the dual protagonists in short order via a bit of magic. Unusually for a Jirel story, it is peppered with bits of French—for all that it is set in medieval France about the year 1500 (the only time we get a hard date), Moore rarely bothered with trying to insert the language into the stories. There is a certain fun interplay here; neither Smith or Jirel are stupid, both are formidable, and both are, in their way, rogues. It is neither love or hate at first sight, but a kind of chess match of greed and wits.

Then they are somewhere else, in one of those transports to other dimensions that showcases so many stories of Jirel and Smith. Perils are faced and overcome, a warlock gets their just desserts, a macguffin is unleashed, and it all ends, if not happily, then with a kind of melancholy correctness of everything back in its accustomed place. Unusually for a Northwest Smith story, Jirel survives—or at least, presumably goes back to her own time and place, as Smith did. Yet in the end he thinks:

Behind the closed lids flashed the remembrance of a keen, pale face whose eyes blazed with some
sudden violence of emotion, some message he would never know—whose red streaming hair was a banner on the wind. The face of a girl dead two thousand years in time, light-years of space away,
whose very dust was long lost upon the bright winds of earth.
—C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner, “Quest of the Starstone” (WT Nov 1937)

Well, light-minutes, but that’s a quibble. While technically a story where fantasy meets science fiction, where Northwest Smith learns a spell but still carries a raygun, the story leans more heavily toward magic; and while the viewpoint switches, it is mostly a Northwest Smith story in which Jirel appears, since most of the viewpoint is Smith’s. Maybe that is part of the reason it feels “off” compared to the previous Jirel stories. Or maybe it’s just the literal deus ex machina, as the Starstone gives up its secret.

When compared to “Tryst in Time” (1936), Moore’s previous time-travel story, there are certain similar elements in common: an adventurer is bored, an offer is made and accepted, a trip through time results in an encounter with a beautiful woman—but here, there is no instant bond, no sense of soul-mates or reincarnations. Jirel and Smith are alike and respect each other, but there is no sense that they complete each other or need each other. It is a meeting of equals.

Gertrude Hemken, one of the most vocal fans and a prolific letter-writer to Weird Tales, praised the story:

The story of the issue is all I’ve expected it to be—and more. I’ve been curious all these months to learn by what methods and under what circumstances would Jirel and Northwest Smith meet. The story is somewhat lovely—seems as though I awakened from a fantastic dream after I had read it. The abstract lives bro’t to mind the yarns of Aladdin’s lamp and its genie. The illustration is superb. Jirel looks like a screen heroine—and the two men seem rather 20th Century in attire and general aopearance. The dancing flame-stars seem like a very strange rain. Needless to say—The Quest of the Starstone is outstanding, in my opinion.
—Weird Tales Jan 1938

Clifford Ball, who had published some sword & sorcery stories for Weird Tales himself, added:

The Quest of the Starstone was a fast-moving, interest-holdiqg, well-balanced piece of work and easily the best story in the current issue even if the famed charaaers of Smith and Jirel are possibly unknown to the later readers. I trust these two authors will be encouraged to continue their partnership. They have the knack of producing masterpieces. But I wish to humbly suggest that
they do not attempt to bring N. S. or J. J. together again, for that might spoil the superb effect of this last story. Not that I mean they should discontinue the characterizations; either one is too magnificent to allow extermination.
—Weird Tales Jan 1938

How little he knew. “Quest of the Starstone” was voted the best tale in the November 1937 issue, and readers wanted more. Well, they would get more of Moore & Kuttner—this collaboration proved that they could work successfully together, combining his swift plotting and Moore’s imagination and style—but not much more of Jirel of Joiry or Northwest Smith.

“Quest of the Starstone” was published in the November 1937 issue of Weird Tales. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.

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

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

Lovecraft y Negrito (2023) by Dolores Alcatena

Racist Language
This review concerns H. P. Lovecraft’s cat, whose name was a racial slur against Black people.
As part of this review, the cat’s name and variations are included. Reader discretion advised.

The first known reference to H. P. Lovecraft’s cat was in a letter from his grandfather when Lovecraft was only 5 years old:

You and Dumplin Mama must keep the Barn shut every night and take care of Nig.
—Whipple Van Buren Phillips to H. P. Lovecraft, 17 Oct 1895, Letters to Family & Family Friends 2.1046

“Nig” was short for “Niggerman.” It was a black cat, at a time when the N-word was relatively common for pets with black coats. Whether it was Lovecraft who named the kitten, or a family member or friend, is not recorded in any of Lovecraft’s letters. It was his childhood pet—and, as it happened, the only pet he could afford during his life, although he retained a great fondness for cats throughout his life, often petting or playing with strays. In 1904, Whipple Van Buren Phillips died. Lovecraft’s family home was sold, he and his mother moved away from his childhood home, and the cat disappeared during the tumult, never seen again.

Lovecraft remembered his feline companion in later years, and based two cats in his stories on his lost pet: Niggerman in “The Rats in the Walls,” and Nig in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Neither appearance caused any particular outcry at the time of publication; Weird Tales was no stranger to the N-word and other terms, and it was not until “The Rats in the Walls” (1956) that any serious effort was made to censor or bowdlerize the cat’s name. Works in translation and adaptation were more likely to change the name; different languages, with different histories regarding race relations and Black slavery, have their own nuances of language to give shades of meaning or seek to avoid giving offense.

In 2023, Argentinian illustrator and writer Dolores’ Alcatena published Lovecraft y Negrito, a short graphic novel about Lovecraft’s friendship with his beloved pet. As she puts it in the opening:

Como amante de los gatos, Howard Philips Lovecraft frecuentemente incluía en sus relatos a estos elegantes y misteriosos animalitos. En su estilo deliberadamente desamorado y serio, los describía como símbolos de perfección, estética, libertad e independencia. Pero entre las cartas del escritor aparece Niggerman, un gatito negro que acompañaba a Lovecraft en su niñez. Al hablar de Niggerman (rebautizado ‘Negrito” para esta obra) las palabras del autor asumían un tono cálido, recordando con ternura cómo jugaban juntos en el jardín. Al hablar del gatito, el escritor no pudo, o no quiso, esconder sus sentimientos. El cariño que Lovecraft mantuvo a lo largo de su vida por Niggerman inspiró esta historia, permitiéndonos acceder a un costado más humano del gran autor del horror.

As a cat lover, Howard Philips Lovecraft often included these elegant and mysterious animals in his stories. In his deliberately dispassionate and serious style, he described them as symbols of perfection, aesthetics, freedom, and independence. But among the writer’s letters appears Niggerman, a black kitten who accompanied Lovecraft in his boyhood. When talking about Niggerman (renamed “Negrito” for this work), the author’s words took on a warm tone, fondly recalling how they played together in the garden. When talking about the kitten, the writer could not, or did not want to, hide his feelings. Lovecraft’s lifelong affection for Niggerman inspired this story, allowing us to glimpse a more human side of the great horror author.

Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)

English translation

“Negro” in Spanish is the color black, “-ito” is a diminutive suffix; context is important because in some usages “negrito” can mean bold type, or it can be a reference to certain Southeast Asian peoples, or a not-necessarily-kind reference to small Black children. In the context of this story, it might be best to think of it as a term of affection, like naming a black kitten “Blackie.”

Su gato, Negrito, lo acompaña. Y, como siempre, lo cuida.	His cat, Negrito, accompanies him. And, as always, takes care of him.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation

The story is told in black and white, mostly from Negrito’s perspective. The cat aids and protects Howard through his journeys, including the events that would inspire “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” From a cat’s perspective, the cat-killing couple in Ulthar are particularly horrific.

“Ningún hombre debería matar a un gato” Pensó el niño mientras recordaba a Negrito ronroneando frente al fuego.	“No man should kill a cat,” the boy thought as he remembered Negrito purring in front of the fire.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation

There is a somewhat fairy-tale quality to the retelling, the traipse through Lovecraft’s fiction. Most of Howard’s waking life we don’t see…but then his cat was not there to see that.

Qué suerte que Negrito siempre había estado en esos momentos.	How lucky that Negrito had always been there in those moments.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation

The Lovecraft of these stories is a scared, almost a traumatized kid, with Negrito as his only friend; parental figures are absent. It is a very sympathetic view of Howard as a child, but in comparison to El Joven Lovecraft by José Oliver & Bartolo Torres it does not show Lovecraft’s occasional joyfully morbid side. Readers are meant to empathize with a young Lovecraft.

The ending, a wordless reunion between the dead Lovecraft and his lost cat, is the kind of afterlife that every cat-lover might wish to experience themselves someday.

Es un tributo muy distintivo ser elegido como amigo y confidente de un gato. H. P. Lovecraft.	It is a very distinctive tribute to be chosen as a friend and confidant of a cat. H. P. Lovecraft.	It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such an one more agreeable and interesting.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation	H. P. Lovecraft, “Cats and Dogs”

Lovecraft y Negrito is a story about a boy and his cat. It is not a historical work that delves into the nuances of the cultural forces that went into such names, or how naming cats did or did not reflect Lovecraft’s racial prejudices in later life. If readers want a scholarly exploration of what we do and don’t know about the real animal, check out Ken Faig’s essay “Lovecraft’s Boyhood Cat” in Lovecraft Annual #19 (2025). If you want a heartwarming fantasy about Lovecraft and his beloved pet, which has gained a kind of literary immortality, then read Lovecraft y Negrito.

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.

“Tryst in Time” (1936) by C. L. Moore

This is an odd reference in one of C. L. Moore’s letters, about a story never published:

Well, have just received my first flat rejection from Wright. A harmless little fable about a sorcerer king of antediluvian times, his mysterious witch-queen and a time-traveler with a startling resemblance to a certain Mr. Smith whom I may have mentioned once or twice before, tho no names were named in the story. Ah, well, life is full of disappointments.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 31 May 1935

We get no more than that—though Northwest Smith would eventually star in a time-travel story, “Quest of the Star-Stone” (Weird Tales Nov 1937), written with Henry Kuttner. However, before she collaborated with Kuttner, Moore published another time-travel story, one which features a very Northwest Smith-like protagonist: Eric Rosner, hard-bitten adventurer and world-traveler:

ERIC ROSNER at twenty had worked his way round the world on cattle boats, killed his first man in a street brawl in Shanghai, escaped a firing squad by a hairbreadth, stowed away on a pole-bound exploring ship.

At twenty-five he had lost himself in Siberian wilderness, led a troup of Tatar bandits, commanded a Chinese regiment, fought in a hundred battles, impartially on either side.

At thirty there was not a continent nor a capital that had not known him, not a jungle nor a desert nor a mountain range that had not left scars upon his great Viking body. Tiger claws and the Russian knout, Chinese bullets and the knives of savage black warriors in African forests had written their tales of a full and perilous life upon him. At thirty he looked backward upon such a gorgeous, brawling, color-splashed career as few men of sixty can boast. But at thirty he was not content.
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)

Did Moore take that rejected story and resubmit it for Astounding? Or did she just take the idea of the story and re-write it for the science fiction magazine (whose editor and fans were not fond of sorcerers and witch-queens)? There is a certain similarity between this tale and Moore’s previous work in Astounding, “The Bright Illusion” (1934) and “Greater Glories” (1935), a romanticism of a male protagonist finding or recognizing love under unusual and somewhat cosmically tragic circumstances. It wouldn’t be surprising if Moore had married the idea of a rejected tale to the general outline of what had sold successfully in the past.

The temporal physics behind the tale are no better or worse than that of many time travel stories, and if Moore isn’t necessarily erudite in physics, she is well-read in basic time travel literature, having no doubt read a great many stories in the pulps or elsewhere. When she writes, for example, of the idea of how moving through the fourth dimension (time) means the other three dimensions go along without you:

“Yeah, and find yourself floating in space when you let go.” Eric grinned. “Even I’ve heard that the universe is in motion through space. I don’t know about time, but I’m pretty sure space would block your little scheme.”
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)

Clark Ashton Smith had addressed just this problem in “The Letter from Mohaun Los” (Wonder Stories Aug 1932); Smith’s solution was that if you waited long enough, another planet would pass by the point in space you occupied and you’d have your adventure that way. She also addresses the idea of changing the past:

There must be many possible futures. The one we enter upon is not the only way. Have you ever heard that theory explained? It’s not a new one—the idea that at every point of our progress we confront crossroads, with a free choice as to which we take. And a different future lies down each.
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)

Murray Leister’s “Sideways in Time” (Astounding Jun 1934) had played with the idea of parallel timelines and alternate futures, so Moore wasn’t the first to address the idea, but the fact that she did further shows familiarity with the mechanics of time travel in fiction.

Moore squirms around that by letting Rosner stay on terra firma, even as the ages pass around him, skipping through time like a rock on a pond. The result is reminiscent of the Futurama episode “The Late Phillip J. Fry,” (or, if you prefer, the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations a la Olaf Stapledon’s classic Last and First Men (1930)), with Rosner zipping through future (and past) ages, from advanced civilizations to barbarisms and back again. At least one scene may involve a tongue-in-cheek poke at a certain Providence gentleman she corresponded with, who had a tendency to use the word “Cyclopean”:

Even at this distance he recognized those darker blotches upon the tremendous walls as the sign of a coming dissolution. It was a city more awfully impressive than any he had ever dreamed of, standing gigantic under the low, gray sky of this swamplike world—but its glory was past. Here and there gaps in the colossal walls spoke of fallen blocks and ruined buildings. By the thick, primordial air and the swamp smell and the unrecognizable architecture he knew that he gazed upon a scene of immortal antiquity, and his breath came quicker as he stared, wondering where the people were whose Cyclopean city this was. what name they bore and if history had ever recorded it.
—C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time” (Astounding Dec 1936)

For the most part, however, this is a piecemeal narrative, a succession of brief, fragmentary scenes and images punctuated by a character that reappears, again and again—a woman, Maia, who is always separated from Eric Rosner by something. Until the end. Without ever using terms like “reincarnation” or “soul mate,” there is a distinct and heavy hint that these two were meant to be together, and that they will be—eventually.

While the story isn’t bad, it also apparently involved some editorial interference and a couple of cuts, which she complained about to her friend in Providence:

Which bring us to the memory of your distress over the butchery of your two tales in that magazine. I ahd somewhat miraculously escaped much injury in my experiences with them up to the publication of my last story, “Tryst in Time” which was so mangled and dismembered that I could scarcely bear to look upon the bleeding remnants. Typographical errors ranged from the careless to the ludicrous—I remember a brook ‘tickling’ through a meadow, for one. And with the most uncanny precision they eliminated and ruined the only two parts of the story for which I felt real affection. My paragraph referring to the mysterious urge which drives races upon migration was left out entirely. I had mentioned the great prehistoric hegiras of our remote fathers across vast areas of Europe, perhaps over the land-bridge into America, the recent fever to “Go West” that burned in our immediate ancestors, and hinting wisely that mayhap the fever which my hero felt to travel in time might be the beginning of a new race-migration somewhere. It didn’t mean anything much, but it was kinda fun and I bitterly resented its omission. And in the last of the story a sentence whose “well-greased perfection”, to quote yourself, gave me a great joy was utterly butchered. I had it, “Wherver you adventured the knowledge of my presence tormented you, and through all my lives I waited for you in vain.” Perhaps it verges on blank verse in its extreme unctuousness, but who are they to cut it in their vandalism to—“Wherever you adventured the knowledge of my presence tormented you—and I waited in vain!”??? If they don’t like the way I write why don’t they go back where they came from? I am burning up.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 24 Oct 1936, Letters to C. L. Moore 195

“Race-migration” was a popular historical concept during the 1930s, and makes its appearance in stories like Robert E. Howard’s “The Children of the Night” (Weird Tales Apr/May 1931). The reference to time travel as a form of race-migration might be a nudge-wink-nudge reference to Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” (Astounding Jun 1936). The cuts might have been for space, or because the editor disagreed with the ideas expressed—there are many possibilities, but no firm answers. Pulp editors could be merciless and incomprehensible.

There isn’t much feedback on this story; Lovecraft apparently never read it, or at least doesn’t mention it in surviving letters. Fans, however appreciated it, with one fan letter noting:

I was glad to see Miss Moore has begun to write ‘science-fiction. Everything else I have read by her was purely weird. Her story seemed real and plausible, in spite of the unusual plot.
—Richard Creecy, Astounding Feb 1937

Which shows how Moore’s reputation was developing.

“Tryst in Time” was published in the December 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.

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

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

The Colour Out of Space (2024) by H. P. Lovecraft & Sara Barkat

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

Comic and graphic novel adaptations of prose and verse literary works have always held a fascination. Because while you might declare one text as canonical, as a true text, immutable and eternal, the graphic adaptations of that text will always be different, unique to their vision and skill and ability to realize that text in illustrated form. Every artist has to pick and choose what images to convey and how to convey them, how to frame the story and the text, what to leave in and out, what to emphasize and how to do it. Give three artists the same story to draw, and you have three variations on the same story.

This sometimes arouses—at least among some readers and critics—the urge to compare different variations on the same works to each other. Because it can be fascinating to see the divergence and the commonalities, to look at all the different flowers that may blossom from identical seeds. Not necessarily to point out any one graphic adaptation of Lovecraft as better than the others, but to enjoy the diversity of views and skills.

When it comes to “The Colour Out of Space” in particular, however, there’s a fundamental question that every artist has to struggle with: how do you depict a color that is outside the visible spectrum?

Strictly speaking, outside of a technical trick like polarized lenses, you cannot. What usually happens instead is that the artist has to use visual rhetoric to convey the sense of the unknown color, even while using the colors that are available for printing. In the case of Sara Barkat’s The Colour Out of Space (2024) this is mostly accomplished by having the majority of the art in black-and-white.

However, instead of having the colored portions represent just the color itself, the color is used to illustrate those people and objects that the color has infected. So the addition is not just a single splash of magenta or red in a monochrome world, it is a spectrum of colors in a landscape, or a room, or a person.

Barkat’s style isn’t a demonstration of technical excellence in the same sense of Gou Tanabe’s The Colour Out of Space (2025), nor does it have the minimalist book-as-object approach of Amy Borezo’s The Colour Out of Space (2016). What she has is a loose, sketchy but heavily detailed pencil that captures a certain underground aesthetic, the rawness of the art adding a certain texture to the text, especially with the use of mixed media (primarily watercolors) to add color. As with Alberto Breccia’s Cthulhu Mythos adaptations, the result is a more profound experience than either the art or the text would accomplish on their own.

Which is ultimately what a lot of people are looking for in any graphic adaptation. Not a simplification of a text, or the addition of some pretty pictures to look at, but a new way of experiencing the story.

The Colour Out of Space (2024) by H. P. Lovecraft and Sara Barkat was published by T. S. Poetry Press. Barkat’s other works include a graphic adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper (2020) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Drawing Dracula Daily (2023).

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.