Your scholarship is in danger, your friends aren’t human, and something ancient is awakening in the dreamlands.

As reality itself becomes uncertain, questions of identity and transformation become matters of survival.

Just another finals week at Miskatonic University.

—Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery website

The Lovecraft Mythos has provided the inspiration for games since the 1980s, from early references in Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games to collectible card games like Mythos, board games like Arkham Horror, and various console and computer-based video games including Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. While many of these games focus on the horror the Mythos, each game brings something new, highlights different aspects of the Mythos, and allows the creators to use their imagination to explore and expand on the Mythos in new ways.

Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery is a forthcoming Lovecraftian visual novel/adventure/mystery game with elements of dating sim romance, puzzle solving, self-discovery, and transformation, exploring the Mythos through a queer lens. The demo is available on Steam and Itch.io, and the crowdfund campaign for the full game, along with tie-in fiction anthology and other perks, is now live on Kickstarter.

Starspawn Studios developers John Burke and Daniel Pennypacker (creator of Polemic) have agreed to answer a few questions about the game.

※

What is the one-sentence pitch for Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery?

John: You investigate an ancient mystery that’s threatening reality itself while navigating the personal connections that make life worth living, exploring themes of love and resistance in the face of overwhelming opposition and inevitable decay.

How did you get into Lovecraft and cosmic horror?

John: The first thing that comes to mind is watching John Carpenter’s The Thing in early high school. The gore was fun, of course, but the isolation and paranoia were what hooked me. I know Alien doesn’t really count, but I saw it around the same time, and it left a similar impression. Seeing skilled characters doing their best and still failing–or nearly so–is just really exciting. Cosmicism itself didn’t click until later; it just read as another apocalyptic threat. I started looking into cosmic horror more specifically after reading Blindsight and a couple Laundry Files books.

Daniel: During the collectible-card-game craze of the ’90s, I bought a starter deck of the Mythos card game. It was so different and confusing, and planted a seed of fascination deep in my brain. I learned more about H.P. and cosmic horror over time just by being into nerdy things.

In my early 20s, I had a horror movie phase and then read a couple of H.P.’s short stories. I was really impressed by how ahead of their time they felt, but I also bounced off because of the overt racism. I’d say at this point, my head was wrapped around what cosmic horror really was. I don’t like gore, so cosmic horror felt like the cool, artsy, subtle horror subgenre.

More recently, I had a Gothic literature phase, which led me back to listening to all of Lovecraft. This time, I was able to view his writing more from an art history lens and could push past his bigotry.

What Lovecraft story resonates the most with you and why?

John: The Shadow out of Time. It’s almost inverted from his usual stories–the freaky thing happens at the beginning, and the investigation is largely internal. The mounting dread isn’t from being trapped in a weird town or learning things you’d rather not about the history of Earth. It’s entirely about self-knowledge. Lovecraft was no stranger to mental illness, and I imagine his own moods, and maybe family history, served as some inspiration here. If not, he really nailed it, because that’s why Shadow so resonates with me. When you go a little funny in the head, afterwards, you have to figure out what happened, and who you are, and who you want to be. You might take medicine that changes your brain. You might try several! It’s not fun. The story uses a frank discussion of mental illness to make sure we know that that isn’t what’s going on, but it’s still ultimately about the terror of learning who you are and what you’ve done.

Daniel: At the Mountains of Madness deserves to be in the sci-fi canon. It has some flaws, but in the context of when it was written, it’s just so original. It’s also pretty free of any bigotry, as far as I can remember? There’s some imagery that’s really great too—the isolation of the Arctic, and the descriptions of the mountains really stick in my mind. 

I’m also a big history buff, and knowing so much has happened before can cause some existential dread, so the revealing of a secret history really resonated with me. I’ve even had moments in my life where I think “Oh boy, I don’t wanna share a relevant weird history thing I know; it’ll ruin someone’s day.”  After reading it, I spent a week imagining what a modern movie of Mountains would be like. The core story is so good, and straightforward forward, it seemed like it could use a modern adaptation that smoothed over some of the wordy narration. The big character arch I kept thinking of was regret and guilt about going on the expedition at all. 

It’s also surprising how much the story actually tells about the Elder Things. He looks at reliefs in their old city, and it pretty much lays everything out. Also: the giant penguins!

What’s your background in gaming and game development?

John: I’ve been gaming consistently since the NES days. I like all sorts of stuff. If I had to list current favorites: Metal Gear Solid 3, Danganronpa 2, Final Fantasy VII… innovative games with great stories that strike a balance between somber and wacky. And old point-and-click puzzlers like Day of the Tentacle. You’ll see all of that in Starspawn’s DNA. For game development, in elementary school I made a text adventure with QBasic. It probably wasn’t very good. I’ve fiddled with a lot of different stuff since then, but I never sat down and made a real game start to finish until now. I never had an idea I liked well enough to justify all those hours. I stuck to writing stories. 

Daniel: I’ve been developing physical card and board games on the side for a while, with one successful self-published game so far. I’ve always loved video games, my day job is programming. I’d always wanted to make a game, but it was always hard to do everything on my own. Having a co-dev was really instrumental in getting the game made. 

Some of my favorite games are Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Resident Evil 4. So I wanted our game to have a clear and obvious interface, action mixed with exploration, and an interesting story. I think if a game is too story-heavy, it’s easy to get bored, but if there’s a boring story, it’s hard to stay interested in a game. One of my favorite parts of JRPG’s has always been entering a new town and just walking around and talking to NPC’s, so a 2D world with lots of talking, interspersed with some action, fit right into what I like in games. 

How did you decide to develop Starspawn together? What’s the background of the game development?

Daniel: I tried making a narrative game a couple of years ago and learned a ton. But I hit a wall when it came to actual writing. Then John suggested working on a visual novel together, and it clicked: “Oh yeah, I was missing a writer—we could actually do this!” John does coding too, so it was nice to know I wouldn’t be stuck with technical problems.

John: Daniel was rereading some Lovecraft at the time and one of his suggestions was a dating sim where you go to school with the various monsters. This didn’t quite make sense—why would they be in school?—so I said okay, maybe you go to school with a bunch of half-monsters and you can date them.

Daniel: Gameplay- and story-wise, this made a lot more sense. It’s hard to come up with relatable characters that are incomprehensible gods.

John: Then we needed to reckon with why there are a bunch of half-monsters. It doesn’t seem like it would be a priority for the great old ones. I came up with a backstory to explain it that ended up being like, part Borges story, part Cold War spy thriller. Which meant pulling in some additional genres…

Daniel: There was a bit of feature creep.

John: I like the old LucasArts puzzle games, so we added a point-and-click mode.

Daniel: And arcade-style minigames.

John: And we needed a way to move around the world, which meant either a map that took you to different settings, or…

Daniel: A full-on 2D world. And we had to make that interesting, so we added stealth gameplay.

John: And finally made ourselves stop.

When you decided on a Lovecraftian theme, did that prompt a Lovecraft re-read?

Daniel:  When we started working on the game, I was mid-read, and John re-read a bunch of the stories. I also ended up reading some other Gothic classics (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights) and some classic sci-fi (Dying Earth, Conan). Reading Conan was especially interesting, as it made me realize how H.P. was broadly part of a pulpy genre.

John: My reread wasn’t going so well at first. The ideas I was getting while reading him were too lugubrious for my taste, and my other ideas were so whimsical that they felt unfaithful. Then I got to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I’d never even heard of. It was when everything clicked for me–how to tell the kind of story I’d want to read, with cosmic horror and whimsy, where you explore beyond the usual claustrophobic settings you find in a lot of mythos games. Carter is too chill about everything, but having a template for a real adventure was what I was missing.

Do you feel that being you (queer, a game developer) has shaped your understanding of Lovecraft and approach to cosmic horror?

John: It feels weird when there isn’t something deeper going on in a cosmic horror story. Even Lovecraft did it, right? Lots of his stories tie in to various preoccupations of the era. The best horror gets its hooks into you by speaking to something that’s already on your mind. And in order to do that, it has to speak to something. Otherwise all you have is tentacles. You don’t have to be queer to have that insight, obviously, but it can help.

My contribution to the Kickstarter short story collection is about a gay American who moves to Iceland around 1960 to help industrialize their fishing industry under the Marshall Plan. He’s expecting a relatively enlightened Danish-style approach to homosexuality there, but it turns out that LGBT life there was even harder than it was in America. It was legal in theory, but the country was so small and gossipy that stigma was more powerful than law. Being queer meant knowing the right secret incantations and hidden meeting places. And if you found something terrifying happening there, you might not report it. You’d be too paranoid and compromised. Some things are more frightening than cults.

Fiction doesn’t have to be about interrogating prejudice or speaking truth to power. But the better you understand yourself and your place in society, the easier you’ll find it is to write a good story. This Iceland idea came naturally to me since I knew about the broad strokes just from being myself, and knew from my life how effective it would be at creating a mood of strangeness and alienation.

Daniel: Both The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and Herbert West—Reanimator felt extremely queer to me! In Ward he literally brings a dark-dandy version of himself to life, who then takes over his life, all while avoiding his parents so he can go out at night. Herbert West feels like it touched on gay men having obsessive crushes that only get them into more and more trouble they can’t explain. I can’t make any judgments about Lovecraft’s sexuality, but we do know he was deeply alienated, and adopted an attitude of a snobbish outsider; a role gay men often occupied before Gay Rights. I suppose Lovecraft was touching on feelings of otherness that might be universal. 

Does gaming offer a new way to explore and experience the Mythos?

Daniel: Yes! Just like any medium, there are certain feelings that games are good at evoking. Specific to cosmic horror, I think we did a good job making the mini-games anxiety-inducing, and providing lots of exploration, mystery, and investigation. 

The classic clever video game for cosmic horror is Eternal Darkness on the GameCube. It did some really fun meta tricks where you thought the game was glitching. That sort of reality-questioning surprise would be impossible to do in any other medium.

Video games can also be really good at vibes and atmosphere, which are such a big part of cosmic horror. Elden Ring is probably the best recent example of a game that’s hard to describe other than the mood of playing it. Sure, it’s hard, but the majority of the game is spent walking around feeling a vague sense of dread. Maybe a more Lovecraft version would be that you can’t actually beat the monsters and can only run away. 

John: “Only being able to run away” is a really great mechanic. There’s a game called Subnautica where you’re stranded on an alien planet and have to explore increasingly deep oceans full of weird fish and some giant monsters, and you basically only have a knife. It’s incredibly good at making you feel insignificant and alone. That game hits most of the Lovecraftian notes, actually, and the gameplay limitations really amplify the vibe.

Another thing unique to games is that you are actually sitting there making the character do things. When you’re watching a horror movie, you can say, you know, “Don’t open that door!” In a video game, you actually have to hit the button to open the door. Undertale does this on the genocide route, making things increasingly unpleasant as you enter commands. Papers, Please consists almost entirely of this, though I do consider it almost too unpleasant to play as a result.

I’ll mention one last mechanic that you see in a lot of games. You build up a big inventory of powers and items and travel abilities, then the game takes that all away from you and traps you somewhere. It’s frustrating if it’s done wrong, but it can be a really effective way to induce feelings of isolation and powerlessness. If you’re reading a story, you might empathize with the character, but if you’re playing a game, the buttons don’t do the same things they used to. You are the one who has lost the powers.

How does Starspawn explore queerness through a Mythos lens?

John: I’m going to let one of our contributing writers start this one. (Em wrote one of the novelettes we’re including as a Kickstarter reward, and she came up with one of the main characters.)

“[Cosmic horror] stories provide a ripe foundation for exploring non-heteronormative identity because both involve recognizing that consensus reality is more fragile and constructed than it appears. Cosmic horror traditionally focuses on themes of transformation, hidden knowledge, and the inadequacy of established categories, all of which create natural space for examining gender and sexual fluidity without requiring explicit positioning.

The genre frequently features characters discovering their true nature, often something that existed before their conscious awareness or something that has been heavily suppressed. Both resonate strongly with non-binary and trans experiences of self-discovery.

To cap it off, the horror elements can effectively capture both the terror and liberation that can accompany stepping outside normative social structures.”

‘Terror and liberation’ summarizes it pretty well. All of our characters have something like this going on. There’s always something about themselves that they don’t understand or don’t accept. Sometimes part of that is about being queer, but we never sat down and decided to write a queer story, if that makes sense. Starspawn deals with learning to accept yourself and love others, and self-knowledge and transformation and the weight of history. It would be weird if it weren’t at least a little queer.

We have a Yith mindnapping victim who comes back full of knowledge about other ways of being. This makes him reflect on who he was, who he is, who he wants to be–and some of the things he’s realized are about his sexuality. But he has many more things to figure out than that; he’s paranoid, he’s not experiencing time normally, he’s confused and depressed. Even with all that darkness, there’s a glimmer of light, since he’s learned things about himself that will let him live a more authentic life. And that’s worth celebrating, even at the end of the world.

Daniel: Feeling anxious, alienated, out of place, and at the mercy of powers beyond your control has a lot of queer overlap. Gothic literature is always concerned with legacy and history, and queer people often have to wrestle with anxiety about family and legacy.

One of the characters in Starspawn is a gay man transforming into a Deep One. Do you feel that “The Shadow over Innsmouth” offers parallels to the LGBTQ+ experience?

John: I’d have to give it a re-read, but I am inclined to say ‘not really,’ unless you want to do some eisegesis. As I recall, you yourself have written about how Innsmouth isn’t even meant to be understood as a parallel for race-mixing. If you play with the ideas presented in the story, though, you can go to some really interesting places.

The character’s name is Silas. He’s nineteen. His story is about leaving home and feeling conflicted about where you come from. In his hometown, they’ve got an ancient pact about breeding; but he doesn’t plan to have kids, which isn’t making him any friends there. And, needless to say, turning into a monster won’t make him many friends in gay circles. He’s got a foot in each world, but he doesn’t feel welcome in either. Pretty common experience for a young queer person.

What are some of the games that influenced the development of Starspawn?

John: I’d always wanted to make one of those old LucasArts-style point-and-click games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, so we have point-and-click and inventory-based puzzles. The protagonist is a little snarky and uses a lot of gallows humor, too. He’s freaked out, of course, but humor is an outlet for him. On the dating sim side, I prefer games with social sim elements rather than straight dating sims; specifically, story-driven games like Persona and Danganronpa, where you spend your free time getting to know the other characters and managing your life.

Daniel: WarioWare for the minigame. 90s Zelda and JRPG games for the 2D sections. Metal Gear for the stealth sections. And Yakuza for showing how combining lots of gameplay styles can work and still feel cohesive. 

The previous game I’d tried making on my own was mildly cosmic horror! The setup was as you were in an RPG city that was about to be invaded and destroyed. The whole game would have had a time limit of about an hour, and was filled with NPC’s asking for help. You’d go around finding and trading items, but there would be no way you could help everyone. Nor could you prevent the city from being destroyed. This is the one I dropped off of because I couldn’t write very well, but it had similar elements of choosing who to spend time on, branching stories, and exploring new environments. 

You obviously took inspiration from Lovecraft, but did you take inspiration from any other Mythos stories or games, like the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game or Sucker For Love?

Daniel: Around COVID, I was playing more TTRPGs and ended up learning how to run Call of Cthulhu. I also read a bunch of adventures to get a good overview of what was out there. I think designing a D&D adventure is the closest thing to structuring a video game. You have to think a lot about pacing, and designing around players missing things or doing things out of sequence.

Right off the bat, we decided there had to be a madness meter, which is taken right from Call of Cthulhu’s sanity mechanic. A madness meter is a really nice way to add some gameplay to exploration and investigation. In CoC, there’s always a risk that anytime you look into something, you’ll end up losing some sanity. This adds some risk assessment to exploring, and not just having players “check everything.”

Our madness meter is a little kinder, though. In CoC, it’s more like a multi-session health point bar that ensures things keep getting worse for the players. In our game, we want it to be a scale you move back and forth on, and being madder isn’t always bad.

John: It’s sort of key to the game design, actually. We didn’t want any combat, since being able to defeat things is the wrong vibe, but we still needed a way to punish you for being bad at things, and like Daniel said, add some dread to exploration. You also take on some madness as you get to know certain characters, ask certain questions, read certain books.

In a dating sim, the main stressors are time management and dialogue choices. You’re always having to decide who to spend your limited time with, and what to say to them. Madness compounds this. The madder you get, the less free time you have to bond with other characters; you have to spend that time doing a soothing activity. Your personality changes, too. You get different dialogue options, often for the worse. But there are also paths in the game that you can only take if you’re willing to commit to being sort of insane. Cursed knowledge and stuff shouldn’t be one-dimensional; a lot of things are still worth knowing.

How do you deal with prejudices in the game? Will characters have to face homophobia or anti-Innsmouth prejudice?

John: I talked a little about Silas above. He’s definitely running into homophobia at home—it’s a small town with an ancient cult that’s obsessed with reproduction. Silas has started to transform, but he’s got some magical protection around it, so he’s just looking a little sweaty and frog-eyed to the general public, which of course comes with its own prejudices. He’s a film major and likes making student films, but he doesn’t let himself act in them anymore. He doesn’t like people looking at him. The guy’s not having a great year. You can see him for who he really is, though. Since each scene has branching paths, you’re free to provide the anti-Deep One prejudice yourself, if you want. I don’t know why you would, but being a jerk is often an option.

When you start exploring the dreamlands, you run into some anti-dreamer prejudice, too, as if you’re there to gentrify the place. And some of your classmates’ parents really don’t approve of their kids dating a baseline human. Every character and setting provides a lens we can use to look at prejudice. We have nine befriendable characters and two worlds, so we’ve had a lot of opportunities to explore this space.

Starspawn has dating sim elements and romance options. Why did you choose to include these in the game?

John: As the story evolved, we realized how important it is that the player can bond with and help other people. Every cosmicist story has the characters realizing how insignificant they are, how insignificant humanity is, but what somebody does with that knowledge is up to them. When Carl Sagan saw the ‘pale blue dot’ picture of Earth from four billion miles away, he didn’t go mad. He used it to try to convince us to be nicer to each other. That’s a direction that Starspawn pushes you towards, too. Relationships give life meaning, even if the universe doesn’t. But we’re not didactic. You can be a total jerk. I don’t know why you’d want to be, but you can. It makes things harder and you get a much worse ending, though.

As for romance, well, that’s part of life too! And it seemed like fun. The bonus art’s been a little embarrassing to work on, I’ll admit.

Daniel: Plus dating sims are a trendy mechanic. And for a good reason! It’s compelling to have to stress over deciding who to engage with more.

John: It encourages you to engage with the characters’ stories, too. If you want to maximize your relationship with them, you have to learn what they like and don’t like. In a game where story features so heavily, that’s an advantage for me as a writer.

Daniel: Dating sims also mesh perfectly with branching narratives, which also mesh well with exploration. So at a certain point, it just felt like it all gelled.

What did you learn while developing Starspawn?

Daniel: So much! I worked on a lot of the 2D engine, and it forced me to learn a ton of the basics of game coding. I had to learn about making maps, pathfinding, animations, and scripting. I had lots of self-doubt about choosing an engine, and I kept wondering if we should have picked Unity, instead of a dedicated visual novel engine, so we didn’t have to write as much of the 2D engine. Ren’Py does give you a huge amount, though. And from talking to game-dev friends, it’s still got the best-in-class syntax for writing a visual novel script.

John: And since the majority of the code is just dialogue, that matters a lot!

Daniel: Personally, it was extremely rewarding to learn so many fundamental aspects of coding a game. One of the nicest surprises was how welcoming game-dev friends were. I’ve got a couple of friends who work in games, and I was initially self-conscious about showing Starspawn off.

John: It’s just the two of us and a few visual artists, so the result is a little, shall we say, indie. I think we’re succeeding, though. A journalist recently called the demo ‘charming and ambitious.’ 

Daniel: I think everyone can see how much work we’ve put in. A lot of people in games got their start by doing their own little indie things, so everyone’s been extremely supportive.

John: One thing I’ve struggled with, as a writer, has been the cost of ideas, in time and money. When you’re writing a book, settings are free. You can come up with some crazy, mind-bending concept and just set a couple of scenes there. Here, you need a painted backdrop for it, you need pixel landscapes, maybe even character portraits. If we have an idea for a cool action scene, we have to figure out how to represent it in gameplay, which usually means we have to cut it. And people don’t want to have to read too much, either. You only get a few sentences at most for each beat. So I’ve learned a lot about being concise.

※

Thank you, John and Daniel, for answering all of these questions. I’m looking forward to seeing what the full version of Starspawn looks like, and wish you the best of luck with your crowdfunding on Kickstarter!

For more on Starspawn Studios check out their website and Bluesky account.

---

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.

Antisemitism

The following article deals explicitly with antisemitism in a historical context. Frank discussion of these matters requires the reproduction of at least some samples of antisemitic speech from historical sources (e.g. Lovecraft’s letters). As such, please be advised before reading further.

---

H. P. Lovecraft was an antisemite. To go into exact detail about the nature of his antisemitic biases and views, the influences from the books he read and people he met, and how those encounters changed the shape and expression of his prejudices over the course of his life, is beyond the scope of this article. It is sufficient to say that from an early age and extending throughout his life Lovecraft held to common stereotypes regarding Jews as an ethnicity and Judaism as a religion, both of which he was largely ignorant about, and largely considered them a people racially and culturally apart from Anglo-Americans like himself. This general antipathy did not extend to friends and loved ones such as Samuel Loveman or his wife Sonia H. Greene, and was rarely made public, but is well-documented in his private letters and influenced views of his peers such as Hugo Gernsback. Lovecraft was not unique in these beliefs, but has left a deep record of personal correspondence which allows more insight into his thoughts on such topics than most of his contemporaries.

---

We despise people—like the Jews—who purchase life at the price of a resigned heritage, and consent to live in a world which has stamped out their culture as a geographic reality.

H. P. Lovecraft to Woodburn Harris, 9 Nov 1929, Letters to Woodburn Harris 200

For the first 30 years of H. P. Lovecraft’s life, the territory of Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which supported a primarily Arabic population of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. During the 19th century private efforts to encourage Jewish immigration to the Biblical lands had gained some headway, a movement referred to as “Zionism” (Zion being a Hebrew word for the historical Jerusalem and territory of the Israelites). During World War I, the Ottoman Empire’s alliance with Germany and Austria against France, Britain, and Russia led the British in 1917 to issue the Balfour Declaration, voicing support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The United States echoed this support with the Lodge-Fish Resolution in 1922.

Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the British-administered Mandate of Palestine was established in 1920, and Jewish immigration to the region increased—as did opposition from autochthonous Arabic Muslims, Jews, Christians, and other peoples of varied religion and ethnicity who were already living in the region. Immigration and conflict in the region would continue until long after Lovecraft was dead, and eventually lead to the creation of the contemporary state of Israel, but during his life it was an ongoing international issue that cropped up occasionally in his letters. Lovecraft earliest views on the subject are from April 1918, before the end of WWI:

I hope, as you do, that the Jews can be rehabilitated as a nation in Palestine. I doubt their capacity for full self-government, for their physical courage & national (as distinct from religio-cultural) sense has been broken by long dispersal & Aryan contempt; but I fancy they will do very well under British protectorate.

H. P. Lovecraft to James Larkin Pearson, 6 Apr 1918, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 315

Lovecraft’s normal approach to colonialism was conservative. He acknowledged the fundamental unfairness of the forceful takeover of a territory from the indigenous inhabitants with a general might-makes-right narrative, as when he discussed the European invasion and colonization of North and South America:

It is true that our ancestors ruthlessly pushed the redskin aside—but after all, this is no more than one tribe had always been doing to another. If the English brutally displaced the Iroquois in New York State, so must the Iroquois themselves have displaced the earlier Algonquin tribes when they occupied the region. And so on . . . and so on . . . . Of course, the greater strength and superior weapons of the white man made his case a good deal different—but the general idea is not to be forgotten.

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 11 Jul 1936, A Means to Freedom 2.856

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lovecraft was also critical of reparations of territory to dispossessed peoples or of allowing colonies self-governance:

To try to go back and theoretically right all the wrongs of history is simply fantastic. On that basis the Aryan race has no business in Europe at all, since it probably took it by force from Neanderthalers and Mongoloids. When a region is inhabited by its own race and unwillingly held in subjection, there is legitimate ground for revolt; but the idea of dispossessing long-adjusted present populations in favour of remote historical claims—however just in theory—is chimerical to the point of downright criminality.

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 21 Jan 1933, A Means to Freedom 2.531

In effect, Lovecraft might not have encouraged wars of conquest, but once a region had been conquered he was unwilling to change the status quo. With regard to Palestine, this leads to a bit of a philosophical conundrum: one of Lovecraft’s criticisms and stereotypes of Jews was as a people dispossessed of a homeland (e.g. Letters to J. Vernon Shea 94) which Lovecraft attributed essentially to cowardice, a stereotype fundamental to his distinction between Jews and “Aryans” like himself:

What we can’t forgive in the Jew is not the tone of his prayers or the size of his nose, but the fact that he is willing to survive under the conditions he accepts. Being weak may not have been his fault—but it is his fault that he is alive & not free & dominant. If we were as weak as he, & could not fight our way to self-respect, we would perish utterly—taunting our foes, virile & unbroken, as the last man fell. That unbrokenness is all that matters to us.

H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 12 Jun 1933, Letters to James F. Morton 325

One would think that Lovecraft might then admire any effort by the Jews to re-establish themselves in Palestine, but after the establishment of the Mandate of Palestine, he instead described Jewish revaunchism as a “sentimental claim of the Zionist Jews to essentially Arab-Moslem Palestine” (Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 10 Nov 1932, A Means to Freedom 1.484). This is the only direct reference to Zionism in Lovecraft’s letters, although he alludes to it elsewhere as “Palestine” or “the Palestine question.”

Lovecraft favoring Arabic Muslim Palestinians in this matter is not surprising; it was a combination of his long-held antisemitic beliefs coupled with his previously stated anti-revanchist stance—and perhaps a touch of pro-Arabic/Muslim sentiment, as Lovecraft once wrote:

It’s because the Jews have allowed themselves to fill a football’s role that we instinctively hate them. Note how much greater is our respect for their fellow-Semites, the Arabs, who have the high heart—shewn in courage and a laughing sense of beauty—which we emotionally understand and approve.

H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Jr., 21 Aug 1926, Selected Letters 2.66

This led Lovecraft to some odd territory in actually disagreeing with the British government, a very rare thing for the anglophile Lovecraft:

Only by reading the outside press & the national magazines can New Yorkers get any idea of how Americans feel regarding such things as Nazism, the Palestine question (in which, by every decent standard, the Arabs are dead right & both England & the Jews intolerably wrong), the American immigration policy, & so on. […]
[172]I think the (probably) 100,000 Yankees in Providence ought to be able to say what they choose about Italy without making apologies to Federal Hill (our local Nuova Napoli), & that the (perhaps) 1,000,000 Americans in New York ought to be able to discuss Hitler & Palestine & pork chops without glancing fearfully over their shoulders at a horde of fortune-seeking Yiddish newcomers.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 8 Nov 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 170, 172

It is notable that this issue of Palestine comes up in Lovecraft’s letters c.1933, which is when Hitler and the Nazis also come to the fore. The rise of the Nazis largely coincides with when Lovecraft begins emphasizing a conspiracy theory of Jewish control of newspapers in New York; this comes up as Lovecraft addresses the point of anti-Nazi articles published in New York papers, which he attributes to Jewish influence in opposition to the rabidly antisemitic Nazis. So this reference to Jewish media influence in his letters, and Lovecraft’s stance on it, is not something he’s volunteering as a general antisemeitc rant, but in answer to a specific point to Shea, who was anti-Nazi. The reference to Palestine is Lovecraft identifying a subject he associates with a pro-Jewish bias.

The British support for Zionism was partially supported by the idea of British Israelism, a belief that the peoples of the British Isles were biologically and/or culturally descended from the Jewish people. The claims gained currency in the 19th century through works like Our Israelitish Origin (1840) and Lost Israel Found in the Anglo-Saxon Race (1886). Lovecraft was aware of the idea, and once joked “[David Van Bush] fondly believes our Saxon stock to be descended from the twelve [sic] lost tribes of Israel!” (Letters to James F. Morton 179), but his antisemitism did not permit him to share this belief:

Your theory that Anglo-Saxons are lost Israelites can be punctured in an instant by the facts of ethnology. Semitic races like the Jews & their kindreds have distinctive ethnic traits, none of which appear in the Englishman. The English, on the other hand, are most obviously and positively related to the Aryan Teutonic races of Northern Europe. The anthropological gulf between Jew & Saxon is so great as to be utterly impassable. No common ancestry this side of the Quaternary age is conceivable. They are as different as two white races can possibly be.

H. P. Lovecraft to James Larkin Pearson, 3 Aug 1919, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 318

Ironically, Lovecraft’s prejudice in this matter and his general atheism led him away from 1930s white supremacist organizations like the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. While some of Lovecraft’s antisemitic and white supremacist prejudices parallel that of the Christian Identity movement of the time, Lovecraft never attempted to provide a theological rationale for his antisemitism, white supremacist beliefs, or Zionism.

The question may be asked how Zionism impacted Lovecraft’s relations with his wife Sonia, who was herself a Jewish immigrant to the United States. The short answer is, we don’t know; their letters do not survive, and Sonia’s memoir of the marriage does not mention it. Perhaps it never came up or played little role in their relationship. However, we know Sonia was at least nominally in favor of Zionism, because of a letter to the editor that was published:

By 1930, Sonia and Howard were long separated, but it gives an indication that Lovecraft was at least intimately acquainted with someone who held opposite views on the subject than himself.

---

Jewish immigration to the Mandate of Palestine is an exceedingly minor topic in Lovecraft’s vast corpus of letters, which reflects his general lack of knowledge or interest in the subject. His few thoughts in his letters do not express any particularly unusual argument or exceptional insight. Nor did it find any expression in his fiction. Lovecraft did not live to see the horrors of the Holocaust, the formation of the state of Israel, the struggle for Palestinian statehood, or the immediate beginnings of hostilities currently ongoing in the region.

For readers today, the relevance of Lovecraft’s comments on the subject is as a representative slice of history—like a tree ring from a fossilized stump that shows the effects of a distant volcanic eruption. How these events, long ago and far away for so many, still touch the lives of so many, and continue to be leave scars that can be seen and felt down into the present day. So while many readers might be interested in Lovecraft’s specific thoughts, it may help to think of this as an expression of how an average person of Lovecraft’s day thought and expressed themselves on this topic. Lovecraft not as an important historic personage, but only as a core sample into a historic period.

If you wish to support the victims of this conflict, please consider a donation to a charitable organization such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

---

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.

Eldritch Fappenings

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

---

The history of underground comix is necessarily (and often deliberately) vague, but it is a truism that these non-traditional comics often take their inspiration from more traditional peers. The Tijuana bibles (8-pagers, bluesies, etc.) that began to appear in the 1920s or 1930s often took as their subject then-current celebrities or characters from popular comic strips like Popeye, Blondie, and The Phantom. The earliest comic book magazines were nothing more than collections of newspaper strips, although by the end of the 1930s they became original works with their own characters in the recognizable format that still survives today.

Tijuana bibles were explicitly pornographic and often used characters owned by others; as a consequence they were broadly illegal, sold under-the-counter, and the artists and publishers left off dates, names, and other information. As a consequence, dating of many such underground works is often approximate, and in some cases relies on context clues. A Tijuana bible starring The Phantom, for example, could not date before 17 February 1936 when the first daily comic strip starring that character was published; there could be no pornographic depiction of Superman before June 1938 when Action Comics #1 was published, no Batman before Detective Comics #27 (March 1939), no Robin before Detective Comics #38 (April 1940), etc. That still leaves a rather open question as to period of publication, but sometimes the field can be narrowed down further by changes of costume that reflect a given artist’s run.

Such is the case with “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven,” a 8-page story that was published in Filthy Sunday Funnies (no date or publisher given), which is also published in Original Dirty Comics 2. This is not a Tijuana bible in the traditional 8-pager format, although it is a later work in the same vein of pornographic satire and parody; Filthy Sunday Funnies was one of a number of small side-stapled digest-sized collections of adult comics that were around the same price point (mostly $5) and format, indicating a common publisher…other titles including Trash Comics, Jolly Time Fun Book, Original Dirty Comics, Sexotic Comics, Raunchy Tales from the Arabian Nights, and Gwendoline in “Sin Island.” Some of these are reprints of older Tijuana bibles, others are apparently original works by various unnamed artists.

Some of these works can be roughly attributed to various known artists based on style or character. The Gwendoline collection, for example, involves the character created by John Willie; a gender-bending riff on Jekyll & Hyde in Trash Comics has the hallmarks of John Blackburn. At least one comic references the San Francisco Ball, an adult-oriented independent newspaper from the 1970s that included pornographic comics with an emphasis on parody and satire, including comic book superheroes; Filthy Sunday Funnies may reprint material from the pages of that newspaper, but indexing for the San Francisco Ball is basically non-existent.

Among the artists who did comics for the San Francisco Ball was Lee Carvel, who released several collections of adult comics work, including several parodies of 70s comic book characters, titled Lee Carvel’s Dirty Comics. An online entry for Lee Carvel’s Dirty Comics #2 lists “Batman and Robin in the Occult Coven” among the contents, but that entry is almost identical to another, unsigned collection Original Dirty Comics #3—which does contain “The Occult Coven.” However, it’s known that Carvel signed some of his work—such as “Gonad the Horney” (a Conan the Barbarian spoof)—and none of his signed works Best of San Francisco Ball Comics #1 show similarities to “Batman and Robin in the Occult Coven,” though some other unsigned works do.

Part of the complication is that because pornographic comics were illegal to sell and often used copyrighted characters, they were almost never copyrighted, nor could the creator or publisher enforce their copyright without revealing their identity. As a consequence, pirating was rampant. There are already three possible printings of “Batman and Robin in the Occult Coven” and it isn’t clear which was the original (if any of them are), and which are reprints or pirated editions.

Faced with bibliographic confusion and lack of printing dates, we have to rely on internal evidence to date “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven.” Given cultural references (parodies of Star Trek, The Lone Ranger, and contemporary superheroes, etc.) the other comics in the collection Filthy Sunday Funnies can be roughly dated to anywhere from the 1960s to the 1970s—but for “The Occult Coven” we can go a step further, as the unnamed artist took deliberate inspiration from a particularly recognizable work.

DC Comics’ character Batman had received his own title starting in 1940; by the 1970s it had become a 52-page anthology magazine, often with a lead story, back-up story, and sometimes a reprint. The editor was Julius Schwartz, who as a teenage fan had been an agent for a couple of Lovecraft’s stories to Astounding and published material about him as fanzines, Batman #241 (14 March 1972) features a distinctive cover by Neal Adams (pencils), Bernie Wrightson (inks), and Gaspar Saladino (lettering):

The artist also “swiped” other panels from the same issue and story, for example:

The really interesting part for Mythos fans is the back-up story in Batman #241 is “Secret of the Psychic Siren!” by Mike Freidrich (writer) and Rich Buckler (pencils & inks), where Robin and his telepathic girlfriend Terri Bergstrom run afoul of the cult of Cthulhu. While the Batman comics have long tipped their hat to Lovecraft with Arkham Asylum, this storyline was decades before The Doom That Came To Gotham, a more explicitly Cthulhu Mythos story published starring the Caped Crusader. There are no tentacles waved about, the Necronomicon is mentioned but never appears; the cult-leader is aware that Lovecraft was a pulp writer and might just be insane.

The narrative ends on a cliffhanger; finished up in the story “Death-Point!” next issue (Batman #242, June 1972) by the same creative team, though Dick Giordano inks over Buckler’s pencils. The storyline would mark the last appearance of Terri Bergstrom, and connections to the wider DC universe are pretty much minimal. The Cthulhu cult is little more than an Easter egg tossed out for fans of Lovecraft and the Mythos…but it obviously fired the imagination of at least one would-be pornographer.

“Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” is a blatant riff off of “Secret of the Psychic Siren!”; the distinctive cover is virtually traced, and there are a number of swipes throughout the 16-page pornographic parody. While the eponymous coven is not explicitly worshipping Cthulhu—they are more focused on sex and murder—it is clearly based on the Cthulhu-worshippers.

While the sex is explicit, Batman is a little stiffly posed—”Secret of the Psychic Siren!” was a Robin-only story, so the Batman character swipes came from somewhere else. The artist apparently took delight in putting some salty language in Batman’s mouth. The strong influence of Batman #241 on the story makes it clear that “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” couldn’t have been produced before 1972, and probably dates to the mid-1970s. That might make this one of the first Lovecraftian pornographic comics, although still a bit later than “Tales of the Leather Nun’s Grandmother” by Jaxon in Tales from the Leather Nun (1972).

There is no easily accessible reprint of “Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven” as far as I can find. However, those who want to read “The Secret of the Psychic Siren!” are in luck, as the story and its sequel were republished in Showcase Presents: Robin the Boy Wonder #1 (2008) and Robin: The Bronze Age Omnibus (2020)

---

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.

This is a brief history of Mythos fiction by and about LGBTQ+ people. “Mythos” in this context refers specifically to the artificial mythology created by H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, popularly known as the Lovecraft Mythos, and then extended by subsequent authors as the Cthulhu Mythos. To a much lesser degree, it touches on Lovecraftian fiction and cosmic horror by LGBTQ+ authors, but this is focused much more narrowly on Lovecraft, Cthulhu, & the associated Mythos.

---

[…] and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

LGBTQ+ folks have existed throughout history, though changing gender and sexual norms, and shifting understanding of human biology, psychology, and sexuality, have changed how LGBTQ+ folks were historically understand and identified. H. P. Lovecraft, for example, never used the term “transgender” because it hadn’t been coined until several decades after his death, and when he used the term “queer” he meant odd, strange, or weird.

Yet even if Lovecraft didn’t have the same vocabulary to describe LGBTQ+ folks that people do today, they still existed. He met and interacted with them. LGTBQ+ folks had their part to play in his life and the development and dissemination of the Lovecraft Mythos, and after his death LGBTQ+ authors have played an increasing part in the expansion and redefining of the Cthulhu Mythos.

This brief history is primarily a quick history of the involvement of LGTBQ+ folks with the Mythos; it cannot be and does not pretend to be comprehensive, but aims to provide a quick overview of the last century and change.

Lovecraft, Homophobia, & LGBTQ+ (1914-1937)

I guess it is true that homosexuality is a rare theme for novels—partly because public attention was seldom called to it (except briefly during the Wilde period) until a decade ago, & partly because any literary use of it always incurs the peril of legal censorship. As a matter of fact—although of course I always knew that paederasty was a disgusting custom of many ancient nations—I never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till I was over thirty…which beats your record! It is possible, I think that this perversion occurs more frequently in some periods than in others—owing to obscure biological & psychological causes. Decadent ages—when psychology is unsettled—seem to favour it. Of course—in ancient times the extent of the practice of paederasty (as a custom which most simply accepted blindly, without any special inclination) cannot be taken as any measure of the extent of actual psychological perversion. Another thing—many nowadays overlook the fact that there are always distinctly effeminate types which are most distinctly not homosexual. I don’t know how psychology explains them, but we all know the sort of damned sissy who plays with girls & who—when he grows up—is a chronic “cake-eater”, hanging around girls, doting on dances, acquiring certain feminine mannerisms, intonations, & tastes, & yet never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclinations.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 14 Aug 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 146

Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender and queer identities were publicly, scientifically, and often legally seen as a sexual perversion and mental illness during H. P. Lovecraft’s lifetime (1890-1937), and for some time beyond that. Lovecraft’s experiences with LGBTQ+ folks reflect the social norms, taboos, and medical stigmas that were attached to any sexuality or gender identity that veered away from the heterosexual cisgender norm, and consequently the understanding of these sexualities, identities, and issues was often very poor.

In the quote above, for example, it can clearly be seen that Lovecraft was confusing sexuality and gender identity, and conflating homosexuality with pedophilia (as many bigots continue to do today). Lovecraft was raised in a culture that praised masculinity and masculine identity, and often deprecated undesirable individuals as “effeminate.” To Lovecraft, it was perfectly in keeping to assume that gay men would desire to have sex with other men because they were effectively women in men’s bodies (Uranian). This perceived deviation could be the subject of mockery, and even violence:

Have you seen that precious sissy that I met in Cleveland? Belknap says he’s hit the big town, and that he’s had some conversation with him. When I saw that marcelled what is it I don’t know whether to kiss it or kill it! It used to sit cross-legged on the floor at Elgin’s and gaze soulfully upward. It didn’t like me and Galpin—too horrid, rough and mannish for it!

H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 8 Jan 1924, Letters to James F. Morton 63

Lovecraft met relatively few individuals that were “out” during his lifetime, because individuals who weren’t closeted faced violence and/or legal persecution, as was the case of Oscar Wilde. Lovecraft is not personally known to have acted on this information beyond a few brief passages in his letters. When critics and biographers talk about Lovecraft’s homophobia, this is what they are talking about. It isn’t entirely clear if Lovecraft was even aware of the sexuality of his gay friends and colleagues, and it is worth mentioning the most prominent and important ones briefly.

Samuel Loveman (1887-1976) was a gay Jewish poet, bookman, and amateur journalist. Lovecraft stumbled across Loveman’s work in 1917 and admired his poetry, and the two began a long correspondence and friendship, with Lovecraft often praising and boosting Loveman’s work. The two finally met in 1921 in New York City, both of them invited there by Sonia H. Greene (Lovecraft’s future wife). In 1922 Lovecraft visited Loveman in Cleveland, where he met Loveman’s friend the gay poet Hart Crane (1899-1932), and others in their circle, including composer Gordon Hatfield, the “precious sissy” in the above letter. In 1924 Lovecraft and Greene eloped to New York; Loveman and Crane moved there as well, with Loveman as Lovecraft’s upstairs neighbor for a period. In time, the marriage failed, and Lovecraft moved back to Providence, RI.

Lovecraft never directly referenced Loveman’s homosexuality, and may have been ignorant of it; Loveman would go on to write “To Satan” (1923) dedicated to Lovecraft, and “To Mr. Theobald” (1926). They remained friends until Lovecraft’s death. It is also unclear if Lovecraft knew of Crane’s sexuality, although there are hints in Lovecraft’s letters that suggested he knew, and Frank Belknap Long wrote in a memoir: “Howard and the rest knew of it, but that didn’t affect their friendship with Crane” (Long Memories and Other Writings 56). Ultimately, Lovecraft and Crane were only passing acquaintances.

Amateur journalism also included several other LGBTQ+ numbers, most eminently lesbian Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986) and her gay associate Roswell George Mills (1896-1966). Gidlow and Lovecraft were presidents of rival factions of the United Amateur Press Association, and while they had little direct contact, his letters give evidence that Lovecraft was certainly aware of them and their publication of the amateur journal Les Mouches Fantastiques, which he was critical of. Whether Lovecraft was aware they were homosexuals is not clear. In any event, these too were brief contacts that had little effect on Lovecraft.

The most substantial LGBTQ+ friends Lovecraft had were August Derleth (1909-1971) and Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951). They shared a love of weird fiction and an appreciation of Weird Tales, and were regular correspondents for the rest of his life. Together, both men would have a profound impact on the life and legacy of H. P. Lovecraft, and shape Mythos fiction for decades to come.

August Derleth began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in 1926. In her biography Derleth: Hawk…and Dove (1997) by Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky made the claim that Derleth was a closeted bisexual and had carried on affairs with both men and women. The evidence to support the claim of Derleth’s sexual relationships with men is a bit scanty, but Derleth’s letters with Lovecraft (Essential Solitude) and Ramsey Campbell (Letters to Arkham) show Derleth was at least more cognizant of and conversant with homosexuality than Lovecraft.

R. H. Barlow was younger than Derleth when he began corresponding with Lovecraft in 1931. In 1934, on one of his trips to Florida, Lovecraft was invited to stay with Barlow and his family—where Lovecraft found out his friend’s true age. Lovecraft would visit the Barlows again in 1935, and young Barlow would visit Lovecraft in New York in 1935 and Providence in 1936. If Lovecraft was aware that Barlow was homosexual, he gave no hint in his letters, although Derleth appears to have suspected Barlow’s orientation since 1936.

Before his death in 1937, Lovecraft had left instructions naming the teenage Barlow his literary executor; and Barlow’s efforts to have Lovecraft’s papers deposited at Brown University’s John Hay Library preserved letters, manuscripts, and other materials that would form the core of Lovecraft scholarship to the present day. August Derleth worked with his friend Donald Wandrei to preserve Lovecraft’s literary legacy by bringing his work to print; and when major publishing houses turned them down they founded Arkham House in 1939 to publish Lovecraft’s fiction and letters. As an author, editor, publisher, biographer, and critic, Derleth worked tirelessly to promote Lovecraft’s work and promote his legend.

Given the stigma attached to LGBTQ+ issues during his lifetime, it’s no surprise that early Mythos fiction contains almost nothing directly pertaining to sexuality or gender issues during Lovecraft’s lifetime. The major exception is “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937), the last of his stories published in Weird Tales during his lifetime.

From Lovecraft to Stonewall (1937-1969)

Lovecraft met and was influenced by many people in his life, and that no doubt included more LGBTQ+ folks than just those mentioned above. Suggestions that fellow-writers and correspondents like Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) were gay generally lack evidence, but the very fact those claims are put forward showcases an awareness of and interest—some would say an obsession—with identifying closeted homosexuals as part of the Lavender scare moral panic. Nor was Lovecraft immune from speculation about his sex life and sexuality:

His stories are sexless and one supposes the man was nearly so, all but mothered into impotency. One can say that almost all of his adult relationships were homosexual, if the word is intended in the blandest sense: there is no sign of strong sexual impulse of any kind. He was “not at ease” with women. His marriage was a mistake and a quick failure. He was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing.

Winfield Townley Scott, “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944) in Lovecraft Remembered 26

Nearly every word of that is factually incorrect, but it showcases the thinking of the time. The decades after Lovecraft’s death were not good ones in which to be LGTBQ+, as persecution and discrimination heightened after World War II. R. H. Barlow committed suicide in Mexico at the beginning of 1951; one of the possible reasons he took his own life was an attempt to blackmail him over his homosexual lifestyle. We may never know if that is true, but it emphasized the duress under which LGBTQ+ folks lived.

Derleth continued tirelessly with Arkham House. Working with Wandrei and Barlow, Derleth worked to shape Lovecraft’s literary legacy with collections of his fiction, letters, and essays, as well as memoirs about him. With Barlow’s absence or compliance on most matters related to Lovecraft and an agreement with Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Arkham House had de facto control of the Lovecraft copyrights—and Derleth used that to bluster, sometimes threatening legal action, to squash publication of material antithetical to Lovecraft’s image (e.g. James Warren Thomas’ masters thesis H. P. Lovecraft: A Self-Portrait, 1950) and any Mythos fiction produced outside Arkham House (e.g. C. Hall Thompson’s fiction such as “The Spawn of the Green Abyss,” 1946).

Mythos fiction under Derleth’s aegis largely consisted of reprinting Lovecraft’s published and unpublished fiction, and the related Mythos fiction of his friends and colleagues such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and himself—the latter of which consisted of both original fiction and so-claimed “posthumous collaborations.” In the 1960s, Derleth began to publish more Mythos fiction from other writers, notably Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. This new generation began to bring differing attitudes of what was acceptable in horror fiction, and Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” (1969) is the first English-language Mythos story to address homosexuality.

Despite these efforts, Derleth did not have complete control of publishing, and some Mythos fiction became published outside his purview (and perhaps without his knowledge). For example, “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958) by Jacques Janus, published in France, revisited the gender-bending issues raised by “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ is probably the first Mythos fiction written by a lesbian, although Russ was not out about her sexuality at the time. The first Mythos parody published by a gay writer might be “At the Mountains of Murkiness, or From Lovecraft to Leacock” (1940) by Arthur C. Clarke, but again, Clarke was not open about his sexuality at the time. Many fans might have been reading fiction from LGBTQ+ writers for decades and never known it, as the consequences of being outed could be severe.

So there wasn’t exactly an LGBTQ+ Mythos underground sticking it to the man in the form of August Derleth. What was happening is that a new generation of LGBTQ+ writers was coming of age and ingesting Lovecraft and Mythos fact and fiction. Paperback publication in the 1960s and a handful of film and comic book adaptations were bringing Lovecraft and the Mythos to a wider and wider audience…and in 1969 the Stonewall riots became the spark for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

It was, in other words, increasingly okay to be gay and a Lovecraft fan.

Beyond the Derleth Mythos (1969-2015)

August Derleth died in 1971, and with his passing came a shift in Mythos publishing. The legal bluster that Derleth had used to try and exert influence over Lovecraft’s posthumous image largely died with him; and critical assessments of fiction (“The Derleth Mythos,” 1972) sparked a pushback against Derleth’s interpretation of Lovecraft and his Mythos. The fanzine and newspaper articles of yesteryear began to give way to scholarly and academic essays and hardbound books. Many of these still evinced the lavender scare hangups; in the first full Lovecraft biography, L. Sprague de Camp summarized the issue so far as HPL was concerned:

The question of Lovecraft’s sexuality has stirred much interest. Some writers have called him “sexless.” Others have surmised that he might have been a homosexual or at least a latent one. They have cited his indifference to heterosexual relationships; the lack of women in his stories, whose leading characters are often a single male narrator and one close male friend; and his many friendships with younger men, some of whom either were overt homosexuals or had tendencies in that direct.

“Latent homosexuality,” however, is a vague, slippery concept. Moreover, the charge of “latent homosexual tendencies” has become such a fad that it is leveled at almost any notable whose love life is at all unusual.

L. Sprague de Camp, H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography 189

De Camp (1907-2000), however, was of the older generation, and the newer scholars, fans, and writers attracted to the Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction were more open to new and accepting interpretations of sexuality and gender identity and fresh takes on Lovecraft and the Mythos. What’s more, without Arkham House throttling production, other publishers could publish their own Mythos fiction by new writers. While there are far too many Mythos writers during these decades to name them all, some stand out as helping to shape a more inclusive Mythos literary landscape, writers who by their work and by their lives stand out from the rest.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) became a leading postmodernist and member of the Beat Generation; his explicit writings on homosexuality shocked audiences, but also helped expand the possibilities of science fiction. The influence of Lovecraft on Burroughs can be seen in works like Cities of the Red Night (1981).

Richard A. Lupoff (1935-2020) broke ground when he wrote “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” (1977), re-interpreting an homage to Lovecraft in the form of New Wave science fiction, explicitly including the first explicit transgender and bisexual characters in Lovecraftian fiction.

Stanley C. Sargent (1950-2018) broke ground in Mythos fiction in the 90s with stories like “The Black Brat of Dunwich” (1997), offering far different readings and interpretations of Mythos classics. Stan also authored what is probably the most coherent argument for Lovecraft as a closeted homosexual in a 1997 interview with Peter A. Worthy. Whether or not readers agree, it shows how openly LGBTQ+ people could now become in discussing their lives, and how they felt their experiences were reflected in the Mythos—which had its scholarly counterpart in work like Robert M. Price’s essay “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider'” (1982).

W. H. Pugmire (1951-2019) grew up in the era of punk rock and Boy George, and became the self-declared “Queen of Eldritch Horror.” While mostly remembered today for his sensual, evocative prose, including his re-workings of familiar Mythos entities (e.g. “An Imp of Aether,”1997) and his own personal corner of Lovecraft country in the Pacific Northwest called Sesqua Valley (e.g. “Some Distant Baying Sound,” 2009), Pugmire was also influential as an editor. While a good deal of Mythos publishing in the 90s was focused on pastiche, Pugmire emphasized the importance of Lovecraft’s themes and atmosphere over his eldritch tomes and unspeakable names. He also collaborated with similar-minded writers like Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950-) with works like “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) that explored these themes.

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964-) has sometimes been called “Lovecraft’s spiritual granddaughter,” and it shows. Kiernan’s Mythos and Lovecraftian stories often feature strong female characters, including several prominent depictions of lesbians in stories such as “Paedomorphosis” (1998) “Paedomorphosis” (1998), and sometimes broaches transgender themes such as in “Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller” (2005). These people are not caricatures but realistic depictions of LGBTQ+ folks as flawed human beings, often struggling with themselves and their relationships.

Billy Martin (1967-) who wrote as Poppy Z. Brite, also pushed boundaries in the Lovecraftian milieu with stories like “His Mouth Will Taste Of Wormwood” (1990) and “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” (1998). Like Kiernan and Pugmire, they were part of a 90s generation that pushed the limits of what Lovecraftian was and could be.

Writers whose work post-2010 stand out for their inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters and themes include Jordan L. Hawk, who writes the Whyborne & Griffith series, a homosexual romantic fantasy with Lovecraftian elements begging with Widdershins (2013); Molly Tanzer whose works include “Herbert West in Love” (2012) and “In the Garden of Ibn Ghazi” (2021); Ruthanna Emrys with “The Litany of Earth” (2014) and Winter Tide (2017).

While some of the work of the above authors verged on or crossed the line into erotica, actual pornographic material has also included LGBTQ+ characters and creations, from the lurid Teenage Twins (1976) to the often-overlooked hardcore bisexual comics of John Blackburn (1939-2006) such as Dagger of Blood (1997), and Logan Kowalsky‘s (1971-) Le Pornomicon (2005). While these and other works may seem n the tawdry side, they’re important examples of the increasing acceptance of non-heterosexuality; while some folks may look on porn as exploitative of sexuality, others find freedom in being able to explore their sexuality through sex work, or just to enjoy porn that matches their interests.

In that vein, you might compare the salacious depiction lesbian characters in Mystery of the Necronomicon (黒の断章, 1999) with the more developed, conflicted gay characters in Cthulhu (2007); while the feature film obviously has more to say about LGBTQ+ folks finding their role in the Mythos, even bad representation is representation—which is more than LGTBQ+ Mythos fans got for decades after Lovecraft’s death.

Which is not to say that all depictions of LGBTQ+ folks and non-heterosexuality/cisgender identity were positive. Far from it. Homophobic and transphobic biases run deep and sometimes pop up in unexpected places, like “The Curate of Temphill” (1993) by Peter Cannon & Robert M. Price. However, the dawn of the internet has substantially widened access to information on sexuality and gender identity; communities have formed to help and support LGBTQ+ folks and connect writers, publishers, and audiences together, and social media often provides a panopticon for intolerance almost inconceivable in the past. Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband continued her abuse for years despite serious allegations, but J. K. Rowling‘s transphobia received immediate pushback on social media.

Revolution & Reimagination (2015-2022)

The Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction scene of today is profoundly different than it was even a decade ago. While intolerance and bigotry are still with us and still very real issues that LGBTQ+ folks face, the Mythos publishing environment is more open and diverse than ever before. This is in part due to a publishing revolution fueled by desktop publishing software, affordable print-on-demand technology, and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Small press publishers continued to grow and diversify in the 2010s, often using crowdfunding to raise awareness and investment in their products, including an increasingly diverse range of Mythos books. Ebooks also provide a new niche for LGBTQ+ authors, such as “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters.

The impact of this publishing shift is still being felt, but one thing that seems clear is that there is increasingly a market for more diverse Mythos fiction, and writers willing to cater to that need. In 2016, publisher Tor shifte focus on publishing a more diverse array of Mythos fiction, including Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw and its follow-up A Song for Quiet (2017), The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) by Kij Johnson, and Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan. While the days of photocopied Lovecraftian fanzines may not be completely over, it’s become clear that these works are more than just a fad. It’s also increasingly become clear LGBTQ+ folks aren’t just writers and artists, but editors and publishers as well, as interviews with folks like Carrie Cuinn (Cthulhurotica), Lynne Jamneck (Dreams From the Witch House), and Erica Ciko Campbell and Desmond Rhae Harris (Starward Shadows Quarterly).

What the future holds for the LGBTQ+ Mythos is hard to say—there has been so much progress in the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights in the decades since Lovecraft’s death, and the reactionary political and cultural efforts to claw back those rights and discriminate against folks based on their sexuality or gender identity, whether they want to play a sport or transition, is a terrible ongoing challenge. Yet it helps to look back and see how far the genre has come. The Mythos has long outgrown the ignorant homophobia that Lovecraft expressed in a few of his letters, and many of the LGBTQ+ fans his works inspired have become some of the best and brightest creative voices we now have.

---

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

A Brazilian Looks At Lovecraft
by Davi Braid

It was a strange night in Michigan. The gibbous moon lurked behind tenebrous clouds. A barely illuminated terrene town was slowly recovering from the fetid consequences of a cacodaemoniacal college party. Eldritch shadows followed the rhythm of ululating winds, forming a blasphemous image of a chthonian forest at the horizon. Ignored by a lonely exchange student, a cup of the local, noxious coffee was getting cold by the window of a noisome hotel.

For some reason, that cup of coffee caused me to panic. Its horrible taste was a clear indicator of how far this place was from home. I had no friends, no family, no coworkers, and I kept asking myself the reason behind that trip. The original plan was to find personal growth out of my comfort zone. It was not working as intended, though.

The hotel room did not have much to offer, so my free time was spent observing the town from afar and reading. It was fun and exciting at first, but it didn’t last long. The cultural differences, the lack of a deeper connection to people, and the constant feeling of being an outsider are things that hit hard when you are entirely by yourself.

Due to being isolated and depressed, my mind would constantly spiral down into nearly inescapable cycles of fear and nihilism. Socializing is an activity that demands a lot of effort from introverts, and the trouble of trying that in a foreign culture was a great excuse to never do it at all. It seems that being a foreigner was not necessarily a charming characteristic in a small town where half the population was college kids.

Even within the Latino community, it was tough being Brazilian. We speak Portuguese, not Spanish, so there is a language barrier that prevents us from completely fitting in. It is hard to think of a moment that felt worse than being among many other foreigners from South America and feeling like an outcast.

I do not remember exactly how or when Lovecraft’s tales really caught my interest for the first time. After researching gloomy things, taken by desperation and anxiety, the concept Cosmic Horror found its way into the screen of my laptop. I never liked horror as a genre, but the title “The Outsider” caught my eye for obvious reasons. On top of that, something about unknown entities that overshadow mundane problems felt weirdly comforting at that point.

The story failed to impress me with its simplistic structure and a generic monster. However, the ending hit me as no written story has ever done before:

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

Thoughts about the pointlessness of living when death is certain were just some of my recurring demons, which didn’t make me popular at parties. The outsider never belonged, and the monster was not hunting him. The narrator did not see itself as the ghoulish shade of decay that it was. This horror story was my polished glass.

That ending was digested by my brain and became the first step toward a life-long obsession with cosmic horror. Solitude in a small room was not an issue for someone who had just opened the Necronomicon. The observer triggered a long introspection that resulted in a few failed attempts to socialize, turning this newly found genre into the best way to escape reality and self-pity.

One must wonder how many demons Lovecraft had. The themes of his writings were painfully clear. Narrators were always finding out horrific truths, and madness was the natural state of those who see the world for what it is. Convinced of the lack of meaning in life, I became one of his characters. On the other hand, reading his characters was about to turn me back into a functional person.

A sudden sense of urgency—acquired after reading “Dagon”—caused me to slowly break out of an old delusion. Happy, inaccurate memories of a big city chased me to the other hemisphere, much like the old ones chased the narrator:

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

With the help of my thanatophobia, the old one by the window caused the panic attack that shaped my following days. The end was near, time was limited, and nothing was being done. How can someone take control of their future when shackled by insecurity and hopelessness?

After so many of his tales, Lovecraft’s antediluvian view of the world became painfully obvious in “The Horror at Red Hook.” Luckily, I was about to get lectured by them:

The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.

I was not an immigrant, but it would hardly have mattered to him. Being a descendant of Native, Scottish, and Portuguese people myself, tangled enigma was an excellent definition of my heritage. Besides, Brazil is a melting pot. Consequently, it is a tangled enigma, as the writer himself defined. Funny enough, taking offense was not my first reaction. Building anger towards an author from two centuries ago due to his outdated views felt like a pointless mental effort.

The descriptions used by the author for certain ethnicities are revealing. They seem to echo how he talks about monsters and gods—as if everything was otherworldly and incomprehensible. Maybe he was afraid of what was different and unknown. Not understanding other languages being spoken in his own country clearly disturbed him somehow: “From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky.”

Digging into his correspondences and stories, I ended up finding something disturbing in one of his letters:

It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly & schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid & their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semitic before I had been at Hope Street many days.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 72

To my surprise, he married a Jewish woman who shared his passion for literature. At that point, a lambent idea crawled its way into my outré neurons. If Lovecraft shared the same hobbies and passions with an immigrant, would he dislike that person the same way? What if people could see how much they had in common instead of how different they were? And that’s when it hit me: What if I started looking for things I had in common with others instead of reminding them of our differences?

I used to think of myself as a unique, awake person who could see the world for what it is—a cyclopean blasphemy—and therefore, there was no point in trying to enjoy my time on earth. It turns out that person was just a socially impaired snob who constantly reminded others of how different he was. Fortunately, “The Horror At Red Hook” pushed some sense into my head in a peculiar way.

We are all people aimlessly navigating life, trying to make the most of it. If I have my doubts and fears, chances are other humans do too. Instead of trying to stand out as the eccentric foreigner, my approach was changed to “I like that too,” which changed not only my experience in the United States but my whole life as well. 

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of weird cultural barriers to be dealt with. Nonetheless, putting some effort into breaching those barriers proved to be a much better way to make meaningful connections. Colleagues slowly became friends, and friends presented me to a whole new world and lifestyle. 

Michigan was quite life-changing, and I miss my time there so much. I ended up loving snow, hockey, Detroit, and much of the local culture. I went to college parties, had terrific burgers, and even learned how to shoot a gun—although I passed on hunting. I made friends, built a professional network, and even helped many newcomers to feel welcomed.

My introversion never left me, and it will not be going anywhere. The process of changing that old behavior into something more productive took months, yet I managed to get there. It never stopped being a conscious effort, but it was a significant improvement. Ironically, all that happened thanks to a xenophobic, antisemitic man who wrote horror stories.

Besides leaving me with a life lesson, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was also the reason behind my regained interest in Brazilian legends. Many of my country’s backcountry myths inspired me to return to fiction writing, giving it a Lovecraftian spin.

When I’m having a really bad day, I return to “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Someone like me is never truly free from old, obdurate demons. Maybe he wrote them down to take them out of his mind. Reading those stories reminds me that there is much more in the world to be seen and discovered, rekindling my passion for life itself.

It is possible that he would not be pleased with how his unearthly entities helped a Brazilian student to fit in the United States. Especially considering what he used to think of my country—or most countries, according to what he wrote in a letter:

If this nation ever becomes really composite; if the polyglot lower elements ever rise to the surface and direct the destinies of the whole people, then the United States will have undergone intellectual and moral death, and must be content to take its inferior place beside Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and other decidedly immigrant nations. For the glory of the world is the glory of England. […] If other nationalities are now represented here, it is only on sufferance. They are charity boarders, as it were. For this is an Englishman’s country.

H. P. Lovecraft to John Dunn, 14 Oct 1916, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 166

Being a polyglot myself, this was the first time I ever read this word in such a negative connotation. Not having to deal with people like him was possibly pure luck. Sure, I was in several uncomfortable situations here and there. Some people wanted to try their Spanish with me as if it was my first language, and some others thought I lived in a jungle, but it felt more like ignorance than anything else.

In the end, all the situations that I had to endure were nothing like what happened to the Saudi Arabian kids. Most North Americans would actively avoid them because of their country of origin, even though they were perfectly nice and polite young men. Truth be told, It was heartbreaking to watch, which caused me to constantly check on them. In their case, as Lovecraft stated, they were there on sufferance.

I do not admire the man, just what came out of his imagination and personal fears. I read his stories during a vulnerable moment, but what I took from them is my merit. There is no point in spending any energy deliberating on his archaic opinions. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is long gone, and I have my whole life ahead of me. 

---

Davi Braid is a Brazilian freelance writer and a games journalist who often gets out of his niche to write about different and exciting topics. Although he does not like horror stories, Cosmic Horror fascinates him like no other kind of fiction. You can contact him via email at danobra@gmail.com or find more of his work at https://davibraid.journoportfolio.com/

Copyright 2022 Davi Braid