Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman” (1975): A Refusal of Roles by Sapphire Lazuli

Much discussion has been brought to light, in recent times, to ponder what it means to identify with a gender identity. Perhaps ponder is too gentle a word, these discussions have often been led by those who oppose the idea of gender nonconformity and thus are designed to diminish the credibility of those outside of the gender binary. “What is a woman?”—the question is asked tirelessly by this crowd in an attempt to quell the happening of gender nonconformity. It is often put forth as an idea that was only recently made blurry:

… and now our culture is telling us that the differences between girls and boys don’t matter, that if you identify with something then you are that thing. (Walsh, What is a Woman 2022)

Gender is a concept that has grown and evolved over numerous cultures; the modern idea of one gender identity can seem a stark contrast to that of past times. Looking at gender across cultures brings difficulty to a single unified ideal. The idea of asking the question, “what is a woman?” is poised to be one of critical discourse, e.g.:

… if I’m talking publicly about what a man or a woman is, I’m not going to give credence to an argument that has no biological or logical basis. It doesn’t make any sense. (Shapiro 2019)

But there is quite an argument to be made that viewing gender as a single, unified concept is an uninformed idea.

I bring all this to light after having recently read through Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman,” a story I had suspected would fall victim to such uninformed ideas. Knowing of other pulp stories that had explored queer themes such as Fred Hayley’s Satan Was a Lesbian (1966), I had expected a tiring Mulan-type story with much less the feminine liberation and far more derogatory discussion of gender expression. Instead, “Sword Woman” allows its characters to explore an incredibly nuanced idea of what gender and expression can mean both within and outside of the perception of others. I was surprised to find such a story written in the 1930s at first, but this later served as a reminder of the queer happenings that this time period was littered with.

※

“Sword Woman” is a burning fire of feminine rage, gender exploration, and a hard, “who cares?” To the question of “what is a woman?” The story’s lead, Dark Agnes, finds themself on a murder spree, killing men time and time again as each threatens seizure of Agnes’ free will. Murder frees them from betrothal, from slavery, and from two attempted assassinations; Agnes begins the story a mere damsel in distress and ends it as a serrated blade, sharpened by the necks of those who would oppose them.

In exploring such a presentation of gender identity and expression, it is important to understand how gender has evolved over time. It is easy to think of gender as a single, static state tied to the presence of particular genitalia, though this has not always been the case for humanity. In fact, even where such ideas have been linked, the presentation of specific genders has changed drastically over time.

In Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), she writes about the nuance of gender in Native American cultures:

In considering gender-based roles, we must remember that while the roles themselves were fixed in most archaic American cultures, with divisions of ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’, the individuals fit into these roles on a basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. (Allen 1986)

This kind of gender expression, one which is determined by the individual’s own experience with their identity, is quite opposed to the modern conservative perception of gender, in which it is a defined state determined for the individual rather than by them.

This is where Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman” follows its approach to gender identity. The story centres around Dark Agnes, a character who whisks themself and anyone around them into a whirlwind explosion of feminine rage and tyranny. Agnes begins this story as a product to be owned; they are betrothed to a man named Francois and the thought leaves a revolting taste in their mouth. So, when their sister, Ysabel offers Agnes with the means “… to free herself. Do not cling by your fingers to life, to become as our mother, and as your sister…” (Howard 1979) by handing them a dagger, Agnes refuses the proposed suicide and instead murders Francois.

Agnes does a lot at this moment: not only are they shattering the chains that bind them to the ownership of men, but they are also leaching the masculine blood to take wholly as their own. As from this point onward, Agnes refuses their position as a woman; refuses being the key word here. Thrown to the side are their betrothal, the temptation for suicide, their placidity, even their feminine garbs are thrown into a river to be forgotten. Agnes refuses everything that had once defined them and takes this moment to reinvent themself. It would have been easy for this moment to mirror the suffragettes and their seizure of the typically masculine roles, swapping one gendered cage for another, but instead, Howard allows Agnes a freedom of exploration that will go on to bring a new, personal definition of gender by the end of the story.

I have been referring to Agnes here with they/them pronouns, though it should be noted that Agnes is referred to with she/her pronouns in the book. I choose they/them here as I feel such pronouns better reflect who this character is; perhaps even he/him would be better fit, as Agnes themself proclaims at the book’s conclusion, “Remember, I am woman no more.” To which their comrade, Etienne Villiers, agrees, “[we are] brothers in arms” (Howard, 1979).

This proclamation taking place near the end of the story further cements how Agnes’ gender evolves throughout the story. As they continue their murder spree of dastardly men, Agnes finds themself constantly covered in blood. They make efforts to wash, though eventually, the blood that stains Agnes’ body sinks so deep into their skin that the blood of man and the blood of Agnes are one and the same. I hear an echo of the struggles that the Macbeths encountered after their murder of Duncan, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather…” (Macbeth 2.2.75). Unlike Macbeth, however, Agnes takes in this stolen crimson stain with pride and sanity. It is as though they becomes more wholly themselves, the more blood they leech.

Importantly, Agnes does not reject this gender identity. It is one that is somewhat thrust upon them, the idea of Agnes becoming a masculine figure is first proposed by Etienne Villiers who fears Agnes will be too recognisable by their father’s scouts dressed in their royal, feminine attire. However, the actual expression of Agnes’ identity as a masculine figure is one defined only by Agnes. Not once do they actually refer to themself as a man, only that they are no longer a woman. I think that it is poignant to point out that had this story been written today, Agnes would likely have aligned more with a non-binary gender identity rather than strictly male or female.

Agnes is the loudest voice when it comes to their newfound identity, often reminding Etienne, here they feel truly as they ought to be. Early after taking the masculine identity, Etienne jests, “By Saint Michele, in all my life I never saw a woman drain a flagon like that! You will be drunk, girl.” Which is met by Agnes’s cold reminder, “You forget I am a girl no longer,” (Howard, 1979) Interesting to note that they say girl here and not woman as they do come the conclusion, a reflection of their growth.

I think what is most pertinent here is the determination of gender. Understanding that gender can be determined not just at a singular point in one’s life, but rather at multiple points allows a much broader description of what gender is. Allen writes:

… the Kaska would designate a daughter in a family that had only daughters as a boy. When she was young, around five, her parents would tie a pouch of dried bear ovaries to her belt… and she would function in the Kaska male role for the rest of her life. (Allen 1986)

We see here a clear presentation of gender as a fluid state, with an understanding of roles existing outside of biology. Here, gender seems to be focused more on the utilitarian aspect of the community. Dark Agnes’ gender identity is not unlike this determination. They take up their masculine identity as it is better fitted to the position they find themself in, and will later take a more personal position at their meeting with Guiscard de Clisson.

Here, Agnes seeks to become a sword woman, to ride among men in the fields of battle. Only, this position they take ends in turmoil as their party is ambushed and killed. Absolutely we can understand that Agnes’ party’s deaths are not caused by their readoption of the female identity, but there is certainly a metaphorical message in that Agnes suffers when they return to the facade. This is where Agnes’s proclamation, “Remember, I am woman no more.” (Howard 1979) takes place, after losing their brothers in arms, after suffering in the position they had rejected in the beginning.

※

It should not be ignored when this story was likely written either. The 1920s through to the 1930s were a period of much change; the world itself was both recovering from and about to enter a world war after all. And among all of this change, a woman named Lili Elbe had begun an exploration of her own gender identity.

Lili Elbe was the second trans woman ever to receive sex reassignment surgery ninety years ago in 1931. There is quite a lot to discuss with her story, but what is important here is the timing and widespread knowledge. Lili’s story, along with many others, should have been lost when the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was burnt down by the Nazis in 1933, however, her semi-autobiographical book, Man Into Woman (now titled Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change), received an English publication in that same year. Along with this, her story featured heavily in German and Dutch Newspapers. Lili Elbe was no unknown figure; she had become quite the public idea by the time of her death in 1931.

There is currently no evidence to suggest this novel came into Howard’s hands, importantly, he does not mention it in his letters. That being said, I still find the existence of Lili Elbe and others like her at the time to be incredibly interesting. It is as though they are surrounding each letter of the page without needing to be there at all. Our society has been incredibly queer for a lot longer than it has often been thought to be, and stories such as this, alongside real-life events, help highlight that fact. Perhaps it is no wonder then that “Sword Woman” was so open to pushing the boundaries of what gender really is.

※

“Sword Woman” surprised me in ways I never would have thought it could. Often it is difficult to engage with literature from times past when so much of it constructs walls to keep ‘people like me’ on the outskirts. It is refreshing to encounter this story and leave with so few negative thoughts.

Howard’s exploration of gender is one of incredible nuance, never seeming to worry all that much about the perception of others. Instead, gender in Howard’s “Sword Woman” is an experience wholly for the individual, a definition that aligns itself so well with our current. Rather than ask the reader to question, “what is a woman?” Howard rejects the idea entirely, and states, in blood-red ink: gender is created only from the thread one chooses to sew.

While written by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s, “Sword Woman” was not published until 1975, and is still in copyright in the United States. This and other tales of Dark Agnes may be read in the Robert E. Howard collection Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (2011).

Works Cited

Allen, P. G. (1986). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 2015 reprint: Open Road Media.

Folk, J. (Director). (2022). What is a Woman? [Motion Picture].

Haley, F. (1966). Satan Was a Lesbian. 2018 reprint: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Howard, R. E. (1979). Sword Woman. Berkley Books.

Lili Elbe, N. H. (2015). Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change. Canelo.

Shakespeare, W. (2015). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Barnes & Noble Inc.

Shaprio, B. (2019, April 9). An interview with Ben Shapiro: social justice, free speech and transgender pronouns. (P. Nieto, Interviewer) Retrieved from: https://www.laloyolan.com/opinion/an-interview-with-ben-shapiro-social-justice-free-speech-and-transgender-pronouns/article_229644e1-0052-58c0-a441-e47724c05c93.html

Sapphire Lazuli (she/they) is a writer of weird horror and perverted desires based in Australia. She draws on thier experiences as a trans woman of colour and a lesbian, often doing their part to bring more queer voices into the worlds she crafts.

Their prose is often described as beautifully poetic, and adjacent to the writer, Sapphire does not write stories that will hold your hand. Though, be it cosmic entities appearing as places, gross and erotic explorations of the boundaries of form, or deep dives into the darkest ridges of the mind and desire, their horror is bound to allure you.

Twitter: @lazuli_sapphire

YouTube: @sapphicsapph

Blog: www.sapphirelazuli.com

That Which Engenders Fear: Jacques Janus’s “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958) by Leonid West

A note about pronoun usage: I will be using a mix of “he” and “they” for the character of Rolf Chapvet because the original uses “he” (or more accurately, uses the masculine in the original French) and I don’t want to be misleading.

“Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (“That Which Arouses Fear…”) (1958) contains two twists that occur one after the other. The first is that the protagonist, Rolf Chapvet, has been sacrificing young men to Yog-Shoggoth [sic] in order to transform himself into a ‘Dark Lady’ by night. The second is that the narrator, who admits early on to killing Rolf, is his mother.

I knew something trans was going to happen, because I picked “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” out of a list of weird fiction with transgender themes, but it took until very close to the end for me to realize how exactly that transness would manifest. I was distracted by noting how close of a pastiche the text is, and by the uncanny valley New Englandness of the names. “Jommy,” one of the disappeared men, is one that stuck especially in my thoughts. It’s like “Johnny” but not, just this side of the sort of nickname a real New Englander would acquire over his lifetime. This is New England as written by someone who has only ever seen New England filtered through a Lovecraftian eye.

The almost rote way the authors approached their pastiche meant I was genuinely surprised when it turned out that Rolf was feeding men to a cauldron to fuel their male-to-female transformations. I fell for the woman narrator twist because women, much less mothers, rarely feature at the center of Lovecraft’s stories, nor did they tend to be the protagonists of Robinsonades, or of Flash Gordon, the other two inspirations cited in Jacques Bergier’s introduction. The genre walked me down the garden path and there I stood, shocked at the transness I knew would occur because never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted this particular deployment.

The twist that is more interesting to me narratively is that the narrator is the protagonist’s mother. Mothers are generally not portrayed as so personally violent as to strangle their own child, and that capacity for intimate violence hangs over the entire piece. The narrator tells the reader how exactly Rolf died from the beginning; she only obfuscates her relationship, making it more shocking. Otherwise, she has no regrets. “Yet I attest that it was my fingers that left their marks on his pale skin during the dreadful night in the Shadmeth vault. It was my hands that gripped his frozen neck and it was in my mind, guided by the absolute certainty of ridding the Earth of the most abominable monster it had ever borne, that I drew the courage necessary to go as far as at the end of this hideous contact and to strangle without remorse this creature which should never have been called to life.” (Emphasis mine.)

The work by Lovecraft that comes to my mind when I think about this twist is not “The Outsider,” which concerns more personal, internalized horror, but “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.” There, the titular character realizes that he is the product of literal bestiality and metaphorical “race-mixing,” cannot bear the horror of this revelation, and kills himself. In “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi,” the horror that cannot be borne is the protagonist’s “son” existing in a female body. The narrator finds this feminine form even more shocking than the serial murder.

It is difficult not to read the bestiality in “Arthur Jermyn” as a metaphor for mixed-race couples, especially knowing anything about Lovecraft’s prejudices. There is no real metaphor in “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi,” which bluntly makes cross-gender transformation the result of murder, depravity, and evil gods. But as in “Arthur Jermyn” it is that crossing of an inviolable category that makes the protagonist worthy of death, although Arthur Jermyn at least has the opportunity to choose his end. Rolf’s mother chooses for him.

Transsexual, transgender, and transvestic behavior was not necessarily unknown to the authors of this story. In 1954, Claude Marais published J’ai choisi mon sexe, confidence du peintre Michel-Marie Poulain (I chose my sex, confessions of the painter (masculine form)). As the title suggests, this was the biography of the painter Michel-Marie Poulain, a World War II veteran who medically transitioned in 1946 and died in 1991. She was a relatively high-profile expressionist and was notorious in her time for living openly as a woman.

That Jacques Bergier and his unnamed collaborator decided to tackle transsexual themes in their 1958 short story “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi (That Which Arouses Fear…),” only four years after Claude Marais’s publication, is possibly a coincidence, but it is clear that transsexuality was in the air. I bring up Michel-Marie’s story specifically not because I think it is the definite source of ‘Janus’s’ interest in changing sex, but to show that people in France in the 1950s had ample opportunity to learn about the idea. Ed Wood’s notorious picture Glen or Glenda (I Changed My Sex!) had come out even earlier, in 1953, and transvestite performers were a frequent sight in French cabaret shows. Transsexuality has frequently been an object of fascination, revulsion, desire, all things that can become “too much” to the point that someone “can’t help themselves.” The protagonist is intrigued and repulsed by her child in equal measure, like an audience member driven to a frenzy by an unusual show.

Bergier does not mention the gender element in his introduction. This would spoil his story, and the twist he is excited to share with his reader. All he says is that it is a “black” story, and it is difficult to tell if he means that in a dark sense, or simply that the contents discussed are too horrible for the sensitive soul. All the introduction really tells the reader is that he and his unnamed collaborator like adventure stories, and they want to share their neat tale with their audience. Did he think trans people deserved death at the hands of their own parents? It is impossible to know, because that would be reading too deeply into his work. He certainly considers their existence unusual and unexpected, the kind of twist one does not guess.

Jacques Janus was (were?) right, however, about one element of their story. The introduction of a transsexual element to this story changes a fairly rote pastiche to something a little odder, something that is even a little bit charming. It does not evoke revulsion like ”Arthur Jermyn”, at least not in me. Instead the twist lodges this story in my head so that I return to it over time, a bit like how I am writing this essay. I am thus interested in Rolf because of their ambiguous gender issues, as vague as those turn out to be.

To Janus’s credit, Rolf is not the typical transsexual serial killer stereotype. They are no Buffalo Bill, skinning women out of a frantic desire to take possession of their femaleness. Instead, Rolf’s method of changing sex is killing men, a bizarre take on the trope I do not think I have seen before. It is also this cross-gender sacrifice that makes me think that even if the authors were aware of transsexuality, they were working under the older idea that transfeminity and cis male homosexuality were two sides of the same coin. Rolf has no interest in women before his mother sees him in front of his bubbling cauldron: “I knew perfectly well that Rolf lived alone up there. He had never been interested in women, moreover, whom he considered unworthy of sharing the life of a man such as himself.” He appropriates something he scorns into himself.

Then again, he does not fill these stereotypes because they were still being developed; Buffalo Bill is the product of a similar instinct on Thomas Harris’s part, who openly admits seeking out the sensational and weird for inspiration in his thrillers. Transsexuality is a weird spice in a weird dish, much like Dr. Hannibal’s cannibalism; these are taboo topics which only the bold dare exploit for thrills.

Buffalo Bill is not, as they say, ideal trans rep. He’s a violent serial killer who funnels his gender dysphoria into murderous urges, and the narrative’s clumsy attempt to separate him off from “real” transsexuals only serves to legitimize the weird gatekeeping of the era’s “best practice.” Yet, I love him, and so do many of my trans friends. “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me,” he says, blending transfeminity and stereotypical camp homosexuality in a scene played for horror but easy to take as empowering instead. He’s well-acted, charismatic, insane, obsessed with bugs. He’s camp. He’s got a personality you can latch on to, and actualizes an ache that many trans people feel. Am I attracted to this person, or do I want to walk around inside their skin?

Rolf isn’t really a midcentury French Buffalo Bill. There just isn’t much to them, just as there isn’t much to the story. He is absent from his own story. The work tells his life story, but his mother is the Lovecraftian protagonist, driven insane by that which can neither be revealed nor understood. There just isn’t enough of Rolf to hold on to. The outsider looking in has no sympathy for his desire to be a woman; he might as well be sacrificing men to the cauldron so he can grow bat wings.

The thing that turns Rolf into a woman is “a body, a whole infamous parody of being alive.” It “surround[s] Rolf in a caressing and monstrous embrace.” The narrator has walked in on her son having pseudo-sex with a freaky creature and changing sex, but the transformation is considered just as hideous as the catalyst. This final moment before his death is also the only time Rolf’s mother uses feminine pronouns. “His features trembled, the fog seemed to seep through all his skin. An imperceptible modification began to draw a feminine mask of diabolical perversity on the contours of her face: the atrocious reality of the Dark Lady and her bloody sacrifices…”

Transsexual bodies are still used as cheap shock, but it’s less common than it used to be. While some series like Lovecraft Country still do that thing where a non-cis body flashes nude on the screen for the shock and titillation of the audience, other works like the multiplayer FPS Destiny 2 contain a nonbinary character who simply exists in the world, and have stories only partially related to their gender identity. But for many people, the transsexual body still remains an object of horror. This piece feels like the halfway point between terfs posting out of context post-top surgery pics and the old newspaper headlines about Catherine Jorgensen: “The Girl Who Used to be Boy Isn’t Quite Ready For Dates.”

“Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” is an odd story. It feels silly to say that it’s not an accurate reflection of transition, because of course it isn’t. You don’t become a girl by sacrificing boys to Yog-Shoggoth, but that objection sort of misses the point. The authors behind Jacques Janus were seemingly not interested in accurately depicting trans people, but instead in frightening their audience. The sex-change cauldron follows a very Lovecraftian passage in which the narrator confronts “a kind of rough table on which were placed a dozen statuettes. In the middle of the statuettes shone an unknown object: a sort of green polyhedron with blood-red carvings that immediately caught my eye.” It takes all her power for her to tear her gaze away, only for her eyes to catch her son doing something even worse.

Sex-change is “that which arouses fear,” something unimaginable and horrifying. The authors want to evoke strong emotion; did they think a reader would agree the mother’s actions were justified? Or were they simply looking to shock?

An English translation of “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” can be found at the Internet Archive.

Leonid “Wes” West (he/him) is a grad student residing in various parts of the American North East. Findable @ftmshepard on twitter and @faemagpie on twitch, he likes horror, classics, and writing too much.

Seabury Quinn’s “Lynne Foster is Dead!” (1938): A Mistaken Gender Identity by Sophie Litherland

“Lynne Foster is Dead!” by Seabury Quinn was first published in Weird Tales Nov 1938, and was later expanded into the novel Alien Flesh (1977). The story may initially appear as a boy meets girl with a twist, but there is so much underneath the surface of this story than a simple body swap horror. Quinn explores such things as gender identity and the alchemy of the self with the character of Madame Foulik Bay. As someone who is transgender, I was certainly cautious with what to expect with trans people generally being portrayed in a negative way across many media platforms. I was then pleasantly surprised to encounter a story that successfully portrays many experiences of individuals who have changed gender, including my own.

The story is told from the perspective of the academic Dr. Abernathy, but the focus is on the tale of Madame Ismet Foulik Bay, a mysterious woman who is less than forthcoming about her background. As she and Abernathy readily fall for each other and engage in courtship, she gradually reveals her past and the twisted tale that brought her to the company of the Doctor. Transformed by dark magic from a foreign land, she regales her past from her perspective to her lover and the reader.

When we are first greeted by Madame Foulik Bay, she is described as the abject form of beauty of the female form. There is not a single hint that Madame Foulik was assigned male at birth. Having latched onto any transgender representation in media, I was expecting a small physical detail to raise the readers’ suspicions. But after combing through her physical appearance many times I could not find the tiniest iota of evidence of her assigned gender at birth. Any good mystery will give the wiliest reader just enough to figure out a reveal right before it happens. This story was no exception in that regard, but I admire the writer’s decision to not slide a masculine physical detail about her origins into her description.

Instead, we are introduced to the exact opposite. There exists a bit of a tired stereotype about male writers describing the female form in a sort of semi-sexual idolising way, which could certainly be applied here. There is a chance that this is entirely on purpose, to throw any suspecting reader off the scent initially about the truth behind Madame Foulik.

The first real clue we get is when Madame Foulik uses euphemisms to describe her past life. Dr. Abernathy even remarks upon this:

Madame Foulik spoke English idiomatically and with a strong New England accent, yet she said, “I began life” rather than “was born.” No lack of fluency accounted for this choice of words, he felt. The ambiguity—if ambiguity it were—was purposeful, not accidental.

I can certainly address the doctor’s suppositions and say for certain it was purposeful! This immediately struck me as familiar, as this is very much the language of the trans community that oozes with euphemism when referring to our pre-transition life.. My personal favourites are “As a child” or “When I was younger.” It merely allows a bit of dignity while not telling a mistruth about the past. We can see Madame Foulik Bay is no stranger to this concept either.

Here is a good point to discuss the concept of living “stealth.” This term refers to the ability to pass unnoticed to others about being transgender. For some it is the goal of transitioning, while others it can be seen as pandering to gender stereotypes. In relation to Madame Foulik, we can quite readily say she is “living stealth,” able to pass flawlessly in society as female. So, when she accidentally outs herself to Abernathy by singing, he is confused and can’t put the pieces together himself.

When Madame Foulik outs herself to Abernathy the moment is written from his perspective, but really the narrative is sympathetic towards her. There is a real sense of trepidation and fear about telling her potential lover about her past, which a reader could only empathise with. From my perspective, discussing gender history is still something that I’m never sure how to approach with both old and new acquaintances. After the truth about the fate of Lynne Foster is revealed, Madame Foulik then goes into how her circumstances came to be in Cairo.

The basic concept of gender identity is that there is an innate sense of gender within us. For most people their gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth, for others such as me, there is an incongruence between gender identity and assigned sex at birth. This is known as gender incongruence, which can cause dysphoria that may be alleviated by transitioning in ways such as socially or physically. What I find most significant in this story is the character of Madame Foulik and how her magical transformation interacts with her gender identity.

When Lynne Foster is part tricked, part forced to undergo the body swap procedure, he is blissfully unaware of what happens until it is forced upon him. Part of the process inflicted is described as a “Burning pain from a blue glowing dagger” where the agony was “almost more than I could bear.” My preliminary notes just read “Laser hair removal.” The intricacies of what the ritual actually entailed are purposefully obfuscated from the reader and the prose gives a good sense of panic and terror in Lynne Foster. When she awakes as Madame Foulik however, there is no lasting pain:

I woke to such a sense of physical well-being as I had not experienced since the crew broke training when the rowing season ended and I’d had a chance to go to bed as late as I desired with a full meal underneath my belt.

Immediately this kicks off her new life as a woman in a positive and healthy light.

What is really compelling is the gender identity of Madame Foulik. As far as we know her gender identity is male, as it is never made clear she wished to be female before her trip to Cairo, and later in the story she even remarks that she wants to reverse the process and find those who can “change me back into a man.” So as a trans person, this forced gender swap is the equivalent of making people like me detransition and when I think of it that way, it stops becoming a happy accident and starts becoming a horror story.

There is however more to it than this. Many people, including myself, have used the trope of “forced gender transition” as a way of escaping a perceived shame of gender transition. To have the decision in someone else’s hands wrests all responsibility and repercussions away. For some it may be sexual in nature, with some adult entertainment genres catering to this in particular. Interestingly that is not the case here as any thoughts of an overt sexual nature are quickly dismissed. I may have even dismissed this if it wasn’t for the detailed physical description of Madame Faulk when she wakes up.

There is a phenomenon known as “gender euphoria,” as the opposite of “dysphoria.” This can manifest in many ways, but one of the common sources is seeing yourself presenting as your gender identity for the first time. I distinctly remember the early days of transition where I had a giddy rush dressing and looking in the mirror. Of course, I had previously been well dressed and smart in the past on occasion, but this was the first time I was truly allowed to feel pretty.

It’s actually very hard to put into words how this feeling comes across, it’s not sexual in nature but more a way of liking and respecting yourself. When I read the section where Madame Foulik Bay first embraces her femininity it draws so many parallels to my lived experience of gender euphoria. When she thinks “I love to be loved by me” I can’t help but deeply empathise with her and feel a bit of pain that she never got to feel this way before. The whole passage completely took me by surprise at just how well it encapsulates this part of the trans experience that can often be overlooked by other media.

In addition to physical transition, Madame Foulik must assimilate her new role as a woman in a traditional society. This is made clear when Madame Foulik recalls speaking to her new father:

I began to remonstrate with him, speaking as an equal to an equal, but before I’d said a dozen words he broke in with “Istaghfir Allah, ya bent—ask God’s pardon, daughter!” Then he explained my status to me and left nothing to my imagination.

There can be a societal shock when presenting as your new gender, which is especially noticeable when in public or meeting new people. There are mannerisms, unspoken rules, and formalities which are very alien at first and some aspects of life that may have been taken for granted are laid bare. People will treat you differently, not intentionally or with malice, but just as what society dictates along gender lines.

This is especially seen in the case of Madame Foulik, reborn in a traditional society where gender roles are enforced, with her being forced to acclimatise or face death by her new family. We see again this theme of enforced femininity, where female mannerisms and speech are enforced against the subject’s will to ultimately become fully female both physically and socially.

Looking at the title of the story “Lynne Foster is Dead!,” there is a clear parallel between this and the concept of a deadname. The term deadname was made popular in the 2010s and refers to the name a trans person was given at birth and literally means “a name that is dead to that person.” When Madame Foulik exclaims “Lynne Foster has been dead!” It is eerily foretelling and akin to what many trans people feel about their old identities in the 21^st Century. Even after Madame Foulik has revealed her past to Dr. Abernathy, not once is she deadnamed or misgendered either by her lover or the author, leading to reinforce the fact that Lynne Foster is well and truly dead.

For everything the story so accurately engages with, I do think the final ending is a bit weak. Madame Foulik’s sexuality is not really touched upon earlier in the story, but it is clear she adores Dr. Abernathy. It should be stated that when a person transitions through non-ritualistic means that a change in sexuality is not necessarily guaranteed, but it is known to happen. So, when she declares her love for Abernathy, I feel it is genuine, but when she declares she no longer wants to live as male for him, that sours the ending for me. I just feel after exploring gender identity in such a nuanced and positive way, it just falls at the very final hurdle.

Looking at the story as a whole, it could be considered the narrative has been leading up to Lynne Foster wanting a relationship with a man all along, but using a gender swap through body switching horror to achieve it in a time where same-sex relationships were perhaps less palatable to the average reader. Considering the forced nature of the body swap and the immediacy of the courtship it’s not impossible that this is the case, however the intensity of the description of Madame Foulik’s transition suggests to me this isn’t the case.

It may also be considered that Seabury Quinn sees Madame Foulik so much as female, that a heteronormative ending seems like a “happy ending.” There is sometimes a lesser-known pressure for trans people to conform to gender stereotypes, including heterosexuality, in order to fit society’s labels and norms.

There is just a jarring feeling that Madame Foulik really deserved a better and more nuanced ending in character with the rest of the story. It’s not enough to ruin the whole story for me, but perhaps a bit of self-reflection and soul-searching from Madame Foulik before she just settles on a female identity for a man in the final paragraph wouldn’t have gone amiss.

I am actually taken aback by how well this story encapsulates the concept of gender identity using ritual magic. When re-reading passages I am astounded to find how Seabury Quinn portrays such feelings as gender euphoria while treating the character of Madame Foulik with not only humanity, but a sense of reverence and admiration. She is relatable, strong, smart, and beautiful, not just some tragic unfortunate soul and is certainly not just written as a freak show or curiosity. I would go so far as to say this is excellent trans representation overall that I haven’t readily seen in modern media.

“Lynne Foster Is Dead!” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

Sophie is a writer with a focus on science, literature and LGBTQ+ topics. She is also a comic, speaker and presenter who regularly speaks at events. Twitter: @splitherland
Copyright 2023 Sophie Litherland.

Seabury Quinn’s “Strange Interval” (1936): Gender, Gender Every Where…? by Mitch Lopes da Silva

Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sailor, shamed for committing the societally prohibited sin of killing an albatross, experiences a series of deprivations and perhaps divinely-orchestrated punishments, including severe dehydration. The sailor laments his situation because although he is surrounded by water, it is not drinkable water, and therefore the substance is actually something else entirely—in fact a poisonous material—to his thirst-wracked body.

Seabury Quinn’s story “Strange Interval,” first published in Weird Tales in May 1936, has an emotional resonance with Coleridge’s poem: obsessed with shame and social perception of class status, Quinn’s protagonist undergoes a harrowing series of deprivations and punishments while at sea—and although there is a ubiquity of events occurring that appear to be about gender and gender transition, they are actually something else entirely. Rather than poisonous materials, the story contains a couple of fairly common kinks, as we shall see.

If you were looking for a story about gender identity, though, you’re going to go thirsty.

Willoughby, Seabury Quinn’s protagonist of “Strange Interval,” begins the story identifying as a landed gentleman, outright declaring: “I’m a Virginia gentleman.” Willoughby is white, and possesses all the advantages of his race and class in 1686, including owning a boat that he likes to sail on the Potomac. One day while he’s out sailing, he encounters something that should be impossible: pirates on a river that is normally protected by white colonialism:

The notched shoreline of Carolina swarmed with buccaneers, he knew, but there never had been corsairs in Potomac waters.

The pirates destroy Willoughby’s boat, and the captain, Black Rudolph (the color likely refers to his beard and/or his cruelty, but not his race), disregards Willoughby’s claims of entitlement and rights as a gentleman and enslaves him. Not long after that, Black Rudolph encounters a Spanish ship and attacks it, imprisoning a woman named Carmelita who pretends to be mad in order to avoid Black Rudolph’s sexual advances. Willoughby discovers her secret and they fall in love, declaring that they want to marry each other. Black Rudolph finds out about Carmelita’s deception and their desire to marry, so he promptly organizes a wedding to marry them on the spot.

If you were thinking “wow, that was oddly accepting of him,” it’s not, because right after that Black Rudolph violently castrates Willoughby and makes him submit to “the accolade of degradation”: further feminizing him by shaving his beard off, piercing his ears, and forcing him to wear a dress and put his hair up. After that, Willoughby is tied up on a bed and obliged to watch Black Rudolph sexually assault his wife, Carmelita.

This goes on for a bit—they move to an island where Carmelita is regularly sexually abused by Black Rudolph and Willoughby becomes Joaquina—a force-femmed doll who is bullied by other Spanish women imprisoned on the island, but performs fairly light domestic chores (scrubbing floors and serving meals, etc.) that become even lighter after Carmelita intercedes and upgrades Joaquina’s job to her personal maid. Joaquina and Carmelita spend their days eating fruit and kissing and their evenings being traumatized until Black Rudolph leaves to go pirating.

Carmelita and Joaquina take a walk together, and when they see one of Black Rudolph’s employees, a slave overseer, attempt to physically assault an elderly black woman, Carmelita intercedes. The overseer turns on Carmelita and whips her, but Joaquina kills him before he can do further damage. Afraid for their lives, they turn to the black woman who offers them help. She turns out to be Maman Cécilie, “a magic-working obeah woman,” and capable of summoning sharks that can tow boats at incredible speeds. She also reveals to Joaquina that if she wants to become Willoughby again, she just has to put on a pair of pants.

Hot tears came to his eyes and a choking sob rose in his throat as he saw the shining dark hair fall beneath the scissors blades, but a subtle change came over Willoughby as he felt the rasp of coarse wool breeches on his legs. In a moment, like the fading of a specter at the rising of the sun, Joaquina whose sweet form and substance had been his so many months, was dead […]

So Willoughby puts on some pants, and even though that act doesn’t end up magically reversing his castration, he realizes he is a man, and that realization helps him outduel Black Rudolph, forcing the pirate into the sea and a fate of tugboat shark food. Willoughby and Carmelita return to colonial society, Willoughby becoming a gentleman and Carmelita his lady.

Superficially things appear to have settled down, but it turns out that every year, Carmelita takes a strange trip somewhere. Curious, when an opportunity presents itself for him to find out where she’s going, Willoughby takes it, and discovers that she’s been visiting a cemetery where Carmelita has commissioned a little gravestone for Joaquina.

Even if you set aside the magical sharks for a minute, there’s a lot going on here. There is sexual violence in “Strange Interval,” clearly, but is this text a reflection on gender or something else entirely?

Here’s where it gets sticky.

Let’s hold off from the forced feminization and start instead with the subject of cuckolding. Why? Because cuckolding is a popular American sexual fantasy, particularly among cis heterosexual men, (in Justin J. Lehmiller’s survey of over 4,000 American adults online—58 percent of men surveyed reported fantasizing about troilism/cuckolding, and over a quarter of them fantasized about it regularly) and troilism’s presence in the narrative is an important clue to understanding this text’s logic.

As you may have noticed, cuckolding fantasies often feature elements of submission and masochism, and this appears to be especially true in heterosexual relationships where the man plays the role of observer.
Lehmiller, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life (2020) 52

While we like to believe that everything is relatively new, cuckolding is found in many ancient myths and religious texts, including Greek mythology and the Christian Bible. The immaculate conception of Jesus presents the essentials of cuckolding without including any sex. A couple is married (or close enough), the wife has (divine) relations with someone perceived as being more powerful than her spouse, the husband feels shame, but their relationship survives, and they are rewarded with a strengthened bond (and a god for a kid).

It’s likely that cuckolding, and cuckolding fantasies, arose directly in response to the anxieties of marriage itself. Partnership as a landed transaction based on a monogamous contract implies that every perceived loss of a partner is a threat. In this scarcity-bound way of thinking, sex outside of marriage threatens an eventual loss of domestic security. Sexual fantasies about cuckolding arise to address these anxieties, which were obviously extant in the 1930s. The 1933 film Design for Living, based on the 1932 Noël Coward play, is an excellent example of a narrative that plays with cuckolding/troilism anxiety and eroticism. “Strange Interval” is only a few years shy of the cuckolding anxiety-rich narrative that swept American box offices in 1939: Gone With the Wind.

In an ideal cuckolding fantasy, the married couple’s relationship survives the “trials” or psychological stress of the cuckolding, and they are rewarded with a strengthened bond. Carmelita and Willoughby undergo that same strengthening, until they are eventually capable of breaking free from their captor. It is interesting to note that although Carmelita is sexually assaulted, she is not haunted with shame like Willoughby is, or forced to perform domestic tasks. Her class position is never threatened, and while they live on the island she is treated like Black Rudolph’s wife:

She had accepted her position with a fatalistic calm, and lived with Black Rudolph in conditions almost simulating matrimony.

That is because her sexual assault is also part of Quinn’s fantasy. She does not suffer from trauma in a chronic or realistic way throughout the narrative because having her character suffer realistically would not be erotic. For all its violent trappings, this is an erotic adventure story, intended to titillate as much as it shocked its readers.

Forced feminization is a kink, and has very little to do with gender and much to do with arousal and power, specifically the perceived power that performing different gender roles enables or diminishes. The key to unlocking Quinn’s interpretation of this as pure kink, and not a sexual fantasy say, about his own gender identity, is his attention to shame and class. Becoming a woman/maid is “the accolade of degradation,” or a way to degrade his male/gentleman body. The constant thematic fixation on shame indicates a BDSM element at play. Quinn’s protagonist loses his class status, his testicles, and his identity as a man, but it’s crucial to observe that even though he never regains his testicles, Willoughby’s gender identity or “manhood” and class status return to him. Like the end of a rough BDSM play session he leaves with scars, but nothing that could ultimately threaten his gender or class. He is, after all, a Virginia gentleman.

Forced feminization fantasies can arise in response to anxieties about gender or class. While extant in the 1930s, these sexual fantasies would have been regarded as queer, and are therefore more difficult to find in mainstream media. One of the earliest known films about forced feminization is 1906’s Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) – a short about an alternate reality where gender roles are reversed – that was later remade in 1912 as In the Year 2000. 1908 brought us Troubles of a Grass Widower which uses circumstantial forced feminization as comedy. There’s also 1913’s The Little House in Kolomna, a Russian film where a woman feminizes her boyfriend in order to force him to perform domestic chores for her as a maid. At first he’s excited to dress in drag/be in close proximity to his girlfriend, but he appears to visibly dislike performing these chores, and splits as soon as his cross-dressing is discovered by others.

Even if Seabury Quinn was not exposed to these particular films, he was likely aware of drag. Drag has roots in theater and vaudeville, and drag film history starts alongside the silent film era. Frequently most early drag performances were included for comedic effect. When Charlie Chaplin or The Three Stooges dressed in drag, their performances were intended as jokes. What these jokes hid, of course, was anxiety about the flexibility of gender. It’s notable, therefore, that Seabury Quinn’s story articulates this specific erotic fantasy in a mainstream publication.

Seabury Quinn’s sensual preoccupation with texture lingers on almost every page of “Strange Interval.” Black Rudolph is often described as a dichotomy of textures, rough and soft, violent yet perceptive, he is the “strangely sensitive beast” of the story.

Black Rudolph put the girl from him, not roughly, but with a kind of slow, deliberate tenderness, and the startlingly red lips beneath his black mustache were parted in a smile that showed a hard, white line of teeth as merciless as those of any wolf.

He is the aggressive antithesis to Willoughby’s meek submission, the cuckolding large ship that physically demolishes Willoughby’s small buckeye.

Because this is a sensual world, intended for erotic consumption, there is a preoccupation with sensualism. Fabrics are soft or coarse or expensive or cheap, but they’re always well-described. Black Rudolph wears felt and diamonds, cambric and lace and velvet and Spanish leather. Willoughby is, by contrast, described as being “uniformed” when he is reunited with society and regains his status as a gentleman. Willoughby, although respectable, is less texturally interesting as a gentleman than the pirate Black Rudolph who indulges in his sexual impulses. It’s only when Willoughby becomes Joaquina and starts to delight in the dresses that she wears that her fabrics come to life. “Stiff brocade” and “clinging gowns of rustling silk” are worthy of Seabury Quinn’s descriptive attention, in addition to a pair of red heels and a corset.

Wool is the fabric that restores Willoughby’s masculinity to him—a less flashy and far more functional fabric than what Joaquina prefers to wear. Willoughby’s wool is “coarse” and “rasps”; it is the antithesis of the softness or smoothness of silk. This arbitrary binary is enough to break the spell of Black Rudolph’s hell/paradise and end Quinn’s sexual fantasy, only to briefly take us on a shark-filled high-speed boating adventure on the open sea.

I’d like to think that this was America’s first “jumping the shark” moment. It definitely predates that Happy Days episode.

For a long time he remained kneeling, and when he rose there was a look upon his face such as one might wear if he had seen the wraith of one whom he had loved and lost long since […]

In any case, what does the narrative “sting” of Willoughby discovering Joaquina’s grave lend to this discussion? It certainly implies that Carmelita is mourning Joaquina’s absence, while giving the story a nice “look at your own grave” moment that pulp magazines frequently enjoyed employing as a trope at the time. The grave could also be interpreted as a part or version of Willoughby that he buried when he left his kinky lifestyle behind on the island, but it feels like a stretch to associate this with a buried or lost gender identity. Joaquina is:

[…] a piteous, forgotten little ghost, without so much as a dead body to call hers.

But Willoughby does not mourn her loss. If this story is about Willoughby’s lost identity, why didn’t he commission the gravestone and take trips to grieve? The gravestone is outside of Willoughby’s purview; purchasing the plot and having the stone carved were tasks only Carmelita undertook. The gravestone is about her grief and Willoughby’s shock at encountering it. Gender isn’t buried in that plot. But perhaps there is something about gender to be gleaned here.

Even though he doesn’t articulate it explicitly within his text, on some level Seabury Quinn obviously understood that gender is contained within the human mind, and not our genitals. As he wrote out this sexual fantasy he instinctively knew that gender could be as easy as feeling connected to one’s own gender presentation—that a pair of pants was more than enough to prove Willoughby’s manhood to himself—but failed to distinguish any differences between kink and identity.

Quinn would likely have had a great deal of difficulty understanding the concept of a person identifying as trans and asexual, for example, because he appears to perceive transness as an innately sexual (and temporary) identity. While people may have gender-bending sexual fantasies, being trans is not a kink. Being trans is about living as the gender you identify as. Forced feminization is a kink, a temporary fantasy; but being trans is about gender identity, and living in the real world. Being trans is being trans all of the time, because it’s who a trans person is. It’s being trans and waiting in line at the DMV; it’s being trans and running out to buy toilet paper because you forgot to get it earlier that day; it’s being trans at the hospital and receiving a difficult medical diagnosis; it’s being trans and being a little sad because you broke your favorite coffee mug.

Transness is not inherently sexy, it’s just a part of a person, like a blood vessel or a fingernail. Anything else is erotic projection.

So one drop. No more.

“Strange Interval” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

M. Lopes da Silva (he/they/she) is a white Latinx and non-binary trans masc author and artist from Los Angeles. He has previously been employed as a sex worker, an art critic, and an educator. In 2020 Unnerving Magazine published his novella Hooker: a pro-queer, pro-sex work, feminist retrowave pulp thriller about a bisexual sex worker hunting a serial killer in 1980s Los Angeles using hooks as her weapons of choice. Dread Stone Press just published his first novelette What Ate the Angels – a queer vore sludgefest that travels beneath the streets of Los Angeles starring a non-binary ASMR artist and their vore-loving girlfriend – in Volume Two of the Split Scream series. On Twitter he’s @_MLopesdaSilva – on Instagram he’s @authormlopesdasilva.

David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” (1929): A Two-Dimensional Gender War by Ro Salarian

It’s funny how cis people see the trans experience as a horror story, a tale of body-horror sci-fi right alongside Frankenstein. Not much has changed in nigh on a century since Dr. David H. Keller wrote “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” except that in 1929 the idea of a physical sex change was mostly a thought experiment, a curious monster no more real than vampires or werewolves. Science fiction always tells us the values of the time when it was written, what we imagined as progress, and what we feared as dystopia. If something is going wrong in our current time, what worse thing might be just around the corner? In this case, feminism will lead to transgenderism, and this threatens the entire human race.

The fact of the matter was that the men of the United States who owned the greatest part of the wealth of the nation were afraid. […] What they were afraid of was the possibility of feminine control […]
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 248

We open with Miss Martha Belzer being passed up for a well-deserved promotion in favor of a man who ends up foisting all of his work on her anyway. It’s company policy to never promote women, because they would lose the respect of the rest of their industry. Martha is described as brilliant, competent, and capable. The story acknowledges that women are intentionally kept down for the sake of men’s egos and fears, and that women are entitled to their indignation. They deserve to be equals in society.

The story goes on for several pages about the talent and capability of women in America, about the petty terror of the insecure men in power. Keller writes extensively about the extra hoops women must jump through to gain even a fraction of the success of their male peers. The smartest, most talented, hardest-working woman at a company will still make half the salary of a man who can’t count to ten. The surest way to independent wealth for a woman was to be the sole heir of a rich man, which is how Patricia Powers becomes a billionaire in the story. Most other women can expect, at most, a low five-figure salary.

At first glance, the story seems very progressive and feminist. This is 1929, less than a decade since white women gained the ability to vote, and slightly longer since WWI ended, when millions of women were ousted from their wartime jobs to go back to being housewives. The continued existence of women in the workforce was a hotly contested issue of the time, and Keller seems aware of the injustice of holding women back.

Just kidding, though. These women will absolutely be punished. And, to my surprise, I found myself agreeing that they deserved it. This is a story of two groups of horrible people fighting each other, and no matter which side wins, women and trans people and people of color lose.

The tale continues with a Secret Service detective named Taine being sent to China to investigate a hospital run entirely by white American women. Chinese men are being paid $100 to undergo mysterious surgeries, and the United States needs to know why. So Taine, a white man, disguises himself as a Chinese sex worker, and is able to get a job in this hospital. It’s exactly as offensive as you think, with nonstop racial slurs and stereotypes thrown around as Taine spies on their secret operations.

He learns they’re performing “gonadectomies,” removing the testes of unsuspecting poor men. Why they’re doing it, Taine cannot surmise. This discovery is reported and received with a shrug, and nothing comes of it for years. There is no sympathy or justice for these men, whose perspective could be a true horror story.

The main conflict of the story arises when a new group of effeminate young men start taking over Wall Street, upsetting the old guard:

It was not the fact that their rule was being contested by a new group that bothered them. […] It was the personality of their opponents that raised their ire and constant resentment.
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 254

These new fellas are all very intelligent and hard workers, with impeccable hygiene and colorful suits. They’re uninterested in golf, preferring to keep to themselves at their private bridge club, and this fact is mentioned so many times, it’s comical. How dare a successful person be uninterested in golf! Well, one of the golf-players is so upset by these upstarts that he whines to the Secret Service about it, offering a million dollars to fix it.

“It seems that you are afraid of something and yet cannot give me any definitive idea of what it is,” the chief replies. “We cannot raid the biggest private club in New York just because some of you gentlemen are sore because you’re not invited to join.” (ibid. 255)

Still, Taine takes the gig. Worming his way into the bridge club via multiple disguises and secret identities, Taine finds himself in a meeting with the top dogs in this conspiracy as they reveal their big, evil plan. All of these “men” are actually women, who had used their Chinese testicle harvest to create a sex change serum. Five thousand of the world’s most brilliant women, funded by the richest woman in the world, had become men so they could infiltrate male society. But they’re not stopping there. Their ultimate goal is to eradicate all men and create a female-only society. Perhaps men can be used as servants in the meantime.

For the men of 1929, this is their imagined dystopia, a world in which they are replaced, eradicated. Women take over, and men are irrelevant. This is terrifying to them, a monster that must be conquered. In the imaginations of bigots, there always has to be someone on top, and someone being crushed. They can’t imagine equality. The only alternative to patriarchy in their eyes is matriarchy, and if someone has to be in charge, of course it can’t be women.

In this story, the true hero is racism. Yeah. It turns out, all Chinese men carry “a disease” (most likely an allusion to Syphilis) that doesn’t affect them much, but it will drive white people fully insane. The smartest women in the world, having injected themselves with this infected biological material, will all lose their minds within a few years:

You took five thousand of our best women, girls who would have made loving wives and wonderful mothers […] and, through your insane desire to rule, you have changed them into five thousand insane women.
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 274

Give them some arsenic and toss them in the looney bin. The conflict will resolve itself, returning everything to the pre-war status quo. This is science fiction that wants to return to the past.

I can easily see this same story written today with the women as heroes, without the ending where they all succumb to a brain-eating disease. When I first began reading, I could imagine remaking this as a campy, girl-power musical, perhaps starring a whole bunch of drag performers. Female supremacy can feel like feminism at first glance. These women were discriminated against under patriarchy, especially in 1929. The people in power were all men, specifically rich, white men, and they didn’t deserve to have all that power at everyone else’s expense. It’s tempting to imagine being on the other side of the power dynamic. It’s tempting to forget that in every scenario in which one group has absolute power, absolute corruption goes hand in hand. Power requires oppression, and women are not immune from perpetuating it.

While one side argues for male supremacy and the other for female supremacy, both argue for white supremacy. People of color are disposable pawns, never in consideration for the crown, their bodies used and discarded, their humanity never acknowledged by the writer or his characters. The white cis women want what the white cis men have, power and control. They don’t care who they have to step on to obtain it. They aren’t worried that injustice exists, only that they got the short end of the stick. They aren’t punished for how they treated people of color, but for taking power from white men. No one is the hero here. Neither side makes a good point.

The magazine makes sure to mention that Keller is a doctor, and that “glands” are responsible for so many important physical and mental systems in our bodies. Yet there is no acknowledgment that filling a cis woman with masculinizing hormones and altering her secondary sex characteristics would bring emotional anguish akin to what trans women often go through, aka gender dysphoria. As any trans person can attest, a lot of doctors today don’t know a thing about how transitioning works, and this guy from 1929 is no exception. While this was written during the time when Magnus Hirschfeld (considered by many to be the “grandfather” of trans healthcare) was making early breakthroughs in the field, this was also a time when a lot of quack science was getting just as much attention in the news and fictional “gland stories.” Keller was most likely aware of recent advances (and regressions) in hormonal and surgical healthcare, but judging by this story, he took the quackery to heart.

It’s difficult to compare some of the transgender themes in the story to modern-day ideas because, well, this isn’t a story about transgender people. This is a metaphor about cis people, a thought experiment unrelated to the trans experience. These women-turned-men aren’t trans men. These women-in-male-bodies are closer to trans women, but still, it misses that mark. They don’t experience gender dysphoria before their transformation, nor do they have any discomfort in their new bodies. Transitioning is framed as a choice, and a fairly easy one at that. Of course women would choose to be men. That’s the only way to get ahead. It’s not about identity. It’s about subterfuge, trickery, a means to an end. Anyone who attempts to alter their place in society by altering their body is untrustworthy, a fake who could never be real. This is the gender equivalent of the racial dynamics in Eli Coulter’s “The Last Horror.”

To this day, trans men are often treated with sympathy and pity, as women who felt they had no other choice, wanting to escape the brutality of womanhood. Meanwhile, trans women are seen as men trying to escape their culpability in the evils of patriarchy. Both this antique story and modern TERFs claim that in a truly equal society, there would be no need to transition. In the past and the present, no one who believes in rigid separation of the sexes can conceive that those sexes could ever truly be equal. If they did, there would be no reason to fear trans people.

The “man-hating feminist” concept has been around for a long time, longer than this story. The stereotype has varying degrees of truth to it. A lot of women do hate men. On the surface, this seems justified. The patriarchy has done terrible things to women. But it isn’t a flat one-on-one binary of 100% evil men vs 100% good women. Responding to misogyny with misandry might feel like sticking it to the man, but it catches a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.

That said, the women in this story are not real man-hating feminists. The man-hating feminists in “The Feminine Metamorphosis” were written by a man. This is a man’s idea of what women must think about men, perhaps based on what he would do if thrust into the role of a woman. He would transition. He would regain his manhood by whatever means necessary.

This is actually a fairly unique story in that regard. So many cis people, when imagining the trans experience, imagine going from the body they currently have to the “opposite” one. They find it terrible, and thus trans people are bizarre. To truly begin to empathize with trans people, one must imagine already being in the “opposite” form, trying to get to the one you currently have. Keller has managed to do this. He is so far removed from the female perspective that even in fiction, he can only imagine wanting to be a man. Still, this is not a trans story. His empathy only took him halfway before taking a sharp detour into his own biases.

Despite this being an old story by a dead man who didn’t have much knowledge of trans people, the attitudes within it are still alive today. There are women who hate men to the point that they dream about them going extinct. There are women who don’t necessarily want to eradicate men, but keep men and women so far apart they become different species. Heck, people are still writing stories today about what would happen if all men disappeared. Trans people cannot fit into such worlds. It’s impossible to long for a world without men without longing for a world without trans people. Trans people of all genders are extra susceptible to both misogyny and misandry, often at the same time, depending on how their gender is perceived by others.

While it’s easy to frame this as a product of the times, a backlash against first-wave feminism, any modern trans person can tell you that a strong percentage of our population, Evangelicals and “radical feminists” alike, is highly invested in the good-vs-evil, man-vs-woman binary. A two-dimensional gender war is delicious to misogynists and transphobes alike. They both require a strict separation of two binary sexes, and the only debate is which one deserves to be in charge. One side is good. The other side is evil. Sinners vs saints. This simplicity appeals to simple people, both back then and now. If the other side is evil, that must make me good, that must make me incapable of evil. That leads to things like a hospital full of wealthy white women performing unethical surgeries on poor men of color and framing it as “girl power!” Nothing regarding gender or race is ever simple, and the true trickery, the actual subterfuge, comes from those invested in a strict binary.

“The Feminine Metamorphosis” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

Ro Salarian is a trans nonbinary writer and illustrator with over a dozen works published. Their work is focused on queer people with elements of pulp fiction, body horror, and eroticism. Their work can be found at rosalarian.com.

Samuel Loveman’s The Hermaphrodite: A Poem (1926): Societal Devaluing + Desire in the Face of Marginalization by Salem Void

The relationship between H.P Lovecraft and the author of The Hermaphrodite, Samuel Loveman, was a subtle display of H. P.’s ability to pick and choose which characteristics of an individual’s personhood to center, and which to discard. Samuel Loveman was a Jewish American poet, critic, dramatist, and a homosexual who was said to have cohabitated with men often cited as “friends”’ up until the time of his death. Lovecraft and Loveman’s friendship was largely centered around their creative works and the symbiotic benefits within the literary world the two shared with one another.

Among Samuel Loveman’s best-known works is the sprawling, epic poem The Hermaphrodite, in which Loveman writes from the perspective of an unknown narrator only addressed as “brother of mine” being visited by Hermaphrodite in what feels like a dream in the middle of the night. The narrator is largely sympathetic to the plights Hermaphrodite discloses he has suffered, often anticipating a shift toward more positive, grand things coming in the story that unfortunately never comes. The Hermaphrodite as written by Samuel Loveman is a beautiful and painfully accurate depiction of what it is to exist born as someone innately confusing and “other” than those around you, both the awe and the agony. What it is to be born as a marginalized person who is simultaneously coveted and rejected by society at large, which I am sure Samuel Loveman must have related to as a Jewish homosexual among peers that rejected both of these parts of his personhood in order to view him as more human.

H.P Lovecraft sung his praises for The Hermaphrodite, writing in a letter:

I’m glad you’ve sent for “The Hermaphrodite”, which is the most purely classical poem written in this generation. Loveman is an authentic genius, & has kept the Hellenic (or perhaps I should say Hellenistic) spirit more perfectly than anyone else I know of. He belongs vividly & definitely to the colourful civilisation of Alexandria & Antioch.
H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 11 Jan 1927, Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja 31

It doesn’t particularly shock me that Lovecraft saw this poem for what it was, a stunning work of art that rivaled Homer and Theocritus, as the poem does end with this abnormal specter of humanity deciding that its best for him to turn to stone and leave the others for good. What startles me about Lovecraft’s involvement with this work of Loveman’s is not his praise of it, but his willingness to spread this work to other authors who very well could have come to the opposite understanding and sought to immerse themselves in the history of Hermaphrodite even further. With how paranoid Lovecraft seemed to be for much of his life about the spread of agendas he saw as harmful, I’m shocked that this wouldn’t extend to what art he shares with his peers depending on what message it might include.

As a writer who is both Black, disabled, trans, intersex and a few other things that are considered marginalized identities, The Hermaphrodite is wildly impactful when it comes to describing the experience of simultaneous desire and devaluing and how confusing and impossible that is to navigate. When Hermaphrodite initially appears to the narrator in this dream, he is said to have winged eyeliner and red lips, the color of fire, with breasts and pale skin. There are many implications throughout the poem of paleness being directly associated with cleanliness, godliness, purity, which is a motif that so many white American and non-American authors and poets and scholars employed in their writing, that I find it unimportant to focus too deeply on. This association with paleness and purity and godliness is one that was enforced in us through the arts, our education, religion and much more, but it is not the central point in the tale, nor does it change the way that people receive Hermaphrodite in any significant way.

The tale that Hermaphrodite tells the narrator first is one where he is accepted into a township, not told to leave, but the energy among everyone shifts so coldly due to assumptions that nobody would even dare to address directly with him. Not only was Hermaphrodite viewed as a bad entity to have around, but also a symbol of further evils to come—Hermaphrodite could not bear this mockery in spite of being “accepted” so he left. This is directly relatable to me as a Black transmasculine intersex person who finds conditional acceptance in many places, the condition being that of accepting that others will speak of my existence as one of potential disorder and disruption. The agonizing choice of deciding to choose loneliness against conditional acceptance.

Hermaphrodite continues on, and a tale is told of famine except for in the vineyards where the grapes burst freely with wine and in this space everyone drunk with wine he allowed himself to let his guard down and be free and laugh and cry with the others as they did. Though, in the morning, as “beauty and lust were made visible” in the night, those who drank were considered to be defiled because of what they saw. Some continued to drink, but this time in silence so they did not attract the attention of those who had not imbibed, but this was not enough, and Hermaphrodite still witnessed the murder and crucifixion of many of his brothers. He recounts the experience of seeing the deaths, the bodies of his brothers slain, and discovering that many had escaped leaving him “to oblivion.”

When Hermaphrodite says this, the narrator rejects it vehemently, insisting that it was a mistake or perhaps that they saw someone like Hermaphrodite “fearless and good, They swept him recreant from their sight”—getting rid of what they saw in front of them that they could not understand, even though he loved them like a brother and they had drank and laughed and cried together. Loveman was close friends with another homosexual American poet, Hart Crane, who he supported and in the end was a primary influence in Crane deciding against suicide. From this knowledge coupled with the sympathetic and hopeful tone of the narrator, we can conclude that Loveman felt a kinship with those of us considered too different to function in this society. Hermaphrodite recounts the tale of his birth, being told “Thou shalt appear in many places, Love, shalt thou love, but not fair faces,” outlining the prophetic vision that Hermaphrodite is capable of love, but it will not be returned in equal measure, doomed to a life of half-acceptance.

Hermaphrodite recounts being brought back into the light and returning to a city again where people crowd him and swoon at his beauty, hailing him as a picture of youth. They declare him a new god that can grant others immortality, and from his heart gushed wine and everyone was happy. The narrator is gleeful at this tale, saying that they know in their gut that Hermaphrodite came forth to liberate them, as everyone yearned for his touch and for his drink. This is the illusion of desire as acceptance. Just because they see Hermaphrodite at this time he has brought riches and beauty to them, doesn’t mean that this condition will stay, that the desire will stay present as a positive force.

At night, Hermaphrodite’s slain friends came to him in a dream, declaring that Hermaphrodite will not find rest there, as immortality is a promise to being alone forever. This dream puts him into a state of shock, feeling frozen like stone, unable to stir when the people lift their hands up in thirst to him. Hermaphrodite is soon after declared evil, though, beautiful and tender, but must be destroyed. The narrator laments how painful it must be to suffer the same thing twice, and again, attempts to reassure Hermaphrodite that this won’t be his perpetual experience.

Hermaphrodite meets someone who tells him to “Be frozen,” and “be marble and be free, Save in thine antique agony”—as a plea to Hermaphrodite to end the pain by ending the cycle of devaluing and veneration that breaks and confuses him so deeply. In the end, he accepts this condition of life where he can fade into the spirit of the world, to be both alive and not, accepting this death as the ultimate choice of his own, instead of the choice of the world. Hermaphrodite experiences the shock of being allowed to indulge in both the horrors of manhood (i.e. war, loss) and the splendors of womanhood (veneration, protection, indulgence), but is not allowed to exist in either space more than transiently, and there is no direction toward what place he would be allowed to exist in more than temporarily. Loveman was drafted in World War I and was not happy about it, a poet of somewhat delicate sensibilities, this gives him insight into the things that are expected of men and echoes of this sentiment are heard throughout this work.

That is the painful purgatory that comes with being intersex, that differs from the matter of being trans. There is no clear transition space that exists when you were born existing in a nebulous state that nobody can clearly define to begin with. So we are just shuffled into the junk drawer of life, as that is easier than examining what it means to have a gender, to be a man, or a woman, or neither or both.

The culmination of Hermaphrodite’s lonely travels through Greece is that Hermaphrodite cannot exist in the world as it is, as he is, so the only way to exist is in dreams and in marble figures left to time, which will lose the colors they have been brightly painted becoming blank and pale, to become a symbol. I relate this condition of life to another phenomenon coined called “social death” which refers to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society. As a Black, disabled intersex person, I feel I exist in a state of premature social death, where I have not yet found a way to fully integrate myself into society because I am not seen as fully human to others because I cannot be categorized and boxed into the neat and orderly boxes that we as humans have created for ourselves so that we can feel in control.

Intersex existence is seen as a deviation from nature, and thus a deviation from order—a sign of the destruction of the structures that have kept us thriving as people. In reality, the true sign of destruction and what holds us back as a society from further thriving is no longer pretending that intersex existence is an unknown that should spur fear.

Samuel Loveman learned after H. P. Lovecraft’s death, that he was a very avid antisemite, and claimed he burned his letters in a scathing essay titled “Of Gold and Sawdust” where he repudiated their friendship, though did make it clear that Lovecraft was “however, loyal in his appreciation of me as a poet.” This reaction to the confirmed understanding that Loveman was only conditionally accepted by his friend Lovecraft, along with the intensely sympathetic narration of The Hermaphrodite, tells me that Loveman didn’t agree with conditional acceptance, and would despise the way that intersex erasure is still propagated constantly to this very day.

The Hermaphrodite is an unfortunately beautiful and tragic show of how little our perception and treatment of intersex people has changed throughout time, and a passionate plea to allow individuals like Hermaphrodite to love, live, experience joy, sorrow and to be lost among the rest who are lost, too.

The Hermaphrodite: A Poem can be read for free online at the Brown Digital Repository.

Salem Void (He/Him) is a man-shaped biomechanical bear that can be “found” in the swamplands of Virginia writing speculative fiction, queer + trans nonfiction, weird dark horror, and more. He hopes his work can be both the salt and the salve on your wounds.

He can be found @thewarmvoid on all socials, as well as Patreon + Substack.

On Barry Pain’s “An Exchange Of Souls” (1911) by Desmond Rhae Harris

First off: I really enjoyed reading this story! I can definitely see how it might have inspired other works like H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing On The Doorstep.” And, it does raise some genuinely good philosophical questions that branch off almost fractally the more you think about them.

The protagonist follows the story of his friend Dr. Myas, a deeply ambitious scientist with many quirks. Dr. Myas delves into the concept of whether or not a person’s ego can be sustained independently of the body and mind–or even moved and switched with that of another. Myas becomes consumed by his quest for answers, growing closer to a woman named Alice whom he plans to marry . . . but only after his experiments, in which she becomes his partner, are finished. Despite numerous ethical and practical questions raised by his peers, Dr. Myas finally crafts a machine that empowers him to explore his ultimate question firsthand, with his wife-to-be at his side. Dr. Myas does, indeed, manage to exchange his “soul,” or ego, with Alice’s. But the cost is dire and the result is a distressed melding of the two people. Mind and body are affected, and the ego is questioned as the protagonist strives to help Dr. Myas clean up the aftermath of this bewildering turn of events.

As I got deeper into the story, I found myself wondering about many of the same things Dr. Myas did. How does one separate the idea of the ego from the electric signals of the brain? From cell memories held in the body? From muscle memories retained in the body’s machinery? If I “exchanged souls” with someone else, would I forget how to play the piano or conduct research? And, of course, this story delves into the complex ideas and questions about identity that people have struggled for so long to fully understand, which touch a very specific kind of nerve for trans people (and surely for many other members of the LGBTQ+ community who have had inherent parts of their identity questioned or invalidated).

As a trans guy myself, I found the idea of Dr. Myas waking up in his wife’s body to be particularly creepy. Aside from the obvious parallels, I’m sure I’m also not the only trans person who’s struggled with medical-related anxiety and weird fears like “What if hormone treatments don’t work?” or “What if things somehow go back to the way they were, and all my efforts and agony were for nothing?” or simply “What if something goes horribly wrong?” Treatments of any kind, no matter how strongly we might desire them, are not risk-free.

This point ties into the story even more: just like Dr. Myas, I and many others have pursued (sometimes rather experimental and cutting-edge) treatments with a dogged, almost grim determination–because even the possibility of success is worth the risks. Even the hope that you might finally fulfill your desires and get some kind of relief for the all-consuming ailment that’s plagued your brain for years is worth the risk of losing everything.

Now for the inevitable: even though I relate to many aspects of the story and can find validation in them, there are definitely some outdated views and terminologies used in this story. I didn’t expect anything different, considering the publication date–of course there would be some sexist and misogynistic views, such as the tendency to view women or AFAB people as simple and shallow and then judge them accordingly. Of course there would be an overly black-and-white description of “men and women.”

After bracing myself for the worst going in, I actually felt somewhat pleasantly surprised as I kept reading. Despite the age and setting of the story, I would actually consider the protagonist’s general attitude towards people to be relatively neutral or even slightly progressive for the times. He seems to see the whole picture and have his personal priorities more straightened out than some people today do. For example: his horror towards the end of the story seems to arise from the jarring changes in his associate, which defy all that he knows of science, rather than anything focused on the gender aspect itself. He also seems to spend as much time critiquing men’s clothing and mannerisms throughout the rest of the story as he does women’s. He does not generally treat women as lesser or offer them a lower level of respect than he offers men, even if the terminology in the story can get a bit . . . dated.

He doesn’t really actively emphasize any sexist or misogynistic stereotypes, either, even though they’re inherently a part of the story’s chronological setting–at most, he mentions them in passing, in a way that seems natural for someone who was brought up to think that way. And at times, he even seems to question these cultural norms, reinforcing the overall inquisitive nature of the story. I especially noticed the part where he felt a bit uncomfortable about the way Dr. Myas simply expected Alice to clean up after a meal, taking her helpfulness for granted. Sometimes little things like that can speak volumes.

As I analyzed the cultural tone of the story, critique at the ready, it actually did remind me of similar debates I’ve run into regarding H. P. Lovecraft’s tone. So many people are eager to judge a writing piece from decades or centuries past according to the cultural backdrop and standards of today. While I completely understand wanting to progress past outdated views built on inequality, discrimination, and a complete misunderstanding of certain marginalized groups . . . I think many people should reevaluate how quick they are to shun a whole piece of writing that still contains good messages. Everything is a mixed bag, after all, and it’s important to be able to read something you don’t agree with and set the disagreeable parts aside while still harvesting any insight you can.

There really is a lot of insight to be harvested from this story, if you really mull it over and chew on the ideas it presents–especially for any LGBTQ+ person or ally. It pushes us to confront difficult ideas that might be uncomfortable or eerie to face as Dr. Myas and Alice begin to fuse. It’d be skin-crawling, I’m sure, for many trans people to think of finally shedding the labels associated with their old body as they embraced a body like Alice’s . . . only to have traits like Dr. Myas’ come through anyway. It must be chilling for others to see the varying stages of nonbinary existence come and go past the point where they’d wish to stay, their ideal state presented as something so fleeting, ephemeral . . . unattainable. And it’s probably chilling for other trans men to see a cisgendered man put in a cis woman’s body, and for her traits to push through as well as his . . . poking at the nerve that’s already been twisted by so many people nastily saying things like “If you were AFAB, you’re a woman and you can’t change that.”

At the same time, aspects of it were strangely validating. Yes, I can see how some people would feel distaste towards the way it was presented, or feel uncomfortable at the way Alice’s qualities persisted and embodied the idea that the body sustains its own form and traits no matter who you are. But it’s just as intriguing and validating to read about Dr. Myas’ ego coming through anyway, with his physical traits even transforming Alice’s body–because it reinforces the other side of the coin: he is still himself, even if he’s now plunked into a woman’s body. He still has many of his same mannerisms, and he retains his personality even if some of his tastes or preferences change to match hers. He is not erased by being put in Alice’s body.

Even if you gain the ability to play the piano or lose the ability to use complex scientific machinery, you are still you. The sum is greater than the whole of its parts, and we are more than just our traits which can be changed.

By the end of the last page, I found myself left with more questions than answers regarding the philosophical themes of the story. And I’m sure that was the whole point. Maybe a very dark and ironic point: even after all Dr. Myas’ and Alice’s sacrifices, we still don’t really have the answers he sought with her. Where does the ego, or soul, end and the mind and body begin? How unforgiving or pliable is the line between them?

In the end, this story grabs us all by the shoulders and spins us around to look in a mirror and ask “Who really are you?” And I wonder how many people can give a solid answer. Maybe if I were suddenly placed in a body more closely aligned with what feels right for me, I would lose some of the mental traits or abilities associated with the one I’m in now. But would I care? (Probably not.) Everyone’s answer to questions like these is different.

I think most, if not all of us can agree: we’d still be ourselves if we no longer remembered things we’d learned from scientific research. We’d still be who we are if we had a smaller stature or had weird muscle memories of playing piano, or other things we hadn’t really thought about before. Because after all, the ego concept is all about identity, and identity is unique in definition for everyone. For all its odd framing around the idea, its outdated terminology, and its overly binary presentation of the genders, I feel that An Exchange Of Souls delivers this message solidly and well.

An Exchange of Souls can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.

My name is Desmond Rhae Harris, and I found some fascinating food for thought within Barry Pain’s story. As a writer and artist, I know how it feels to wish for something that you can’t forcibly mold into your exact ideal form–the frustration and the all-consuming desire to get it “right.” I feel for Dr. Myas, despite some of his questionable perspectives. Anyway, my work has been published by Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag, Burning Light Press, and Florida Roots Press. I’m also the Associate Editor / Designer / Illustrator at Starward Shadows eZine. When I’m not working with publications or writing and illustration as a freelancer, I like to go outside for walks at dusk or play music. Video games sometimes even make it on the list, too. You can find out more at TheInkSphere.com.

Must I Wear This Corpse For You?: H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937) by Joe Koch

Let’s start at the end of the story, when the woman is already dead. Not just dead, but self-disinterred, reduced to a mass of “liquescent horror,” a few bones, and a crushed skull. Dental records will identify the skull as belonging to Asenath Waite, the small, dark, witchy woman who seduced and manipulated the narrator’s best friend Edward. She’s one of Lovecraft’s few prominent female characters, and a very striking figure both visually and emotionally according to the other people in the story. Although “The Thing on the Doorstep” owes some conceptual devices to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Asenath Waite seems very unlike Madeline Usher and more a literary descendant of Poe’s Ligeia, with all the romance removed. There’s nothing beautiful about the woman’s demise in Lovecraft, no ecstatic mourning of the beloved dead; only, as in real life, a malodorous heap of unrecognizable remains.

But wait a minute. There’s some sleight of hand at work here. We’re talking about Asenath Waite the way she’s presented early in the story, when in fact Asenath is not really in the story at all. Asenath’s father Ephraim has hijacked her body by magic, locked her mind or soul away in his own aging body, and killed it. All of this happened before the story began. Now Ephraim, from within Asenath’s body, is trying to affect the same scenario with the narrator’s best friend Edward. In fact, Edward and Ephraim (posing as Asenath) are married.

We’re introduced to Asenath as “she” and the pronouns and gendering stick even when, less than halfway through the story, the spirit or mind inhabiting Asenath is recognized as Ephraim by his underground coven. A few paragraphs later, as Edward continues to rant after waking from this involuntary mind exchange with Asenath/Ephraim that has taken his body into the coven’s ceremonial pit of shoggoths, he lays out his suspicions plainly through questions such as “Asenath…is there such a person?” and “Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom?”

I’m struck in re-reading this story how difficult it is to see Asenath as Ephraim when I’m in the thick of the narrative, despite the pointed physical descriptions comparing his/her expression to a wolf, despite clocking frequent, overt parallels between Ephraim and Asenath’s behaviors, and despite the fact that I already know how it’s going to end.

Nothing in the story is kept secret for long, and yet Asenath’s absence eludes me. It’s a testimony to how minds trained to see the world according to binary heteronormative preconceptions cling to this conditioning in knee-jerk fashion. We see what we’ve been taught looks like a woman or a man, and we mentally make a label based on that snap judgment.

Asenath—or the Asenath suit that’s being worn by her father—is referred to as a woman and given predominantly female pronouns throughout the story, even in Edward’s final epistolary confession. Occasionally, Asenath/Ephraim is referred to as “it.” Twice we encounter the construction “he, she…it” as Edward grapples with the knowledge that his wife is not his wife. We see Asenath—who is really Ephraim—only through the narrator Dan’s binary perception and through Edward’s misgendering and denial-ridden reports. The repeated use of incorrect female pronouns applied to the entity that is Ephraim performs a narrative magic trick, making the woman disappear.

Misogyny in early twentieth-century American writing is no surprise, nor is it an unexpected element in Lovecraft. Men are almost exclusively the protagonists of his stories, and women most often appear as names in genealogies or barely mentioned relations with little or no character development or agency. Even in our example, Lovecraft hasn’t given the real Asenath Waite a voice or an active role in determining the fate of her soul, or the uses to which her body is put during her short life and after her death; but I think this story presents an interesting, if unintentional, counter-example of misogyny, despite the “woman in the refrigerator” outcome. Perhaps even because of it. As someone historically mistaken for a woman, it highlights for me some of what’s driving our current cultural arguments about transgender bodies.

Asenath Waite, as shown on the page early on, is a vivid and compelling character. I’d hang out with her. She has the Bohemian, decadent crowd at Miskatonic eating out of her hand. She knows all sorts of dark secrets, winks shamelessly, and leads the occult gatherings rather than being a follower. The narrator Dan finds her repugnant for the same reasons I like her as a modern reader, because she violates Dan’s (and perhaps Lovecraft’s) idea of rigid gender norms. Exhibiting stereotypically male assertiveness, her duality is meant to be uncanny or monstrous, although, writing in 1933, after the sexual freedom of the jazz age, after the women’s suffrage movement had begun, after the founding of Planned Parenthood, Lovecraft was not without positive models of nonconforming women, including his ex-wife. The story requires Asenath be attractive and dynamic enough to seduce Edward and control him for years, as she—or rather he—does.

He, she…it: the binary breaks down as Edward tries to describe how Asenath puts her mind in his body. Except it’s Ephraim in Asenath’s body who is acting upon Edward, acting from within a disguise. The further Edward’s speech moves away from the strict binary and blurs the distinct line between male versus female, the less Dan believes him. Edward denies his own direct experience of reality, too, despite an abundance of evidence. He stays in the torturous relationship for years enduring Ephraim’s mental penetration like a victim of supernatural domestic violence. (Another interpretation is that Edward is gay, and the unique situation facilitates his denial while allowing him a gay marriage. Exploring the implication of a gay love triangle between Dan, Edward, and Ephraim is, however, outside the scope of this essay.) Either way, unable to admit Asenath is really Ephraim, adherence to the heteronormative binary blinds Edward to the facts, hides the villain, and erases Asenath’s true fate as a murder victim.

The pronoun trick works on the reader, using our gender expectations to heighten the story’s impact. It’s interesting that in the real world of contemporary America, some people want to perform—and demand performance of—a similar trick. We see commentators and politicians very upset by nonbinary pronouns, fearful of transgender people who do not fit clearly into rigid biological ideas of male and female. As if we are some sort of uncanny monsters, they seek to control thought and behavior by eliminating words that describe our direct lived experience as nonbinary, gender-questioning, or otherwise gender-fluid people. Why are they so afraid of our words? Our bodies? In life as in the story, let’s ask who this denial of a rich, flexible, and varied language might serve.

In the story, it’s Ephraim. In contemporary America, it’s the people behind numerous bills like North Dakota’s proposed SB2199 that would mandate employers who receive state funding (as well as schools, institutions, and state agencies) to use only male or female pronouns based on DNA testing. The bill states words must fit “the individual’s determined sex at birth, male or female.” Using anything other than state-assigned pronouns, such as using they/them, would incur a fine of $1,500.

This isn’t unique to North Dakota. Rampant across the United States, new laws about the words we can use and how we can use them are clogging up court dockets. Other laws ban books that merely mention anything other than heteronormative gender from libraries and schools. And let’s not even try to figure out what bathroom we’re allowed to use or what team we can play on if we’re nonbinary. In conjunction with laws regulating—and as an outcome of forced detransition, eliminating—transgender bodies, these proposals are medically irresponsible and shockingly repressive. I grew up during the Cold War, when the Soviet “thought police” were supposed to be the bad guys. Rather than dwell on the mystery of what motivates this seemingly anti-American terror of inclusive language and bodily autonomy, let’s return to Ephraim in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” an obsessively gendered story about who controls bodies, how they do it, and what is the goal of such sorcery.

Edward loses control of his body with greater frequency as Ephraim practices inhabiting it. Ephraim believes he needs a white male body and brain to further his magic practice and achieve full power. Eventually, Edward succumbs completely, losing his body to a man masquerading as his wife. His final missive, written with the shaky hand of Asenath’s decaying corpse, calls for Dan to “kill that thing–kill it.”

Shall we call Ephraim a rapist? He fits the horror movie trope of a dangerous man in a dress we’ve been trained to fear and feel disgust for in films like Psycho (1960), Dressed To Kill (1980), and Silence of the Lambs (1991). He doesn’t obtain consent from Edward, who (finally!) fights back, killing the body of Asenath to eliminate Ephraim. But the specter of the murderer or rapist who masquerades as a woman can’t be killed in the story any easier than we can expurgate it from popular imagination. Even though transgender women are more likely to be sexually assaulted or murdered than any other LGBTQ+ group, we’re told by contemporary news media that they are evil men donning a deliberate disguise to sneak into women’s spaces and attack. They’ve created an imaginary bathroom monster, a lurker in the stall, by inverting facts and employing the divisive binary thinking habit that pits women against men and vice versa. Many well-meaning people unwittingly further this narrative.

Ubiquitous divisive humor and dialogues reinforce common heteronormative binary thinking. Jokes about genital size or sexual prowess; dialogues about coping with threats or neediness couched as specific to one gender; reproductive rights conversations excluding every non-woman with a uterus. The same thinking that judges manhood by sexual performance or womanhood by fertility and chest measurements is the soft fascism that says a man can’t have a uterus and a woman can’t have a penis. It’s tied in with eugenicist ideas about race, ethnicity, ability, weight, and so forth that pretend there is one ideal and correct type of body, rather than an infinite number of (beautiful) variations. It’s how Ephraim thinks.

Ephraim is a man stuck inside a woman’s body, but he’s not transgender. Rather, he’s representative of the misconception that bodies must conform to a rigid set of physical standards to be permitted to speak their own language or be seen (alive) in society. The language that traps Edward (and the reader) in complicity with Ephraim solidifies his disguise as Asenath. Wearing a mask is the opposite of being transgender, in which we live authentically, and throw off a wrongly imposed disguise. We experience ourselves as more variable, nuanced, unstructured, or nonbinary than common cultural stereotypes presume possible. I highly recommend it, and hope the government never forces my detransition. Edward and Asenath’s fates show us the result of people coerced into a wrong disguise.

As the patriarch of the Waite family, Ephraim uses vulnerable, female, and non-white bodies to perpetuate his power and avoid death. Edward is described as child-like, dependent, and physically weak, and through scattered bits of history, we get a picture of Asenath that Lovecraft has coded as biracial: half-white, half-Innsmouth hybrid sea creature. She’s held in captivity for her whole life, bred for the purpose of housing his consciousness. The real Asenath screams from behind the door of her locked “padded attic room,” trapped in the wrong body until her death.

Strip away the false veneer of gendered, stolen, and exploited flesh, and we’re really not reading a story about a man stuck in a woman’s body, or a man masquerading as a woman, but about power masquerading opportunistically behind multiple facades; power hiding its true face for the sake of perpetuating systemic control. Ephraim is patriarchy itself, spanning generations and holding power by controlling the bodies of others.

We’re back where we started, at the end of the story with Asenath, a woman reduced to nothing, a thing disintegrating on the doorstep. Her physical, psychic, and textual obliteration indicts Ephraim—and therefore the patriarchy—much more damningly than if she had spoken or survived. We’re meant to remember her. Her name is the last word of the story. It lingers along with the image of her corpse, dead for three months and thrust upon Edward, who is not a man masquerading as a woman, but a man forced to wear a quick-rotting corpse that will kill his soul in disguise.

“The Thing on the Doorstep” can be read for free online at hplovecraft.com.

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Shirley Jackson Award finalist and author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive, their short fiction appears in publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Queer Book of Saints. Joe co-edited the art horror anthology Stories of the Eye and has collaborated with several other authors and poets on short writing projects. He/They. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.

Editor Spotlight: Interview with Lor Gislason

Content Warning
The story that follows may contain graphic violence and gore.
Please go to the very back of the book for more detailed content warnings.
Beware of spoilers.
Content warning for Lor Gislason’s Inside Out (2022)

While H. P. Lovecraft is most often associated with cosmic horror, and famously declared in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that weird fiction is more than the “literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome,” he has also left his slimy, gore-stained fingerprints in the annals of body horror. What is the terror of “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” except the slow recognition of a biological inheritance that cannot be escaped? Or the hideous degradation and transformation that overcomes the Gardner family in “The Colour Out of Space”?

Yet Lovecraft never embraced body horror as we know it today. That is the product of later generations, a new and different breed. Mutation, infection, decay, surgery, puberty, transition—there are untold variations on how flesh may change, and the question is often not so much who or what the individuals were but what are they becoming—what is the experience like—and how do these stories change as our own understanding of biology and medicine continue to advance?

Lor Gislason is the editor of Bound in Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror (2023), and author of works like the body horror novella Inside Out (2022). They were kind enough to answer some of our questions on body horror, cosmic horror, and Lovecraft.

※

How did you get into body horror?

Lor Gislason: I think in a way it’s always been part of my life; I can remember watching Dragon Ball and seeing Goku transform into a giant monkey when I was around 5. I don’t think I had the words for it, or knew of the genre, until my teens and my first viewing of Hellraiser (1987).

Has writing body horror changed how you relate to it?

LG: If anything it’s made me relate to it more, through research and understanding how the body works. Going through a health crisis (and subsequently using it in my writing) also helped me process the experience.

How did you get into Lovecraft and cosmic horror?

LG: I rented a lot of movies as a teen and one of them was Necronomicon (1993), which is not a particularly great movie, but spurred me to look into Lovecraft’s work and other adaptations. I’m a big fan of cosmic horror video games like Dead Space and Bloodborne.

Do you feel that being you (nonbinary, autistic) has shaped your understanding of Lovecraft and approach to body horror and cosmic horror?

LG: Definitely. There are times I feel hyper-aware of my body, and others where I feel completely disconnected from it and while this can be hard to describe it’s been a running theme throughout my writing. My novella Inside Out is not just about becoming a giant pile of flesh (although that does happen) it’s also about how we struggle to connect with other people, especially physically.

Joe Koch wrote that “body horror and cosmic horror stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum”—would you agree?

LG: If we consider how cosmic horror uses the mind as a weapon, a prison, an area of change, then it’s the other side of the coin to body horror. There’s a lot of room to play with those concepts. As Joe put it: “The monster is the body. The hero is the mind” in Lovecraft’s stories, often moving beyond flesh and blood to achieve some higher goal—but our mind is a part of our body, isn’t it? Often they’re seen as separate things. I’m sure it’s just a matter of perspective.

Some of your works like The God Carcass seem to try and bridge the aesthetic between body horror and cosmic horror—what were you going for?

LG: I often go into rabbit holes and one of them that led to The God Carcass was whale falls and how an entire ecosystem, and even organisms that exclusively live off whale carcasses exist, just this massive amount of creation and life exploding from something dead. So what if a entity from another plane fell into the ocean? How would that work? I tried to make it a bit fantastical and dreamlike, it’s a bit different from my usual writing but I’m quite happy with it and to be a part of the Ooze anthology.

Tell us about Cosmic Dyke Patrol.

CDP is my current project, which I pitched as a sort of cosmic ghostbusters novella. It follows a lesbian couple named Harriett and Marcy who investigate entities and accidentally invite a particularly aggressive bear-like creature into our world. It’s a bit silly, very queer and hopefully encapsulates the “fun horror” I love so much.

Do you think there is a future for more stories that try to combine Lovecraft or the Mythos with body horror?

LG: Absolutely. There are a lot of Elder Gods (created by HPL or by others) that use body horror to its full extent. The idea of a being that’s so beyond our comprehension, physically or otherwise, is such a fascinating idea. You could do literally anything with that!

You’ve noted a love for 80s horror movies—does that include Lovecraftian films like Re-Animator (1985)?

LG: Yes! Although I might be a bit more attached to From Beyond (1986), if I’m honest. I’m sure many people know how much I love the colour pink! Underwater (2020) was also great, honestly a bit overlooked when it came out.

How did Bound in Flesh come to be?

LG: This is my favourite story to retell, it’s very “peak internet,” haha. I tweeted something like, oh wouldn’t it be cool if an anthology like this existed? And Max Booth III of Ghoulish Books sent me a DM, saying basically “okay but what if that did exist, would you want to work on it?” It was a joy to work on, and I still feel extremely lucky to have been given the opportunity.

Do you feel that transgender characters are often depicted poorly or negatively in horror fiction?

LG: This is interesting because while some would consider many trans characters in horror as bad representation, or portrayed negatively, many others take pride and strength from those depictions, reclaiming it as part of our history. Like Angela from Sleepaway Camp (1983) is iconic and was meant to be this horrifying reveal, but I know many people who love and relate to her. Likewise, queer-coded villains have been a trope for ages, and embracing these messy, imperfect characters can be really empowering.

In the introduction to Bound in Flesh, you describe these as stories of “transformation, acceptance, growth, and gore”—would you characterize these stories as transpositive tales of horror?

LG: Even though many of the stories have what you’d consider “unhappy endings,” I think they are positive. It’s the writers speaking their truths, as corny as that sounds. Pushing through to the other side, no matter what that brings, it’s very hopeful in my mind. I originally planned this super long introduction, with a lot of reflection on gender and body horror but it felt unnatural in the end, like the book said all it needed to without me rambling on top of it.

Do you feel there is a lot of diversity in the folks writing and reading horror fiction these days?

LG: In some ways, yes, and others, it’s still very much a boys club. I think for a lot of people they just don’t know where to start looking for books by trans authors, or neurodiverse authors, and other marginalised groups. So by having anthologies like Bound In Flesh the hope is we can get the word out there that this does exist and that there is a place for everyone in horror.

What do you see as the future of body horror and cosmic horror?

LG: I think right now there’s a great trend of small, narrative experiences in video games using cosmic/body horror, something that feels very specific to that medium and I hope to see it continue. Developing games is a lot more accessible now too, so the amount and variety of storytellers is expanding. I’d love to work on a game someday.

※

Thank you Lor for answering all of these questions, and for a chance to pick your brains about body horror and cosmic horror! Looking forward to seeing more from you in the future.

For more on Lor Gislason, check out their Linktree.

Bound in Flesh (2023) is available from Ghoulish Books.

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

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

Her Letters To Lovecraft: Jennie K. Plaisier

Further versified contributions are those of Mrs. Jennie M. Kendall and Dr. O. M. Blood. Mrs. Kendall’s ballad is marked by attractive animation and commendable correctness, but Dr. Blood should exercise more care in his use of rhyme and metre.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Sep 1918 in Collected Essays 1.205

She was born Jane Irene Maloney in 1882 (according to her grave marker)—but she was better known throughout her life as Jennie. The daughter of Irish immigrants and raised in Chicago, Jennie was listed as a student in the 1900 Federal census, and the 1910 census gives her profession as a stenographer. Yet beyond her professional duties, Jennie Maloney was a noted amateur journalist involved with the National Amateur Press Association. She was elected as Corresponding Secretary of NAPA in 1905, and in 1908 she served as Historian under Official Editor Frank A. Kendall. In 1911, Jennie and Frank married; they both continued in amateurdom, and the union produced a daughter Betty.

In 1913, Frank Kendall was elected as President of NAPA. Unfortunately, on 23 November 1913, only four months into his term, he died from meningitis. Jennie Kendall was elected to fulfill the remainder of her late husband’s term, incidentally becoming the second female president of NAPA. By the time H. P. Lovecraft joined amateur journalism in 1914, her term would have ended. While raising her child as a single mother, Jennie would continue as an amateur journalist, and that is apparently how Lovecraft first knew her—as Mrs. Jennie Kendall. (See A History of the National Amateur Press Association.)

It is not exactly clear when Lovecraft and Jennie fell into correspondence, though it may have been as early as the 1920s. The Rainbow Vol. II, No. 2 (May 1922) by Sonia H. Greene (ed.) includes a poem “The Distant Forest” by 9-year-old Betty Jane Kendall, and precocious as that young amateur journalist might have been, it was probably her mother that stamped and mailed the poem in when Lovecraft & Greene needed material. No doubt Jennie and Lovecraft read of each other in amateur journals, but if they had any correspondence during this time, it has not come down to us.

In 1920, Jennie remarried to John Plaisier, a schoolteacher, and she took his name, becoming Jennie K. Plaisier. In 1935, Jennie, Lovecraft, and amateur Vincent B. Haggerty were elected to serve as a panel of judges for the awarding of the NAPA laureateships for 1935-1936…and there they ran into the bane of every small organization’s existence: petty politics.

My letter to Mrs. Plaisier was sent to Haggerty for reading & forwarding on Nov. 2; but he seems to have been slow in attending to the matter, since I’ve just had a note from Mrs. P. dated Nov. 6 & containing no sign of his having received my commiseration. Fortunately I had an extra carbon of my letter, which I’ve now sent her. […] Smith’s position is an extremely destructive one. A liberal attitude toward red tape regulations is all that has kept the National—or any organisation—a living institution—indeed, if this quibbling ultra-constitutionalism were retroactive, it would illegalise half our existing laureate awards & wipe out of technical existence the administration of some of our most useful & counterfeit officers! Rigidity is death to progress. I have fought legalism in amateur journalism for 20 years, & certainly don’t want to see it employed today for the gratification of a private grudge!
H. P. Lovecraft to Edward H. Cole, 19 Nov 1935, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 133

Two works in Ralph W. Babcock, Jr.’s amateur journal the Red Rooster (May 1935) were up for a laureateship, but he had made an enemy of fellow-amateur Edwin Hadley Smith. The quarrel was personal, but it played out in amateurdom: Smith brought up an obscure and unused rule in the NAPA constitution in an effort to show that Babcock’s publication with the items in question did not meet the legal definition of an amateur paper, and so were ineligible for any award. Smith wrote to Lovecraft to declare the works invalid; Lovecraft demurred. As Lovecraft put it:

I think I may have a fight on my hands—with our dear old pal Hadley. he has challenged the story & history laureate awards on the ground that they did not appear in a properly published paper—all of this of course being an effort to give Babcock a jolt, since the May Red Rooster is the paper in question. I disapprove of the use of virtually obsolete legal technicalities as adjuncts to private vengeance, hence as Exec. Judge will not give a decision until I have had proof that the original spring edition of the Rooster lacked the normal matter & circulation which would make it a paper. Smith is pretty well riled up about this, & would like to force my resignation if he could. Mrs. Plaisier is on his side, & Haggerty won’t vote because he was laureate judge of history.
H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 13 Dec 1935, O Fortunate Floridian 305

Old Hadley is trying to bulldoze me into giving an early decision in his favour—for it appears that my vote would be decisive. In response, I urbanely tell him to go to hell. Mrs. Plaisier—the chairman of the judges—seems to be in his favour, while Haggerty refuses to act because he was laureate judge of the disputed history entry.
H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 15 Dec 1935, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin et al. 304

Whether Lovecraft told Edwin Hadley Smith to go to hell or not, his letters to Jennie Plaisier were no doubt much more formal and cordial, as untangling the truth of the matter and negotiating the dispute with his fellow judges required an exchange of more than a few letters between Lovecraft, Plaisier, and Haggerty. Eventually, a compromise was reached: Babcock declined the history laureateships, while the other went to Richard Foster for his piece in the Red Rooster.

The final verdict was released in a joint letter by Lovecraft, Plaisier, and Haggerty titled “Report of the Executive Judges” and dated 25 Apr 1936, along with various other bits of business. It was, to put it simply, a busy year, and must have generated a fair bit of correspondence between Lovecraft and Plaisier. Most of this, however, has not come to light. The “Reporter of the Executive Judges” has been reprinted in the Collected Essays volume 1 and the volume of Miscellaneous Letters, but only a part of a single letter from Lovecraft to Plaisier has seen print.

This letter fragment is dated 8 Jul 1936, and deals exclusively with Lovecraft’s politics…and his shift in politics over the course of his life:

Dear J. K. P.:—

[…]

Regarding extra-associational politics—I can sympathize very strongly with you in your state of isolatoin, since my own position is very similar. The background surrounding me (despite some wavering on my aunt’s part in response to my repeated arguments) is solidly old-guard Republican, whereas I myself have been increasingly a left-winger ever since the advent of the depression began to force me into real thought on the subject of economic and political trends.

I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression—and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past. They had been using science whilst I had been using romantic antiquarianism. At last I began to recognise something of the way in which capitalism works—always piling up concentrated wealth and impoverishing the bulk of the population until the strain becomes so intolerable as to force artificial reform. Sparta before Agis and Cleomenes. Rome before the Gracchi and Ceasar. Always the same story. And now accelerated a thousandfold through the unprecedented conditions of mechanised industry. Well—I was converted at last, and in the spring of 1931 took the left-wing side of social and political arguments for the first time in a long life. Nor has there been any retreat. Instead, I have gone even farther toward the left—although totally rejecting the special dogmatisms of pure Marxism, which are certainly founded on definite scientific and philosophical fallacies. I am all for continuous development and revolutions—and it seems to me that the nations with a naturally orderly and liberal tradition have a very fair chance of developing in the proper direction without any cataclysmic upheavals. Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries are far ahead of the United States, but even the latter is coming along despite its ingrained tradition of harsh acquistiveness. So today I am a New Dealer—perfectly conscious of the waste and bungling necessarily connected with experimentation, but convinced that open-minded experiment with all its faults is vastly better than efficient and economical progress toward the wrong goal.

The entire basic philosophy upon which old-time Republicanism is founded is at best a barbarous one, and at present an obsolete and unworkable fallacy. it leads only to increasing stress and ultimate explosion. Laissez-faire economics under present conditions means the permanent displacement of more and more persons from the industrial fabric. it is time that the state adopted general public welfare, rather than the protection of heavy individual profits, as its guiding policy and aim.

It may possibly interest you to see the general formulation of my new position which I prepared in the earlier days of my conversion—hence I am sending a couple of documents which you needn’t read through if they promise boredom. Some of their phases may seem rather out-of-date in 1936, but the general picture of my philosphical orientation still holds good. Pardon the illegible condition of the 1934 newspaper letter—a rough draught of something that was never printed! it is sometimes amusing to show these things to people who knew me in my Tory days, and who still have not kept track of my evolution. Poor George W. Macauley—still a stubborn reactionary—was almost paralysed by the horrible transformation which had come over the old gentleman! No need to hurry about returning the stuff—and no need to read it if it looks excessively dull.

Yrs. most sincerely,
H. P. L.
H. P. Lovecraft to Jennie K. Plaisier, 8 Jul 1936, Letters to Hyman Bradofsky & Others 389-390

These views track with the development of Lovecraft’s politics over the course of his life; whether the subject came up as a result of the dispute of amateur constitutionalism or arose separately—other amateurs had noted the same shift in Lovecraft’s politics, which were very different in the mid-1930s than they had been during his days publishing his amateur journal The Conservative. Whatever the case, it seems clear that their correspondence continued for a little while after their mutual service on the Executive Judgeship was completed. They may have continued writing to one another as late as 1937, for Jennie K. Plaisier’s address is listed in Lovecraft’s 1937 diary (see Lovecraft Annual #6.171).

After Lovecraft’s death, Jennie wrote of their friendship:

I mourn him very much, as we had become very fond of each other during the Executive Judgeship days that you caused us so many gray hairs. I shall miss his letters and his helpfulness a great deal. I have quite a bit of his work on hand that he had sent to me and it may be valuable material. We shared the same political outlook. He was won over to my “modern revolution” theor from an old rock-bottom republicanism and during the last campaign had quite a time with his relatives and friends because of his attitude to the “new Deal.” These are not idle words when I say his passing is a great loss for A.J.
Jennie K. Plaisier to Edwin Hadley Smith, 26 Mar 1937, MSS. Brown University Library

The 1936 letter fragment was first published in Selected Letters 5.279-280, an expanded version with more of the letter was published in Letters to Hyman Bradofsky & Others 389-390.

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

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