“Quest of the Nameless City” (2007) by Tachihara Tōya (立原透耶)

It has been known for a long time, then, that Lovecraft had the same prejudice againt the Japanese as he did againt the Chinese, or African-Americans. […] So what? Mishima Yukio was gay, and Kawabata Yasunari committed suicide after being spurned by the maid. The personal proclivities of literary greats have nothing to do with the quality of their masterpieces.

We Japanese tend to be forgiving of heroes. We feel absolutely no contradiction in being enthralled by the Cthulhu Mythos, and the fact that Lovecraft was prejudiced.
—Asamatsu Ken, foreword to The Dreaming God 2

“Quest of the Nameless City” (2007) by Tachihara Tōya (立原透耶) is a story in The Dreaming God, the fourth and final volume in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series from Kurodahan Press, edited by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健). It is the English-language translation of the 2002 story 苦思楽西遊博 (Kushi Kakusei Yūhaku); the translator was Kathleen Taji.

Journey to the West is one of the classic Chinese novels, comparable to Homer’s Odyssey in Western literature, and has served as inspiration for a vast array of fiction, film, manga, cartoons, etc., including the venerable and popular Dragon Ball saga. Tachihara Tōya may be the first to remix this classic with the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price also notes in the introduction that the story also draws from (or at least strongly parallels) August Derleth’s Trail of Cthulhu serial novel in parts. Most notably, the third chapter (“Sandy’s Story”) echoes a major plot point in “The Black Island” (1951) where the narrating character is affected by the Elder Sign.

The result is a fragment of an epic. Tachihara provides three chapters from three different character perspectives; the full story could be a hundred. A taste of what-might-have-been. The Mythos in “Quest of the Nameless City” is not quite that as Lovecraft or Derleth had written it; the Old Ones are filtered through a different cultural lens, and though we are not given vast details about their place within the cosmology, the story incorporates the Mythos entities into the gestalt as it does all the other inhuman creatures from Journey to the West. As the character Pigsy notes in chapter two:

The world is vast, and there are even manuscripts like the Book of Mountains and Seas, full of Chinese mythology. Thus, I suppose the existence of such fantastic beings is not astonishing in the least.
—Tachihara Tōya, “Quest of the Nameless City” in The Dreaming God 41-42

Initially, one of the key aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos is that it is different, explicitly alien and other to both Christian theology and “typical” horrors like ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies which abounded in the pulp fiction of the time. This was not an ironclad rule if you tiptoed even a little outside the bounds of Lovecraft’s own writing; Robert E. Howard had no qualms about including the occasional vampire in his Conan and Solomon Kane stories, which are tied in to the wider Mythos, and other authors have been more explicit in adding Cthulhu & co. to the kitchensink of contemporary fantasy and horror. This trend was perhaps best emphasized when Dungeons & Dragons added the Cthulhu Mythos to Deities & Demigods (1980), Cthulhu was given stats alongside Japanese and Norse deities and Arthurian and Native American heroes.

What Tachihara is doing in “Quest of the Nameless City,” whether intentionally or just as a side effect of the brilliant idea of combining the Mythos with Journey to the West, is effectively lampshading this tendancy to assimilation. Like any “authentic” mythology, the Cthulhu Mythos is ripe for multiple interpretations, some conflicting, and some adapting the familiar stories into new contexts. There are no contradictions here that cannot be ironed out by another chapter, another gloss, or simply let stand to be enjoyed on their own merits.

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

“Necrophallus” by Makino Osamu (牧野修)

Well, I can tell you one thing: Lovecraft would never have written this! But whether he would have been capable of it, or would have approved it, these questions are quite distinct. And yet it is a Lovecraftian tale; it belongs in this anthology.
—Robert M. Price, foreord to “Necrophallus” in Night Voices, Night Journeys 237

“Necrophallus” (2005) by Makino Osamu (牧野修) is a story in Night Voices, Night Journeys, the first volume in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series from Kurodahan Press, edited by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健). It is the English-language translation of the 2002 story 屍の懐剣 (Shikabane no Nekorufaruso); the translator was Chun Jin.

The name of the story is warning and enticement at once. Necro, death. Phallus, the male sexual organ. Like the Necronomicon, it is a name to conjure with and be repelled by. Readers who see the title and keep reading have committed themselves to the act. Sex and death have always been intimately linked in horror; sex is taboo and transgression, excitement and anticipation. The building blocks of any good horror story. Lovecraft understood this, used it in his fiction—not in any explicit depiction, but by intimation and action; “The Loved Dead” by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft is a tale of necrophilia told from the necrophile’s point of view.

Lovecraft, of course, never lived to learn about Ed Gein, or to see the rise of the slasher film, splatterpunk fiction, torture porn. There was sadism and masochism in the pulps—even in the early Cthulhu Mythos! Robert E. Howard’s bloody flagellation scene in “The Black Stone” was a taste of what was to come in the weird terror pulps; the garish magazines which promised torture, mutilation, strange and terrible surgeries, gruesome injuries…and sex. Naked women, heaving bosoms, strange violations; always implicit in the pulps, because the could not publish the explicit.

Not Lovecraft’s scene.

Makino Osamu, however, brings the splatterpunk mentality to the Cthulhu Mythos. Filmgoers might point to similarities with Audition (オーディション, Ōdishon, 1999), but while there are definite cinematic flourishes to “Necrophallus,” the narrative itself doesn’t hit the same beats. The narrator is a hunter for the limits of human experience; psychologically damaged, sadistic but not in the sense of cruelty but in some profound sociopathic sense. What he meets, when the eponymous Necrophallus appears, is something beyond the limits of mere human sadism.

Which is really the success of “Necrophallus”: to have that moment of Lovecraftian realization, of the smallness of human endeavor, embedded in and expressed through the worldview of a violent, gory psychosexual narrative. There’s no humor to leaven the horror, as is the case in Edward Lee’s “Hardcore Lovecraft” line; no refuge in outrageousness. And, for that matter, not really much in the way of titillation or moral. The protagonist is a monster; if the reader feels any sympathy for them at the end, it is only because they are a human monster, whose appetites have led them into the clutches of something so much worse.

Like most such extreme horror, when taken out of context and without having gone through the narrative the imagery can approach the ridiculous…but then the surreality of the scene is the point. The idea of having arrived at some new state through the bloody and painful process is akin to birth, and once through the other side the narrator is transformed and ready for the final revelations.

Chī-chan rubs its dangling tentacles against my own. They make a sound like someone slurping their spaghetti. Not to compare with being dismembered by the Necrophallus, but such mingling of entrails also holds something like the remnants of pleasure.
—Makino Osamu, “Necrophallus” in Night Voices, Night Journeys 253

Unlike “She Flows” by Takeuchi Yoshikazu (竹内義和), “Necrophallus” has the minimum of explicit Mythos connections; Yuggoth is invoked by name, while At the Mountains of Madness and Miskatonic University are hinted at. It could be cataloged in the next edition of the Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, stats could be provided for the Necrophallus in some module of the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game without anyone blinking an eye.

It doesn’t really need that, however. The story could have stood on its own without that, being Lovecraftian without being explicitly Mythos. Which is probably the real testament to what Makino Osamu has achieved. Whether or not you like the story, with its sexually explicit scenes and bloody body horror, “Necrophallus” has successfully adapted elements of Lovecraft’s style of culminating revelations to a very different mode of fiction. That in itself is an achievement.

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

“She Flows” by Takeuchi Yoshikazu (竹内義和)

I told him I saw no need to broaden, i.e., to dilute, my understanding of “Lovecraftian.” […] I realize that genres grow and develop by an incremenetal process of transgressions of inherited genre conventions. Thus it is no crime to do something different and still call it “Lovecraftian.” What passes for Lovecraftian tomorrow may seem quite different from what the term denotes today. But I can’t pretend to see how you get there from here.
—Robert M. Price, foreword to “She Flows,” Straight to Darkness 193-194

“She Flows” (2006) by Takeuchi Yoshikazu (竹内義和) was published in the third volume in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series from Kurodahan Press, edited by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健). It is the English-language translation of the 2002 story 清・少女 (Se Shojō); the translator was Nora Stevens Heath.

The Mythos as a concept is a struggle for definition. What makes a Mythos tale? Does it have to use specific words, deliberate tie-ins? What are the minimal requirements? The status of “Mother of Serpents” (1936) by Robert Bloch as a Mythos story hangs on a single word. “Hypothetical Materfamilias” (1994) by Adèle Olivia Gladwell is a Lovecraftian tale with three. “Red Goat, Black Goat” (2010) by Nadia Bulkin has none, though we recognize the shadow of Shub-Niggurath without ever reading the name of the Black Goat of the Woods. Does any story become a Mythos story if it includes the Necronomicon? Can a story be Mythos but not Lovecraftian, if it uses the right words but in a vary un-Lovecraftian way?

Rhetorical questions. There is no set canon to the Mythos, no strict definition as to what is or is not Lovecraftian. Every individual carries a canon in their head, maybe multiple canons. You the reader decide whether a story is Mythos or Lovecraftian to you. Don’t let anyone else decide for you.

“She Flows” is challenging in this regard. There are, as Robert M. Price notes in his foreword, no explicit connections to the Mythos. The implicit connections are filtered through what feels like a different cultural lens: compensated dating, alcoholic parents, abusive parents, depression. Two girls with eyes a little too wide apart.

People with monstrous faces, long red tongues.

The reader has to make their own connections. Takeuchi’s approach is showing more than telling. Never says “Deep One,” or “Innsmouth.” But they write:

My theme is the ocean.

All I sing are songs about the ocean. You know that folksong, “My Bonnie lies over the ocean”? I liked that one. I remember my dad always used to sing it softly into my ear when I was little.

So maybe that’s why all the songs I write are about the ocean.
—Takeuchi Yoshikazu, “She Flows,” Straight to Darkness 206

Where does the reader’s mind go? A European folksong. A mother who hates her daughter’s face. Was her father a Deep One…or a Caucasian? It’s a story about the ambiguity. Reading between the lines. The reader bringing their own understanding to complete the story. Robert M. Price in his foreword wondered if this was a Deep One story; couldn’t quite make up his mind because there is nothing definite there.

Yet in context, this is a story in a Mythos anthology. Had it been placed in an anthology of yōkai stories, would it have been received differently? It would not be difficult to see these creatures as some form of yōkai, or as some delusion of a mind unhinged by child abuse. The story is weaponized ambiguity. It cuts those who want it to mean more than what it is, who want it to connect to something larger than itself.

Is “She Flows” Lovecraftian? It is if you want it to be.

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

“The Acolytes” (1946) by Lilith Lorraine

The Elder Ones are stirring as the red
Stallions of chaos champ their bits with rage;
And they have sent their messengers ahead
Proud with the knowledge of their alienage.

They walk apart from men, the Acolytes,
By stagnant pools and rotting sepulchers,
Whispering of dark, delirious delights,
As young gods die among their worshippers.

They dream of dim dimensions where the towers
Of Yuggoth pierce the decomposing dome
Of skies where dead stars float like evil flowers
Afloat on tideless seas of poisoned foam.

Black tapers glow on many a ruined shrine,
The patterns coalesce – the good, the bad –
The old familiar stars no longer shine –
And I – and I – am curiously glad.
—Lilith Lorraine, “The Acolytes” in The Acolyte (Spring 1946)

Mary Maude Wright (née Dunn) wrote under a number of pseudonyms, at least three of them masculine. She wrote pulp fiction for some of the same magazines as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, but among early science fiction fandom she had her greatest esteem as a poet, for she was prolific and skilled. As a correspondent of August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith, like Margaret St. Clair, she was on the fringes of the Weird Tales circle. She was likewise associated with The Acolyte, Francis T. Laney’s prominent 1940s fanzine devoted to Lovecraft and his contemporaries, sharing space with Virginia “Nanek” Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Jr., E. Hoffmann Price and other pulp fans and professional pulpsters.

Sgt. R. A. HOFFMAN. Acolyte art editor, reports from “Somewhere in Tex- Texas” on his visit to the home of Lilith Lorraine, noted poet:

…I Visited San Antonio, which I found to be a primitive, degenerate town, and telephoned Lilith Lorraine, mentioning that CAS had insisted I look her up… She and her husband met me in their car, and drove me out to their Shrine (Avalon Poetry Shrine. — eds.). As we entered the grounds, I heard the barking of what seemed to be myriad dogs, though it turned out to be only three— two of them Russian wolf and the other a crossbreed between Russian wolf and spitz. All were beautiful creatures and very friendly. Inside I was startled to find a veritable menagerie. A large parrot was quietly perched inside its huge cage which sat on the floor, and two cats were snarling at each other. They also have a monkey, but it was asleep in bed at the time, though later she brought it out.

Miss Lorraine is a most amazing person, and going out there was a most fascinating adventure. She and her husband have been married 33 years, but she says she is all the time receiving love letters from strangers. She prefers her pen-name so much that even her husband calls her Miss Lorraine sometimes! They are both native Texans, and she is complete with drawl and all. She has a charming personality and a fine sense of humor.

I had only 2 1/2 hours before my bus, and every minute was spent in incessant conversation or in listening to Lilith read us some of her verse. She read me selections from her then as yet unpublished book The Day of Judgement (Banner Press, 1944), and I was completely caught in her spell, totally swept away with them. She showed me the shrine itself, and the sunken garden, though unfortunately it was late at night, and the floodlights did not give the proper perspective we would have desired….Miss Lorraine thinks CAS the finest American poet since Poe….

Lilith Lorraine’s previous poems in The Acolyte were “On Walking in the Tomb” (Fall 1943) and “Black Cathedrals” (Spring 1944), but “The Acolytes” was a little different. It came in the final issue (#14) of the ‘zine, and is a tribute to those who contributed to the important little magazine…those who, through their efforts kept interest in H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard going after their death, who began the study of their work and the creation of original fiction and poetry of the Mythos.

The last lines of the poem are strangely appropriate; evocative of Lovecraft and perhaps Robert W. Chambers’. The Acolyte was extinct with this issue, but the Acolytes, that first post-Lovecraft generation of fans and scholars survived and flourished. The stars were right…and Lilith Lorraine was there, to capture a moment in verse.

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

“A Night at Yuan-Su” (2005) by Nanjo Takenori (南條竹則)

My heart is gently warmed, in particular, by the many works left by an obscure writer who lived in Providence in the early twentieth century. when I read his work, I am strangely suffused with warmth, as though I have found a friend from beyond the seas.
—“A Night at Yuan-Su,” Inverted Kingdom: Lairs of the Hidden Gods Vol. Two 279

“A Night at Yuan-Su” (2005) by Nanjō Takenori (南條竹則) was published in the second volume in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series from Kurodahan Press, edited by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健). It is the English-language translation of the 2002 story ユアン・スーの一夜 (Yuan Sū no Yoru); the translator was Usha Jayaraman.

In his letters, H. P. Lovecraft decried the loss of old buildings, old ways of life. He was not a Luddite, but his sense of aesthetics was tied to antique styles, and he despaired when an old block of buildings was torn down to make way for something new, as a piece of the past was lost. In this sense, he felt a stranger in his own century. Some of these sentiments are apparent in his fiction, in stories like “He” and “The Outsider.” The idea is expressed most succinctly in sonnet XXX of the Fungi from Yuggoth cycle, “Background”:

I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,

In this brief tale, Nanjō Takenori sketches the story of a different outsider, thousands of miles away, lamenting the slow loss of historic Tokyo. There are nods to Lovecraft here and there—and a certain kind of humor. The narrator’s deprecation of human beings could almost have turned into one of Lovecraft’s rants about immigrants, the new people displacing the old, but stops short; “A Night at Yuan-Su” is not “The Street” or any other kind of racist fable. It is, ultimately, about a lonely creature out for a drink and a bit of quiet companionship.

This is where the narrative takes a turn, from the atmospheric descriptions of Yuan-Su (really Harajuku in Tokyo), its old buildings torn down to make way for housing developments, to the more fantastic. Reminiscences of a bar named HE, where Imhotep serves araq to an odd clientele. Odd reactions, fragments of names. Unlike Lovecraft’s eponymous Outsider, there is no final revelation in the story…but there is still that peculiar sense of humor. Earlier in the tale, the nameless narrator describes the evil spell of Betelgeuse, the red star, has on them. At the end, finally settling down with a beer and a bowl of tofu, they are thwarted by a shot of ergoutou (Chinese sorghum liquor)—one of the popular brands of which is Red Star.

Given the setting, I almost suspect there are parts of the joke I’m missing. Perhaps the narrator’s particular attributes reflect some specific species of yōkai which Japanese readers might be more familiar with; perhaps the fragmentary names of bars contain more half-hidden meanings for those familiar with Mandarin and Japanese. Whether this is the case or not, doesn’t really matter for the enjoyment of the story. It’s a mood piece, a snapshot of a night, a moment, an attitude. We have all been outsiders, at times; there’s an empathy there for those who desire simple comforts which are then denied.

Never again will I go into that dirty town. Not even on a bright, moonlit night! I have no need to. If my loneliness gets the better of me, if I feel like visiting a friend, I can always go to Celephaïs, the city of dreams, wrapt in its golden aura…
—”A Night at Yuan-Su,” Inverted Kingdom: Lairs of the Hidden Gods Vol. Two 285

In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
—“The Outsider”

The end of “A Night at Yuan-Su” is curiously ambiguous. Does the nameless narrator mean literally that they will go to Celephaïs, or is that a poetic statement to refer to diving once more into Lovecraft’s fiction, finding comfort in the old familiar tales? It can be read either way; nothing the narrator says or does up to this point is explicitly supernatural. Whether they are a human recluse or something else is left up to the reader—and many readers will want to believe in the stranger, more fantastic option. It is a meaner, uglier world that doesn’t allow for a bar named HE to stand on some corner of Harajuku, where exiles from fantastic lands can sip anise-flavored liquors with their collars turned up and their big hats dipped low over their faces, speaking of distant planets and the depths of the sea.

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

“Mother of Serpents” (1936) by Robert Bloch

Let me add that I got a comparable kick out of “Mother of Serpents”—whose Haitian atmosphere is convincing, & whose climax is magnificently clever, powerful, & unexpected.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, 3 Dec 1936, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 179

Voodoo—whether it be Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo, rootwork, Obeah, or any other name for the syncretic practices derived from indigenous religions by African slaves in the New World—has an odd place in the Cthulhu Mythos. H. P. Lovecraft wrote very little about it; in all of his fiction, there are only two explicit references to voodoo of any sort:

[…] the one known scandal of my immediate forbears—the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls” (1924)

Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. […] The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928)

The sect in “The Call of Cthulhu” turns out to not be connected with voodoo at all, but both references are extremely vague on the details. Much the same could be said of “Medusa’s Coil” (written 1930), which does not feature voodoo explicitly, but includes “wrinkled Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witch-woman” who provides the connection between Africa and the American South.

The vagueness is perhaps as it should be: Lovecraft was fairly ignorant on the subject of voodoo, as were most in the United States in the early 20th century. Interest in Haitian Vodou increased during the long United States occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). This experience provided the inspiration and raw material for Arthur J. Burks and other future pulp writers to spin wild tales of curses, cannibals, and human sacrifice; writer William Seabrook lived in Haiti for a period and investigated it, his book The Magic Island (1929) and its account of zombies stirred the American imagination, with Weird Tales writers such as Seabury Quinn and August Derleth quickly borrowing his erudition for stories like “The Corpse Master” (Weird Tales July 1929) and “The House in the Magnolias” (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror June 1932). For more on this line, see Zombies from the Pulps! (2014).

Lovecraft read The Magic Island in 1931, while visiting Rev. Henry S. Whitehead in Florida. (Letters to F. Lee Baldwin &c. 195) Whitehead had spent summers in the U. S. Virgin Islands, which had been sold to the United States in 1917, and penned tales and articles for the pulps based on the stories of “Obi” and “Jumbees” he encountered.

JnSlHJt — From *The Letters of Henry S. Whitehead* (1942)

After Lovecraft read The Magic Island, references to voodoo evaporate from his stories, although there are occasional references in his letters. Knowledge, in this case, may have killed the mystery that voodoo had for Lovecraft; there is no evidence he ever read Zora Neale Hurston or any other anthropologist on the subject, and there is a notable absence of reference to voodoo stories in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”—which he had initially written and published before reading The Magic Island, but which remained without reference to African-American authors or voodoo tales as supernatural fiction even in the later revised and expanded versions.

There was always a racial element as well.

Ordinarily voodoo & Yogi stuff leaves me cold, for I can’t feel enough closeness to savage or other non-Caucasian magic.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 3 Sep 1931, Letters to J. Vernon Shea &c. 45

Curious that your ghost ideas in youth excluded the Indian while including the negro. For my part, though, I can’t feel much weirdness in connexion with any but the white race—so that nigger voodoo stories very largely leave me cold.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 30 Oct 1931, A Means to Freedom 1.231

The racial aspect has much to do with prevailing American attitudes about Haiti and black religion in general. Colonialist attitudes remained firmly in place in much of the United States, to the point where Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were shocked to hear of interracial marriages in the Virgin Islands from Whitehead. In reviewing August Derleth’s voodoo story “The House in the Magnolias,” Lovecraft wrote to his friend:

[…] you have the woman describe herself & family as Haitian, which conclusively implies nigger blood. There are no pure white Haitians. White persons living in Haiti are not citizens, & always refer to themselves in terms of their original nationalities—French, American, Spanish, or whatever they may be. The old French Creoles were wholly extirpated—murdered or exiled—at the beginning of the 19th century.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 9 Sep 1931, Essential Solitude 1.376

Which leads eventually to Robert Bloch’s “Mother of Serpents” (Weird Tales Dec 1936). Nothing much remains as to the genesis of this short story; there is no evidence that Lovecraft had a hand in it, or even saw it before publication. Far from Bloch’s mature work, this is a potboiler that goes for the jugular of Haitian racial and cultural stereotypes and never lets it go.

There were no happy blacks in Haiti then. They had known too much of torture and death; the carefree life of the West Indian neighbors was utterly alien to these slaves and descendants of slaves. A strange mixture of races flourished; fierce tribesmen from Ashanti, Damballah, and the Guinea Coast; sullen Caribs; dusky offspring of renegade Frenchmen; bastard admixtures of Spanish, Negro, and Indian blood. Sly, treacherous half-breeds and mulattos ruled the coast, but there were even worse dwellers in the hills behind.
—Robert Bloch, “Mother of Serpents”

Essentially a conte cruel with voodoo trappings and a supernatural denouement, much of the atmosphere of “Mother of Serpents” is built up in these broad strokes and fine details; Haiti is described as the epitome of racial tensions, black magic, and vice with all the care that Clark Ashton Smith would give to describing an island of necromancers in the far-flung future of Zothique. The description is half-erudite; it’s clear that Bloch was using Seabrook or some other sources for a few of the basic facts on Haiti (such as the legend that Henri Christophe committed suicide with a silver bullet), but it is equally obvious that he was inventing little horrible details left and right. Every character is a stereotype, and there are no heroes. The voodoo-inflected president—keeping in mind this was nearly two decades before the reign of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier—is (literally) a bastard, a criminal, a “black Machiavelli” who enriches himself at the expense of the country…and what is worse in his mother’s eyes, he sullies his black heritage by marrying a mixed-race woman.

Trying to unpack all the racial insinuations in this short story would take longer than the story itself, and wouldn’t achieve much. How much of this claptrap Bloch actually believed is debatable; it’s pure pulp pandering. The Mythos connection is a slim one:

The Snake-God is the real deity of the obeah cults. The blacks worshipped the Serpent in Dahomey and Senegal from time immemorial. They venerate the reptiles in a curious way, and there is some obscure linkage between the Snake and the crescent moon. Curious, isn’t it—this serpent superstition? The garden of Eden had its tempter, and the Bible tells of Moses and his staff of snakes. The Egyptians revered Set, and the ancient Hindoos had a cobra god. It seems to be general throughout the world—the kindred hatred and reverence of serpents. Always they seem to be worshipped as creatures of evil. Our own American Indians believed in Yig, and Aztec myths follow the pattern.
—Robert Bloch, “Mother of Serpents”

Damballah (in different spellings) is one of the principal loa in Haitian Vodou, and is depicted as a snake. The Egyptian god Set (Seth, Setekh, etc.) is not depicted as a serpent; possibly Bloch was making an error and remembering Robert E. Howard’s Stygian snake-deity Set from the Conan tales; although Bloch did not like Conan. Yig was the creation of H. P. Lovecraft, and appeared in “The Curse of Yig” (1929) and “The Mound” (1940), published as by Zealia Brown Reed Bishop; Lovecraft might have sent Bloch the manuscript for the latter, or perhaps Bloch was only referencing “The Curse of Yig.” In any event, the inclusion of Yig among the snake-deities must have been Bloch’s tip of the hat to Lovecraft.

“Mother of Serpents” barely qualifies as a Mythos tale. Despite being reprinted a number of times, it has not been included in any of the collections of Bloch’s Mythos fiction, and has only been reprinted in a single Mythos anthology: Il terrore di Cthulhu (1968). It is often forgotten today—a relic of Bloch’s youth, when he was still trying to find his feet in the publishing game, a few months before the death of H. P. Lovecraft and a full decade before Psycho (1959).

Voodoo, rootwork, and other syncretic religions of the Americas continue to be an element in the Cthulhu Mythos; this is especially true for roleplaying games, where occupations like “Conjure Woman” are part of Harlem Unbound and rules for voodoo magic in Secrets of New Orleans. Individual depictions run from Hollywood tropes to efforts at accurate ethnographic representation. with so little written about voodoo and how and where it fits into the Mythos, at least from Lovecraft, writers are free to indulge their imagination—and do. Some of them, such as Robert Bloch, let themselves lean in too far on the pulp stereotypes and racism both implicit and explicit in the early depictions of Haiti and Vodou.

“Mother of Serpents” can be read online.

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

“Night Voices, Night Journeys” (2005) by Inoue Masahiko (井上雅彦)

Outstanding stories always leave the reader in silence.

But one very special type of outstanding story, after silencing them, stimulates them into furious action. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
—Asamatsu Ken (朝松健), foreword to Night Voices, Night Journeys 2

“Night Voices, Night Journeys” (2005) by Inoue Masahiko (井上雅彦) is the title story of the first volume in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series from Kurodahan Press, edited by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健). It is the English-language translation of the 2002 story 夜の聲夜の旅 (Yoru no Koe, Yoru no Tabi); the translator was Edward Lipsett.

This is a story about revelation. In Shanghai, the femme fatale Azie is the plaything of her master, the last in a long line of those who possess her. Yet this is not a story about human trafficking or sex slavery. That is the frame of it, the red herring. Onion layers of truth are peeled back, one at a time, bandaids ripped off as the reader starts to understand what is actually going on…and when you finally get it, when the realization of who and what “Azie” is finally comes together, there’s a desire to go back from the beginning and read it again.

At the same time, this is also a story about how images translate across cultures, in particular how certain images of the Cthulhu Mythos have been interpreted and popularized in Japan.

Lovingly, those fingers toyed with her ear.

Those fingertips, moving so skillfully, soothed along the perfectly-sculpted rim of her ear, cupping; the trace of a fingernail. […] The rhythm of his fingers. She lay on the bench seat, facing upward, body stretched out to him. To his fingers. His incessant, gentle, ravenous fingers.

Of course, the fingers would love not only her ear. He would surely walk them elsewhere. From her ear, on down, to other parts. those unique fingertips, slick with saliva pungent with the scent of myrrh, would glide from that other place to yet another spot, rich in so many secrets, never ceasing their mysterious dance.
—Inoue Masahiko (井上雅彦), Night Voices, Night Journeys 181

ED2Book — *Necronomicon Ex Mortis,* **The** **Evil Dead 2** (1987)

H. P. Lovecraft first mentioned the Necronomicon in his short story “The Hound” (1924). Although given little description there, it is in good company alongside:

A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.

This was the beginning of the Necronomicon‘s association with anthropodermic bibliopegy and the strange and varied library of Mythos tomes which continues on even today. While Lovecraft himself did not bind it in human leather, other creators did, and the idea was given visual form in the Evil Dead franchise as a series of props that still possessed discernible human features on cover—including a distorted face on the front cover and an ear on the back cover.

The films in the Evil Dead series made their way to Japan. The image of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis became strongly associated with visual representation of the Necronomcion in various Japanese Mythos artwork, most recently appearing as the inspiration for the volume in Tanabe Gou (田辺剛) in his adaptation of “The Hound”:

DI9yrTDXcAE0IO5 — Excerpt from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories by Tanabe Gou

It is a fine point as to whether or not “Azia” takes the form of a literal woman in Inoue Masahiko’s story; the prose often deliberately obscures the details from the unknowing reader until practically the end. The idea of the Al Azif becoming a nubile female was a major conceit of the series Demonbane (デモンベイン, 2003), but “Night Visions, Night Journeys” predates that work, and the approach is much more subtle. “Azia” is in many senses an object, the reader gets her view but she does practically nothing, being utterly passive, something to be possessed by different masters.

It is in miniature a history of the Necronomicon in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, from the view of the Necronomicon, and that is fantastic enough when the realization hits, but even more fantastic when the reader sees how cleverly and carefully the work was done. For example, in the story when it is written:

She had donned an Islamic robe for him, plucking the Egyptian qanoon.
—Inoue Masahiko (井上雅彦), Night Voices, Night Journeys 196-197

Is a reference to:

Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”

That is only brushing the surface of things; “Night Voices, Night Journeys” is a tremendously fun story for fans of the Mythos, with many more references both subtle and explicit. The reader’s sympathies lie with “Azia” (or “Nekkie” as the others call her), who is innocent of the uses that her various “Masters” put her secrets to, yet is forced to witness every evil end, her skin absorbing the spilled blood. It’s imagery that translates very well, especially if you’re familiar with the sources being drawn from—but the story is much more than a nostalgic retread through the pages of Lovecraft.

There is a scene at the end where “Azia” faces an audience—and that is us, the readers.

“They’re your fans. They love you.”

“But… those horrible faces…” she said, shivering. “They’re all my sacrifices.”

“No, your recipients. The recipients of your saga,” he corrected.
—Inoue Masahiko (井上雅彦), Night Voices, Night Journeys 200-201

How could it be otherwise? The Mythos has always been about reader participation; the reader always brings their prior knowledge of the Mythos with them to each new story they read, building their own canon, putting together pieces of the puzzle. For readers who have never read “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the reference to Innsmouth in “The Thing on the Doorstep” is meaningless—as may be the reference to the limousine driver from the port town in “Night Voices, Night Journeys.” To read about the Mythos and play the game of connections is to be a part of it, whether or not the reader ever creates anything to expand on it themselves.

If there’s a criticism with “Night Voices, Night Journeys,” it’s that certain absences in representation are more apparent. Lovecraft never had any female characters in possession of the Necronomicon, so none of the “Masters” in the book are female. There are in fact no other female characters in the story, aside from the brief passage where the books whisper to each other on the shelves. The gendered perspective of “Azia” as both female and passive and sensual might be interpreted as borrowing on sexist tropes, although in this case that appears to be entirely incidental. A byproduct of the raw material for the story rather than any deliberate statement being made by the author.

Which is certainly true for many other Mythos stories as well. Still, it would be interesting to see how “Azia” would take to having a Mistress caress her instead of a Master—or if there was some fundamental difference in how a woman might use and interpret the Necronomicon. But that would be a different story altogether; “Night Voices, Night Journeys” is about the way “Azia,” simply by existing, twists those around her…and it is fascinating and fun.

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

Editor Spotlight: Interview with Carrie Cuinn

I’ll admit that when I first put out the call for submissions, Cthulhurotica seemed to most people like it would be a collection of literary tentacle porn. I got stories that introduced a lovely setting but spent the next two thousand words having sex all over it. I got writers who wanted to take a gory horror story they’d written for something else, slap “Innsmouth” over the town’s “Welcome to . . .” sign, and call it Lovecraftian. I got potential readers telling me they couldn’t imagine “Lovecraft” and “Erotica” in the same sentence, and never (ever!) wanted to see my book in print.
—Carrie Cuinn, introduction to Cthulhurotica (2010) 5

The arrival of Cthulhurotica (2010, Dagan Books) shook a few foundations. The Cthulhu Mythos was no stranger to erotic fiction; individual stories and novels had appeared sporadically since at least The Erotic Spectacles (1971), and there are numerous examples of pornographic comics and erotic artwork dealing with the Mythos. Collected works had been attempted, The Shub-Niggurath Cycle (1994) and Eldritch Blue: Love & Sex in the Cthulhu Mythos (2004, Lindsfarne Press). Cthulhu Sex magazine (1998-2006) had a provacative title, though it had little actual Cthulhu sex in its pages.

What set Cthulhurotica apart from the rest was a matter of approach. It was not the staid combination of sexually explicit (and mostly heterosexual) pastiche where pieces were buttressed by explanations and analysis, not an exercise in gross-out gore or cheap titillation along the lines of the Hot Blood series. Cthulhurotica is sex-positive erotic fiction which runs the gamut from Mythos-flavored sex comedy to erotic Lovecraftian horror; the writers and their point of view characters run the spectrum of gender and sexuality. Such diversity in a Mythos anthology was, and to a degree is, atypical.

The compilation and publishing of Cthulhurotica is testament to the hard work and vision of editor Carrie Cuinn. Since she is best able to speak as to her motivations and how Cthulhurotica came about, she has been kind enough to answer some questions about herself as a Mythos writer and her experience editing Cthulhurotica:

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How did you get into Lovecraft and the Mythos?

Carrie Cuinn: I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on. My mom loved horror and we both loved the library; I was probably too young when I started reading Stephen King, but by the time I was in middle school I was spending hours in the stacks each week, looking for new (to me) writers. I found Lovecraft and from there Derleth and Bloch and Howard and then into pulp fiction magazines which got me into science fiction… His stories helped introduce me to the greater world of genre fiction that still captivates me today.

How do you feel that being you (female, bisexual, deaf, a mother) has shaped your understanding of Lovecraft and approach to the Mythos?

CC: The most obvious thing that struck me as a kid was seeing all the ways I wasn’t in Lovecraft’s stories. Even in classic science fiction stories where “men were men” and women were mostly decorative, there were a few characters I could identify with. Heinlein has a ton of flaws and his female characters aren’t usually well-rounded, but at least he seemed to actually like women, you know? Lovecraft saw a very specific type of straight white male as the protagonist for his stories, usually reacting to both cosmic horror and the horror of living in a world where immigrants had jobs and women had opinions. I didn’t get the impression he would have considered me anything other than background scenery, if he noticed me at all.

As I got older, it only got worse: if I’d been quiet, straight, unhappily married but mostly consigned to keeping my head down and doing housework, Lovecraft might have only considered me ugly and useless. Everything I ended up being as an adult? I’d have been a minor monster in his eyes. But like so many readers who grow up not seeing themselves in the books they read, I had to learn to appreciate fiction in pieces, knowing if I stuck to only Lovecraft’s interpretation there wouldn’t be a place for me there.

What made you decide to edit an anthology of Mythos fiction?

CC: I wanted more of Lovecraft’s kind of fiction, where humans react to the immensity of finding out the unimaginable was both real and uncaring, but without the racism and misogyny. I wanted what he started, just more of the world he built, not less. Luckily, in addition to being a writer I was also a big gamer. I started playing D&D in 6th grade and fell in love. It was a different kind of storytelling, where you could make a place for yourself no matter who you were. Being yourself wasn’t subversive, it was encouraged. That was the point of role-playing games! You decide who you are within the structure of that fictional universe.

When I was about 19, I got a chance to play Call of Cthulhu with some friends. Finally, I could see people like me considering the possibilities of a Mythos with us in it. If Innsmouth were a real place, of course there’d be complex and interesting women living there. Queer people and people of color would be living their lives, working, struggling, loving, and being a part of the community. They’d all have to be affected by the monstrous events taking place around them too. I wanted to tell their stories.

Why focus on sex and sexuality in the Mythos, though?

CC: I thought about doing something like this anthology for about 15 years. I’d previously worked on an erotic fiction magazine when I was living in San Francisco, and I’d even drawn up an outline for a collection of Mythos-related fiction as an author, but the feedback I got wasn’t encouraging. I wanted to write stories where sex was good, everyone enjoyed themselves, and the characters were both a) adults, and b) fully consenting. For some reason, guys I knew who considered themselves hardcore Lovecraft fans didn’t want to see those kinds of stories… I put the idea aside, but I never forgot it.

If we all deserve a chance to exist in the world—which seems obvious to me but is still a point of contention for too many folks—then we also all deserve a chance to be healthy and happy. I get that it’s an appropriate topic for exploration in horror and that’s fine with me but sex is a nuanced part of many people’s lives; if it’s only a punishment, or an act of horror, for the women and queer people in your stories, then the story isn’t really inclusive. I wanted to see it alongside the horror, instead of only victimizing people.

What made you think the world was ready for Cthulhurotica? Do you think it found an audience?

CC: Fast forward to 2010, and I’d just started writing fiction again after a lot of changes in my life. I went to college, had my son, moved across the country. I joined Twitter, and found myself in this community of writers who were starting to explore the overlap between sex and horror in interesting ways. I even wrote for an anthology of zombie sex stories. There was still far too much straight-male-fantasy sexual violence, and a lot of the really intriguing ideas were reduced to joking tweets, but at least the field was expanding. Readers were looking for new perspectives. Suddenly this idea I’d had forever seemed possible. So I jumped on it.

Initially people treated Cthulhurotica like a bit of a joke too—it was even featured on Geek & Sundry’s Vaginal Fantasy show, which mostly reviewed books they thought (from the cover and description) would be ridiculous. Instead, they actually liked a lot of the stories, and readers took it from there.

Did you do any research and reading into previous works like Eldritch Blue: Love & Sex in the Cthulhu Mythos or Cthulhu Sex Magazine before starting your own anthology?

CC: I looked into both of those, and a whole lot of fanfiction. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. It turns out that before Cthulhurotica, when time you put “sex” and “Mythos” together, you usually got stories of (at best) straight men saving white women from monsters and then getting sex, or (far too often) monsters raping women. That wasn’t my idea of a good time.

I know we all have different tastes when it comes to a complex idea like erotica, so I didn’t want to replace those works, and I’m not suggesting there’s nothing of value in what came before Cthulhurotica. I wanted to give readers more options.

Cthulhurotica has a relatively high percentage of female authors, some of the stories include homosexual or bisexual views, and most of the authors were relatively unknown. As an editor, did you specifically seek out different voices than typical for Mythos anthologies at this time?

CC: The goal of the anthology was to show the Mythos through the lens of those who were left out of the original. This meant actively seeking stories where the women were strong and useful and good, queer people and people of color weren’t the monsters but the protagonists. And of course, satisfying sex, because we all deserve that. I was open to submissions from any author, but as it happens, most of the writers who understood what I was looking for were women.

Was it difficult to find writers and stories that struck the right tone of Lovecraftian erotic horror or did you have more submissions than you could use?

CC: It was definitely harder than I expected. At least 90% of the submissions misunderstood “erotica” as simply “sex.” Erotica certainly includes all kinds of sex acts, but the goal of it is to excite you into imagining that sort of fun for yourself. Simply putting sex on the page doesn’t make it erotica. I said over and over again in the submission guidelines, in interviews, that I wanted stories where the characters involved were enjoying what they were doing, and still, most writers gave me horrifying sexual violence, almost always inflicted on women. Some writers would take my notes on their first rejection, reply to tell me how wrong I was to reject them, and then send me a second story which had the exact same problems.

It’s hard not to generalize when you’re looking at an inbox full of the same story told over and over again, by authors who were self-described straight white guys, but after a while you realize the worst offenders either genuinely couldn’t see why their story was outside the submission guidelines, or they were getting off on forcing me to read something they knew I didn’t want. That whole experience, which didn’t get any better when I started reading for the sequel, is largely why there wasn’t a Cthulhurotica 2.

Did the anthology achieve what you wanted it to? Is there anything you regret about the book or the process?

CC: I’m proud of the fact that I even got this book published, honestly. It exists in the world now, in the Mythos, and no one can take that away from us.

Where it fell short of my hopes has more to do with my inexperience than anything else. This was my first anthology as an editor, and there were definitely people who preyed on that. I got a lot of bad advice from someone passing themselves off as an industry pro (including ridiculous things like “never spend more than $50 on a cover” which I’m very glad I ignored). There was no particular author I was hoping to get, but there are one or two pieces I regret including. I felt pressure to take work I didn’t love in order to hit a minimum word count, and to include stories that fell outside of my scope to “appeal to a wider audience.” I think it detracted from the overall anthology slightly, and confused some readers about what we were trying to do.

I learned so much from the few years I spent in small press publishing, and even though it wasn’t all good, Cthulhurotica is the reason I had those opportunities. People still ask me about it, and years later, I’m still glad I did it.

call_of_cthulhu_by_fantasio_d2ek17a-fullview — Cover art for *Cthulhurotica* by Oliver Wetter

Do you feel the Mythos fiction scene has changed since Cthulhurotica came out?

CC: Not really. There were a few more creative anthologies trying to push the envelope in different ways, but they were all small-press publications. (She Walks in Shadows edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles might be the best of these.) And I think you’re more likely to find bylines by authors who aren’t men now, which was not very common before 2010, but that’s again due to Moreno-Garcia as much (if not more) as it is because of me. When you look at recent anthologies by Chaosium and PS Publishing for example, they’re more in line with past collections. Which isn’t a criticism, especially since I’ve written stories for both those companies that are among my best-reviewed and favorite pieces! But the edges of the scene are still mostly defined by individual authors and editors.

Unfortunately, Lovecraft appeals to exactly the same sort of people who gatekeep video games and comic books, and every time we make progress, they double down on the hate. There’s a lot of push back about the idea of making the Mythos more inclusive; too many self-described “Lovecraft scholars” who actively look for anything outside of their limited preferences to attack it. It’s sad when a big creative idea like the Mythos loses some of its potential to people who never learned to share as a child, but despite them, writers were breaking off pieces of it for themselves long before me and will continue to do so. We just don’t always call it “Mythos” anymore, even if all the moving parts look the same.

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Thank you Carrie Cuinn answering these questions, and for the look behind the curtain.

Cthulhurotica may be published online; you can follow Carrie Cuinn at https://carriecuinn.com/

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

The Queen of K’n-yan (2008) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健)

This is Cthulhu Mythos fiction unlike any you have read before.
—Darrel Schweitzer, introduction to The Queen of K’n-Yan xiii

The Queen of K’n-yan (2008, Kurodahan Press) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) is the English-language translation of his 1993 novel 崑央の女王 (K’n-Yan no Joō); the translator was Kathleen Taji.

There is a world of Mythos fiction beyond the English language, and it depends on translation. The original works of Lovecraft and his contemporaries, their ideas, concepts, and language, have to be translated from their original English into the new language. This process is not automatic or uniform, not every word that Lovecraft & co. wrote has been translated or published; many of the letters especially have not yet made the jump into other languages, and may never. Imagine what it takes to read Lovecraft, filtered through someone else trying to capture his style and language, to twist the language to translate not just the literal words but the ideas and weird names which might not transliterate easily or cleanly.

Then imagine translating an original Mythos novel back into English. How much survives? How much is recognizable? What new cultural syntax is picked up?

It is more of an issue than you might think, because there is a cultural syntax to the Cthulhu Mythos already; the stories, and the secondary literature of pastiches, sequels, prequels, etc. are highly intertextual, sometimes metatextual—and not everything that is written in English gets translated. The result is that some ideas which are largely outmoded in current English-language Mythos fiction may be retained longer in non-English-language Mythos fiction; and of course some new bits are often added which English language Mythos fans have never seen before.

Kathleen Taji’s translation of The Queen of K’n-Yan is a good example. As a novel, Asamatsu Ken’s work is definitely atypical for Mythos fare: the setting is a contemporary Japan and WW2-era China, the massive, secured corporate arcology and overall plot are something out of a cyberpunk novel, echoes of The Thing (1982), Aliens (1986), and Gunhead (1989). Archaeological mystery and psychic flashbacks to a Japanese war camp conducting medical experiments on Chinese civilians give way to a survival horror/body horror aesthetic somewhat foreshadowing works like Parasite Eve (1995) and Resident Evil (1996).

As the title suggests, the primary Mythos influence of the story is “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft:

It isn’t too much of a spoiler to let you know that Asamatsu Ken’s The Queen of K’n-yan involves the discovery of a mummy from that same underground realm, but excavated in China […]
—Darrel Schweitzer, introduction to The Queen of K’n-Yan ix

Asamatsu Ken takes the idea of the people of K’n-Yan and expands them to a global scale, parts of their underground realm running throughout Asia, and ties them into existing history and mythology:

Before the advent of humanity, the world was divided and ruled by several races of intelligent beings. That’s to say, the dragon race, the denizens of Zhùróng – the fire deity – the earth wolf tribes, the wind bull people, and the star-spawn – as can be deduced, they symbolize the five elements of water, fire, earth, wood, and metal. The human descendants of the dragon race are the Han, the human descendants of the earth wolf are the Manchu, and the human descendants of the wind bull people are the Tibetans […] The denizens of Zhùróng, the symbol of fire, rose in revolt against the Yellow Emperor and were sealed underground in retribution. The underground cavern where they were imprisoned is called K’n-Yan. And the star-spawn were banished to the distant heavens.
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 85

For English-language Mythos fans, this might be sounding suspiciously like the early “elemental” theory of the Cthulhu Mythos first postulated by August Derleth in “The Return of Hastur” (1939). Derleth designated various entities according to the four elements of the Western tradition of Hermetic occultism (Cthulhu, water; Tsathoggua, earth; Hastur, air; and creating Cthugha as the missing “fire elemental”). Asamatsu Ken is certainly paying homage to this idea, even if he is taking it in a different direction:

What appeared were strange sentences containing a mix of Chinese characters, cursive Japanese hiragana, and roman letters. They read –

“Beseech the god of the western seas, THCLH, with sacred reverence.

Beseech the forefather of heat and flame, THGHC, with sacred reverence.

Beseech anon our birth lord, ZTHRNG, with sacred reverence.

The infant princess, through the black disease

When reborn as Queen

Even death will not die…”
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 112

Zhùróng is a complicated personage, but often considered a god of fire; THGHC is a reference to Derleth’s Cthugha, THCLH to Cthulhu. The complexities of Japanese, Chinese, and Japanese languages coming into play here were probably difficult to translate, but readers can recall how in “The Mound” Cthulhu was represented as “Tulu” and get the vague idea of how Japanese readers might have been piecing together clues.

As an aside, applying the five-element approach to the Mythos is not unique to Asamatsu Ken’s work either. Shirow Masamune in his manga Orion (仙術超攻殻オリオン) has a Cthulhu-esque entity arise from an occult effort involving an unbalanced water-element.

The discussion of “races” in the context of Mythos fiction is more complicated, and not unique to this work. Perhaps for the best, Asamatsu Ken doesn’t delve too deep into the geopolitics or genetics of it all. The main characters are left piecing together bits of history so old that they’ve faded into myth, trying to sort out bits of truth from the old legends.

As the story enters its penultimate phase, the survival horror aspect comes to the fore. A weird game of cat-and-mouse occurs between Morishita Anri (the novel’s protagonist, Japanese), Dr. Li (the novel’s secondary antagonist, Chinese), and the Queen of K’n-Yan, who a la The Thing has taken on the form of a human woman—hinted to possibly be either Morishita or Li. Reanimated body parts are combined together in was reminiscent of Bride of Re-animator (1990):

An ankle with eyes. A left hand with three lips. Orifices with fangs. A large intestine with wings on its back. Thirty upper arms congealed together, spherical in shape. A thigh with a face, knees with thin hands, and ankles growing out of shins. Eyeballs with tentacles, and most horrendous of all, hordes of internal organs, squirming and groping.
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 175

Strange as it may be with all these diverse elements, the novel does actually come together at the end, in a fairly satisfying way. Not every mystery is explained, nor do they need to be; background noise about large sinkholes in China where the Princess of K’n-Yan was discovered, outbreaks of disease, and rising heat suggest what is about to come, but that is a horror for the future beyond the last page in the novel.

For all that works, at least within the internal rationale of the novel, there are a few things that don’t translate well. There are elements of style and plot which simply don’t come across to English-language readers as nicely as they could, and it is difficult (not having read, or able to read, the original) to tell whether this is a quirk of the translation being too literal or simply a faithful reproduction of Asamatsu’s style which doesn’t quite click.

Stylistically, the chunks of raw exposition embedded in the narrative stand out as exactly that; the Mythos references when they come aren’t exactly subtle. From the standpoint of characters, most are fairly weakly developed except for the protagonist Morishita Anri and the mysterious Dr. Li…and even then, there is a relatively late development in the novel which comes almost out of nowhere:

Something was trying to take shape. Akiyama Haruka’s face appeared in midair – three times larger than the actual face. This was followed by the appearance of a neck, shoulders, lithe arms, and lastly, shapely breasts. Akiyama winked at Anri, and her pupils sent an insinuating and lascivious look her way.

“Hold me, please…pretty please.”

On hearing her words, Andri felt like retching.

The queen knows?! Somehow she’s found out that I’m gay.
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 199

The issue of Mosihita Anri’s homosexuality, for about the first hundred and ninety-eight pages up until this point, is so low-key as to be completely absent. Going back to re-read the novel, there are only extremely vague hints which maybe point to that if the reader already knows she’s a lesbian; this feels like a character development which was either not communicated well in the original or which was so subtle that the translation didn’t quite convey it. Which is not in any way a dig at Kathleen Taji, only an exemplar of how difficult the job of translation is. How do you communicate someone’s sexuality in Japanese culture when they do not have any immediate love interest? Were there cues that would have made sense to a Japanese audience that an English reader would miss?

These are the kind of questions that consume the reader in The Queen of K’n-Yan. It is an effective Mythos novel; Asamatsu Ken knows what he is doing. Yet it is undoubtedly a very different Mythos novel from August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) or Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons (1978). The setting and the syntax are in line with Japanese horror of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mythos translated, adapted, and integrated into a post-WW2 world with computers, genetic engineering, wuxing, and the People’s Liberation Army.

Perhaps most importantly, The Queen of K’n-Yan is an example of what translation offers to the English-speaking audience: something different, a new way to think about the old Mythos. For those of us who cannot read Japanese, it is only through translation that we can approach these works—even if, like Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror,” thumbing through the English translation of the Necronomicon, we know that there is something missing from the original.

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

“Polaris” (1920) by H. P. Lovecraft & “The Lair of the Star-Spawn” (1932) by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

That night had the news come of Daikos’ fall, and of the advance of the Inutos; squat, hellish, yellow fiends who five years ago had appeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and finally to besiege our towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their way now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the strength of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from ruthless conquest. […]

They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Star shines high and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of years, and never a man save squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they call “Esquimaux”.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Polaris”

At the end of the 19th century, the Yellow Peril or Yellow Terror had gripped the imagination of the Western world; works such as weird fiction author M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger; Or, what Might Happen in the Division of the Chinese Empire Should Estrange all European Countries (1898) were pure invective, fueling racist and Orientalist fantasies about Asia and the prospect of a global conflict on the lines not of nation-states, but of race. The victory of an industrialized Japan in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) stoked these fears, and a year before the Great War broke out found an avatar in Dr. Fu Manchu, the villainous star of what would become thirteen novels by Sax Rohmer. Fu Manchu would inspire hundreds of copycats, not a few of whom appeared in Weird Tales, and even by favorite authors; Robert E. Howard’s “Kathulos” from the serial “Skull-Face” (1929) definitely has Fu Manchu in its literary DNA. The Yellow Peril, in more generalized form, would be familiar in Weird Tales throughout its entire run from 1923-1954, as was the case in many pulps.

Throughout his life H. P. Lovecraft was clear in his genuine belief in the Yellow Peril, at least as an impending threat. One passage from a letter will suffice to give the general substance of this racialist paranoia, although in many other instances Lovecraft wrote admiringly of Japanese culture and aesthetics, and of Japanese actors and artists:

Of Japan I have not so far spoken, because I think it a certain enemy of the future, which no plan can permanently make a friend. It demands free access to Anglo-Saxon soil for its citizens, and this can never be given. Orientals must be kept in their native East till the fall of the white race. Sooner or later a great Japanese war will take place, during which I think the virtual destruction of Japan will have to be effected in the interests of European safety. The more numerous Chinese are a menace of the still more distant future. They will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilisation, for their numbers are amazing. But that is all too far ahead for consideration today.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 30 Sep 1919, Letters to Alfred Galpin 57

Despite this belief, which was relatively common during the period, the Yellow Peril is scarce in Lovecraft’s fiction. He never quite develops a Fu Manchu type character, the cult in “The Horror at Red Hook” has overtones of the multiethnic criminal enterprise of Rohmer’s villain, the “corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng” in “The Hound” is located in Central Asia, and Castro in “The Call of Cthulhu” claims that he has spoken to the “undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China,” likely a reference to the mythical Shambala and the claims of the Theosophical Society to receive their guidance from the Great White Brotherhood in Asia. There are only two stories where the idea of a racial conflict on these lines is suggested in Lovecraft’s fiction: a glancing reference in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (“that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia”) written with E. Hoffmann Price, and the very short story “Polaris.”

The story came from an odd start. In 1918, Lovecraft was arguing about religion in one of his letters, which led to a discussion of truth and recalling a recent dream:

Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills. There was not a soul in this vast region of stone-paved streets and marble walls and columns, and the numerous statues in the public places were of strange bearded men in robes the like whereof I have never seen before or since. […]
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 15 May 1918, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 70

Shortly thereafter, Lovecraft shaped the dream into “Polaris,” about a man who dreams (or is possessed by the spirit) of an ancestor from 26,000 years before, in the land of Lomar situated in the far north. This would be familiar to audiences at the time as a reference to racialist theories of Caucasians originating from Northern Europe. Lomar is under peril from the Inutos—and these are explicitly Asian stereotypes, which Lovecraft near the end directly associates them with the Inuit people, foreshadowing his reference to the “degenerate Esquimaux” in “The Call of Cthulhu” a decade later.

At this point in his life, Lovecraft’s racialist beliefs were strongly influenced by Thomas Henry Huxley, who categorized the Inuit and other Native Americans and trans-polar peoples as “Mongoloids” alongside many Asian ethnicities. Lovecraft typically shortened this to reference to “Mongolians” or “Mongols,” regardless of nationality or ethnicity. The fantasy racism that Lovecraft engages in here, equating a contemporary group of people with a mythical precursor, was not unknown—the entire “Lost Race” subgenre of scientific romance depends on such linkages, and the basic ideology can be seen in Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” (1936) essay and in some of the worldbuilding of J. R. R. Tolkien, who at the same time was crafting what would the background of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lrod of the Rings (1955).

Lovecraft’s use of the term “Esquimau” and its plural “Esquimaux” was a touch archaic in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, but not necessarily intended as a pejorative. The term “Eskimo” was in general use (as evidenced by the 1933 film Eskimo, which Lovecraft had seen), and Lovecraft’s preference for the older form an apparent affection. The term “Inutos” suggests he was at least aware of the term “Inuit,” even if he chose not to use it; the suffix “-os” would make the name match the other pseudo-Grecian names in the story. While there are no contemporary accounts of Lovecraft’s thoughts on the Inuit, later in life his few references in his letters categorize them as a “degenerate offshoot” of the “Mongolian race.” (A Means to Freedom 1.482) This was a very typical distinction for Lovecraft to make, when regarding a culture that he was generally ignorant of but perceived as “primitive” compared to contemporary (and white) civilization.

Which is a great deal to unpack from a few lines in a story of a little over 1,500 words. Nor was it an immediate success; Lovecraft shared it in the amateur Transatlantic Circular, and it was published in the amateur journal The Philosopher in 1920. In 1925, Lovecraft submitted it to editor Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, but it was rejected as a “prose-poem.” In 1931, Lovecraft submitted it to editor Harry Bates at Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, who likewise rejected it, and in 1932 to Carl Swanson’s projected magazine Galaxy, which never came out. “Polaris” was finally reprinted in the fanzine The Fantasy Fan (Feb 1934), where it was well-received by readers. The first professional publication of “Polaris” was posthumous, in Weird Tales (Dec 1937). August Derleth and Donald Wandrei included it in their initial Arkham House publication The Outsider and Others (1939), sealing its place in the Lovecraft canon.

That wasn’t necessarily the case. Lovecraft had a soft spot for the little tale, but soured on it nearer the end of his life:

“Polaris” is a sort of semi-favourite of mine—written in 1918 & therefore largely experimental.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 28 Aug 1930,
Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 229

I’ve expunged both from my list of acknowledged writings—relating them to the oblivion now enjoyed by such failures as “The Street” & “Juan Romero”. Before long I shall strike other times out in the same way—”The Tree”, “Polaris”, “The Hound”, “The White Ship”, “He”, & perhaps a few more. It doesn’t do me any good to have my name associated with absurd crap.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 19 Mar 1934, O Fortunate Floridian! 120

The real legacy of “Polaris” and the impact it had on Lovecraft and his writings is that the idea of Lomar as this mythical ancient northern land became an intertextual element in Lovecraft’s fiction, mentioned in “The Other Gods,” “The Quest of Iranon,” “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” “The Mound” (with Zealia Bishop), At the Mountains of Madness, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (with E. Hoffmann Price), and “The Horror in the Museum” (with Hazel Heald), and “The Shadow out of Time,” which contains Lovecraft’s only other reference to the Inutos:

I talked […] with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it […]
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow out of Time”

Which is where things get a little weird. In “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” Lovecraft says:

[…] the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoë and slew all the heroes of the land of Lomar.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”

Just to make things complicated, a very different entity with a similar name and geographic bound is given in another story:

A small bulge in the canvas far to the right suggested the sharp horn of Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice, that walked sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six.
—H. P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, “The Horror in the Museum”

The accounts are contradictory and at a glance irreconcilable; it is difficult to tell if Lovecraft was deliberately muddying the waters of his own Mythos, or if his conception of what caused the fall of Lomar had shifted from 1918 when he wrote “Polaris” to 1926 when he wrote “Dream-Quest” to 1932 when he wrote “The Horror in the Museum” for Hazel Heald. Later writers made efforts to gloss these contradictions, which resulted in stories such as “Nautical-Looking Negroes” (1996) by Peter Cannon & Robert M. Price.

It is too much to suggest that Lovecraft made the change from Inutos to Gnophkehs because he recognized the Yellow Peril influence of the work and wished to change it; the last appearance of the Inutos is in “The Shadow out of Time,” written in 1934, and there is no evidence in Lovecraft’s letters that his basic prejudices regarding the Inuit changed substantially by that point in his life.

When we talk about talk about the effect that Lovecraft’s prejudices had on his fiction, and by extension the fiction of other writers, it is not necessarily the very blatant examples of an N-word in print, or even the infamous ending to “Medusa’s Coil.” It is the much more subtle impact of racialist thought and tropes, however common and accepted they may have been in Lovecraft’s time, which persist as part of the Mythos. The Inutos, thankfully, are not especially pervasive in the wider Cthulhu Mythos; Lomar and Gnoph-Keh/the gnophkehs are more popular.

This is not always the case.

One of us was home for the summer from a year of teaching at a military academy in Missouri and preparing for post-graduate work at Wisconsin and Harvard, the other was back to stay in Sauk City, Wisconsin, having resigned an editorial position with Fawcett Publications in order to do or die as a writer. Though both our homes were in Sauk City, we chose not to work in them but to rent what had once been a summer cottage on the village’s main street, just north of the business section, in a relatively quite zone on the west bank of the Wisconsin. […] the method of work was this—the basic outline for each story was set down by Derleth, the entire first draft then written by Schorer, a final revision made by Derleth. […] he went over the manuscript, sometimes rewriting, sometimes simply retyping selected pages or paragraphs; and prepared the story for submission—usually to Weird Tales or Strange Tales, and rounded out the evening by outlining the next story to be done.
—August Derleth & Mark Schorer, Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People

The industrious collaboration during the summer of 1931 netted the two young writers 17 stories, one of which was a Mythos story titled “The Statement of Eric Marsh,” echoing Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and it would introduce a new element to the expanding artificial mythology:

Though your major field will probably be much broader, you nevertheless have a very distinct aptitude for convincing spectral creation; & it would be a pity if things like the Tcho-Tchos & Rigelian daemons were to remain for ever unchronicled.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 3 Aug 1931, Essential Solitude 1.354

Herewith the Tcho-Tcho story, The Statement of Eric Marsh; I don’t like the story. Have you any suggestions for a better one? But then, the story is rotten, too.
—August Derleth to H. P. Lovecraft, 21 Aug 1931, ES1.365

As for a new title—how would “The City of Elder Evil” do? Or “The Lair of the Star-Spawn”? I’m not much for fancy titles, but I presume something on this order is what you’re looking for. I shall undoubtedly use the Tcho-Tchos in some later story—let Wright say what he please!
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 26 Aug 1931, ES1.367

“The Lair of the Star-Spawn” became the title; the story was accepted and published in Weird Tales (Aug 1932). Among the elements that Derleth & Schorer added or referenced in the story were the Tcho-Tcho:

It is true that strange legends had reached us, even before we had left Ho-Nan province, of a weird race of little people, wo whom the natives applied the odd name, Tcho-Tcho, supposedly living near or on the Plateau of Sung.

So the Hawk Expedition proceeded into Burma (present-day Myanmar). The story in many ways is a very typical Lost World/Lost Race narrative, comparable to H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886), Edgar Rice Burrough’s At the Earth’s Core (1914), Robert E. Howard’s “The Slithering Shadow” (1933) and “Red Nails” (1936), C. L. Moore’s “The Tree of Life” (1936), and many others—only with a Mythos twist, as the Tcho-Tcho are servants of Lloigor and Zhar. The descriptions of them are stereotypical:

[…] the tallest of them no more than four feet, with singularly small eyes set deep in dome-like, hairless heads. These queer attackers fell upon the party and had killed men and animals with their bright swords almost before our men could extract their weapons. […]

The Tcho-Tcho people could not believe them dead, since it is impossible for them to conceive of such a weapon as a gun. At base, they are very simple people. Yet they are inherently malevolent, for they now that they are working for the destruction of all that is good in the world. […]

Then the Old Ones, the Elder Gods, returned to the stars of Orion, leaving behind them ever-damned Cthulhu, Lloigor, Zhar, and others. But the evil ones left seeds on the plateau, on the island in the Lake of Dread which the Old Ones caused to be put here. And rom these seeds have sprung the Tcho-Tcho people, the spawn of elder evil, and now these people await the day when Loloigor and Zhar will rise again and sweep over all the earth!

Damning an entire species to be unapologetically or uncomplicatedly “evil” from birth is a gross oversimplification—but easy moralities play well in politics, pulp stories, and fairytales; J. R. R. Tolkien would do much the same thing with Orcs in his legendarium, with all the unfortunate implications still being worked out decades later. It’s not necessarily a problem of having a group of antagonists depicted as irredeemable—its the use of racialist language, ideas, and reasoning behind it.

Like the Inutos of “Polaris,” the Tcho-Tcho are depicted as aggressive, primitive, and adversarial to the main viewpoint of the story; Lovecraft doesn’t make the Inutos explicitly evil (or the men of Lomar good), but the framing of the story as a quasi-fable of the Yellow Peril would establish those relationships with the readers. Derleth & Schorer are if anything more explicit, even if they make the Tcho-Tcho a “race apart,” from both the Caucasian Eric Marsh and the Chinese Dr. Fo-Lan.

If it had been a one-off story where the Tcho-Tcho were never mentioned again, this would be worthy of a footnote—none of them appear to survive the end of Derleth & Schorer’s tale, though Derleth references them again in “The Thing That Walked On the Wind” (1933) and a few later stories; “The Sandwin Compact” (1940) moves them from Burma to Tibet—but of course, it didn’t end there.

“Do you remember,” he shouted, “what I told you about that ruined city in Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit I’d been there when you saw the photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer in darkness out of wax. If you’d seen it writhing in the underground pools as I did. . . .”
—H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, “The Horror in the Museum”

Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow out of Time”

Lovecraft doesn’t expand much on the original conception of the Tcho-Tcho, aside from adding the “s” for a plural; he places them alongside the Serpent-People of Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom,” the Voormi of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Seven Geases,” and his own Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness—all in good fun, just an inside joke for astute readers and members of the gang. Yet it cemented, if that was necessary, the Tcho-Tcho as part of the Mythos.

For many readers the occasional references to the Tcho-Tcho people encountered in Cthulhu Mythos fiction do not really register. Aren’t these hard-to-prounounce people just one more of the so-called “servitor-races” of the Old Ones? So what?
—Robert M. Price and Tani Jantsang, “The True History of the Tcho Tcho People”
in Crypt of Cthulhu #51, 24

Unlike the Inutos, several later authors decided to elaborate on the Tcho-Tcho, to various purpose and effect. The term “servitor-races” that Price and Jantsang use is particular to the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, and is exemplary of the problem that the Tcho-Tcho embody: the long shadow of the Yellow Peril, sliding uncomfortably into the contemporary day. Call of Cthulhu came out of Runequest which came out of Dungeons & Dragons, which based itself on the borrowed racialist terminology of later 19th and early 20th century popular fiction: scientific romance, science fiction, fantasy, pulp fiction, Lost World and Lost Race tales, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber…and more, but the gist is that in the translation to the roleplaying milieu, the Tcho-Tcho, Deep Ones, and other strange critters of the Mythos were translated into D&D-esque terms: where Tolkien (and thus D&D) had “races” of Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Humans, CoC had Humans, Deep Ones, Serpent People, Voormis, and Tcho-Tcho.

The habit of thinking of groups of sentient humanoid entities as biologically and culturally distinct from anatomically modern humans and essentially not human and morally irredeemable can be problematic in and of itself—there are plenty of parallels to scientific racialism and racial discrimination, which some authors of the Mythos have explored, such as in “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys.

In the case of the Tcho-Tcho, there are added wrinkles: their original placement in Southeast Asia, and subsequent movement around Asia by different authors, their depiction as inherently autochthonous and antagonistic to “human” life, and their initial description aspects of Asian visual stereotypes (short stature, different eyes), has allowed them to pick up several more Yellow Peril characteristics in their general depiction. Many Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game products, including spin-offs like Delta Green, depict the Tcho-Tcho as Asian characters, often conflating them with negative stereotypes as criminals and drug-dealers.

The issue of the Inutos and the Tcho-Tcho is a problem that transcends the Cthulhu Mythos. Those are symptoms, the result of many different writers working independently toward different goals, not stepping back to consider where some of the conceptions they were using came from or how they were being used. Fantasy racism can be used to explore some of the consequences of real-life racial discrimination and prejudice in a way that echoes the experience of ethnic minorities without calling them out…and it can be used very lazily, so that Tcho-Tcho (or Orcs, etc.) can serve as easy villains and faceless fodder for the heroes to kill without moral compunction.

It is seductively easy to use stereotypes to apply to entire groups of people. That’s why pulp fictioneers did it; painting with a broad brush, using tropes the readers were familiar with, they could sketch out stories quickly and the reader could suspend disbelief. It is also why many people use it today; discrimination is terribly easy, appreciating the nuance and complexity of human relationships and seeing them as individuals rather than representatives of a group is hard.

Perhaps because of the initial complexity of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and their tremendous popularity, the Deep Ones have gotten a lot of attention and engendered a good deal of sympathy from later Mythos writers. The Tcho-Tcho have not attracted anything like the same level of development or empathy, and have fallen into a very weird space where they have largely become “acceptable villains” in Mythos roleplay and fiction—and, if they have not already, are in danger of becoming nothing more than a Mythos-flavored Yellow Peril.

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