“Unseen” (1995) by Penelope Love

Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”

Some of the best stories are those that leave a great deal unsaid and unseen, letting the reader fill in the gaps on their own. A few critics have called this a weakness when it comes to horror stories—the inability of the writer to describe things, or a crutch to avoid giving description. Yet not every story needs for every mystery to be explained, and there are narratives where the very inexplicableness of events is part of the point. Something Penelope Love captures very well.

A new road is going through Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley, to cut through an ancient earthwork known as Morley’s Mound. Rescue archaeologists have arrived to excavate, to see what they can salvage before the bulldozers and concrete mixers come. A pleasant, tight-knit group let by the shy Andrew, who is on the dig with his wife Carol and their newborn Diane. Josephine has come to write up the dig for a local paper. The cozy domesticity is only interrupted by the fact that the site had been disturbed by a self-styled antiquarian in the last century—the eponymous Morley—who had tunneled into the mound and left something behind. A quasi-Grecian mask of Byatis.

The disappearance of Carol and baby Diane is inexplicable. The center of the narrative cannot hold, the long paragraphs fall apart into patchy staccato snippets of the investigation. All the set-up for a murder mystery, suspicion falling on each in turn, to be as quickly dismissed. Mum and child are gone. Some people just vanish, and it is left for those left behind to try and make peace with it—even if there is no sense to make of it.

The pain of not knowing is a very adult fear.

There is no Mythos horror in the conventional sense in this story; it is much more personal. As with “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens, the Mythos is the catalyst to bring cosmic horror to a more personal level. It is one thing to know, intellectually, that all things will die; it is something else again to have it actually happen, especially without any apparent reason. If Love had left it at that, it would have been a competent enough piece of fiction, though critics could point out that nothing much happens and it would appear to be only tangentially connected to the Mythos.

However, “Unseen” is bookended with an opening statement from Lovecraft, which supplies the title but apparently nothing else…until the very end. As the bulldozers rend the barrow open, and the final mystery is discharged. It isn’t an answer, not really, but it is a conclusion. A piece of a puzzle that will never be completed, but enough edge pieces are in place to guess at the shape of the thing—and that is enough. It is quintessentially Lovecraftian, in the sense that Love takes one of Lovecraft’s ideas and runs with it, and shows the reader what it is like when something intersects the normal human life from outside, and upsets all previously held notions of space and time.

“Unseen” was published in Made in Goatswood (1995), and has never been reprinted. Penelope Love has written a substantial amount of Mythos material, much of it for the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, where her credits include The Horror on the Orient Express and Terror Australis. Her Mythos fiction includes “The Whisper of Ancient Secrets” (2010), “Daddy, Daddy” (2014), and “Turn Out The Light” (2015).

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Star Bright, Star Byte” (1994) by Marella Sands

Marella Sands warns of new gates through new technologies […]
—Thomas M. K. Stratman, introduction to Cthulhu’s Heirs (1994) 9

Cthulhu is older than digital computers, and neither Lovecraft nor his contemporaries dreamed of the internet. By 1994, the world wide web was three years old, the first full text web search engines online to help navigate the new conglomeration of web sites and networks. Four years before Google, a year before Nintendo released the Virtual Boy. Virtual reality—the immersive experience of a simulation, created and maintained by a computer program, that allowed you to interact with people and programs—was the promise of cyberpunk, had been since William Gibson described the globe-spanning Matrix in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

Marella Sands’ “Star Bright, Star Byte” might be called Cthulhupunk. The setting is low-key cyberpunk: 20 minutes into the future, virtual reality systems are run like 1990s bulletin boards, hosting hundreds of users that jack in through implants in the back of the head. Immersed in virtual reality, they can ignore the cultists murdering people on hilltops—at least, until someone called Narla hacks the system. To gain control of a virtual world where anything can be programmed to be just right…even the stars.

“Star Bright, Star Byte” is an artifact of its time. Competent, uncomplicated, and fairly straightforward, Sands sets up and resolves this essential conflict with a minimal cast of characters (Kent Taylor, sysop; his friend Joe, and Narla). Even with the near-future setting of immersive virtual reality, the social mechanics are the same as cybersex in the 1990s: Narla presents as a good-looking woman, the better to entice and distract Kent while the system is hacked, but the sysop knows:

Of course, she could be a balding corporate executive in real life. Or another all-American male computer jock like me. Not all people program constructs to match their gender on the Outside.

The juxtaposition of still-unrealized technology and decades old internet culture is exacerbated by the combination of cyberpunk and the Cthulhu Mythos, both in a rather uncomplicated form—we get little sense of who the cultists are or why they’re trying to accomplish what they’re doing, except to hurry the Great Old Ones back. This is not atypical of Mythos fiction of the period; the tropes had already been established. Sands’ chooses not to dwell too deeply on either the logistics or the mechanics of how the world works: it’s the idea that is the thing. That with new technology comes new risks, and old horrors might appear under new masks to take advantage of the possibilities offered.

This is not exactly a new premise; Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953) is somewhat comparable in basic concept, but not execution: there is a tinge of grittiness to “Star Bright, Star Byte” in the reality of Kent Taylor’s bachelor pad, the terrible smell from the long-neglected cups of coffee by the computer terminal, the way the “all-American male computer jock” feels blistering if he gets any sun, and admits he’d probably find the real Bahamas disappointing compared to his computer simulation—not exactly high tech and low life, but details that define the more personal stakes involved. Where Clarke could end his story with the suggestion of a terrible finality, Sands prefers in Mythos fashion to leave readers with the terrible potentiality—that while the cultists were vexed this time, they might still try again.

“Star Bright, Star Byte” is not the only work of the period to try and combine the disparate cyberpunk/Mythos aesthetic; which include Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Pickman’s Modem” (1992), Michael D. Winkle’s “Typo” (1994), Scott David Aniolowski’s “I Dream of Wires” (1995), GURPS CthulhuPunk (1995), and Alan Dean Foster’s “A fatal exception has occurred at…” (2002), to name only a few examples, and showcase the syntax of an era in which people were still exploring the conceptual limits of the shiny new internet. In a more general sense the effort to marry or address the advance of technology with the Mythos continues right up to the current day: Nick Mamatas explored virtual reality and the Mythos in “Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep” (2011)—the latest participant in a nascent literary tradition.

“Star Bright, Star Byte” was published in Cthulhu’s Heirs: New Cthulhu Mythos Fiction (1994) by Chaosium. It has not been reprinted.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” (2014) by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

In xochitl in cuicatl, flower and song: This way shall begin the poems that tell the feats of this war. No name shall be forgotten. No drop of blood spilled in vain. No sacrifice ignored.
—Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath”
Translated from the Spanish by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” is a quintessential Mexican Cthulhu Mythos story, where all of the elements of plot, setting, and characterization are told from and within an indigenous perspective—and yet the Mythos is blended in, an essential part of the narrative that reflects on and deepens the themes of the story.

In Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas’ story, an elite warrior of the Mexica travels to the Valley of Toluca: war is imminent, and the Aztec had sent scouts, but none had returned. Now he enters their village, searching for answers…like the unnamed protagonist of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”…and encounters an old, drunken man, a Zadok Allen analog, who points him toward the central temple.

The plot is not a re-hash of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” despite a few narrative parallels. In the Aztec religion, Huitzilopochtli was worshiped with human sacrifice. The Mexicas spread from the Valley of Mexico, subduing their neighbors, bringing the captured warriors back to their temples. By the shedding of their blood, the sun was was kept from falling, and the world continued. The Matlazinca have an inverse concept: they sacrifice to renew the moon, and so preserve the world. This by itself would be a fascinating inversion, but the god has a wife…

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Deer of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”

Goats were a European import to the Americas, but why should Shub-Niggurath be tied to any one specific culture? The characterization of the Black Deer and her young here is a subtle but perfect tweak on an old standby; one that complements the story by keeping Shub-Niggurath within the Mesoamerican context of the story. The transformation of the priestess Šuti during the ritual is a nod toward Ramsey Campbell’s “The Moon-Lens”—a nice nod of continuity for Mythos fans, as it was when Valerie Valdes made a similar reference in “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015).

The success of “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” is more appreciable when it is considered how rare it is to have a Mythos story told outside of a Western/European context—to showcase a native culture and people and their own understanding of the Mythos without recourse to any of the familiar tomes or requiring a European to stumble on things and relay a narrative back, filtering events through their own frame of reference. Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas does this not by recapitulating tired old stories, or by rejecting any of the elements established by Lovecraft, but by focusing on how the individuals in those cultures and in that context would have perceived and responded.

“In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” first appeared in Sword & Mythos (2014), and was made into an audio recording for Far Fetched Fables (2016). Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas’ other Mythos works include “Ahuizotl” (2011), “Tloque Nahuaque” (2011), “They Came From Carcosa” (2013), “Caza de shoggoths. Colección grotesca” (2013), and “The Head of T’la-yub” (2015). Many of these stories have been translated into English by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of “Flash Frame” (2010), and editor and publisher of Innsmouth Free Press.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“The Challenge From Beyond” (1935) by C. L. Moore

Didn’t the F. F. [sic] “Challenge from Beyond” turn out well, considering? Yours was by far the best installment insofar as originality and workmanship are concerned. You had the hardest section, too—having to explain all the unconnected ramblings of your predecessors. Several of the installments, including mine, were carelessly written and loosely phrased, but yours, as usual, was a miracle of exact wording. And wasn’t it interesting to see how the personality of each writer colored his installment.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 11 Dec 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 87

Catherine Lucille Moore was one of the most prominent female writers at Weird Tales during its heyday, a contemporary and correspondent to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others in “the circle,” who praised her fiction. Several of her stories have definite aspects reminiscent of the nascent Cthulhu Mythos: Moore’s “Shambleau” (Weird Tales Nov 1933) and Robert E. Howard’s “The Slithering Shadow” (WT Sep 1933) both feature tentacled aliens who carnally assault their victims; the strange angles and dimensions of the tunnel in the depths of Joiry Castle in “Black God’s Kiss” (WT Oct 1934) and “Black God’s Shadow” (WT Dec 1934) are reminiscent of Lovecraft’s non-Euclidean geometries. Moore was introduced to her future husband and writing-partner Henry Kuttner through Lovecraft, and Kuttner made his own contributions to the Mythos, such as the Book of Iod.

Moore never participated directly in the collaborative universe of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and others—made no addition to the library of eldritch titles, no strange god with an unspeakable name, there was no road from Joiry to Averoigne or Arkham, Hyboria or Hyperborea. Neither did Lovecraft or the others reference her fiction in their own works. This was not in itself exceptional—other writers in “the circle” chose not to participate, or participated only through collaboration, like E. Hoffmann Price, who together with Lovecraft wrote “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (WT Jul 1934), but who by himself never wrote a Mythos story, nor had any of his works referenced by his contemporaries in their Mythos stories. Moore was much the same; a colleague but not a co-conspirator… except for in one thing.

“The Challenge from Beyond” was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, the teenage editor of the Fantasy Magazine; for the third anniversary issue of the fanzine, he had cooked up the idea of two round-robins, both titled “The Challenge from Beyond,” one being weird fiction and the other being science fiction. Schwartz successfully managed, after some effort and shake-ups, to attract a solid line-up for both; for the weird, C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long each wrote a section, building on each other’s efforts. Moore started it off.

Julius Schwartz has inveigled me into one of these chain-story things in which you are also scheduled to be drawn. I wrote a first installment and mailed it to him on the 18th. Certainly not a brilliant thing by any means—it’s hard to get very brilliant in three pages, especially if they’re chiefly devoted to setting the stage—but the best I could think of just then If it comes to you next, as I think it will, perhaps you can do better on the second installment. If you want to be bothered.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 22 Jul 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 53

I hope you haven’t had too much trouble over your installment. Mr. Schwartz asked me to be as weird and original as possible in starting it out, and I was notably neither. At least there was a vast expanse of room for improvement as the story advanced. Frankly, if I’d been able to think up something strikingly weird and new I wouldn’t have given the idea away for nothing. Anyhow, it will be interesting to see what the others have done with such a poor start.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 22 Jul 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 62

Self-effacing to a fault, Moore’s section of “The Challenge from Beyond” is, despite her mea culpas, perfectly competent. True, not much happens and there is no mention of fantastic monsters, evil sorcery, lost races, or aliens from another planet or dimension—but it manages to hint of otherness, and establishes tone, character, setting, and subject, staying true to the basic premise while providing an obvious hook for the next writer. For 857 unpaid words, that’s not bad—and while dwarfed by Lovecraft (2,542) and Howard’s (1,037) sections, it is the third-longest section overall.

But is it a contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos?

And yet—that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it—
—C. L. Moore, “The Challenge from Beyond”

Moore’s section was followed by a rather generic entry by A. Merritt—and it was up to Lovecraft to tie together the elements from their respective sections and actually begin to weave a story out of the thing. In Lovecraft’s section, Moore’s queerly-marked cube becomes an alien artifact, mentioned in the Eltdown Shards—a Mythos tome created by his correspondent Richard F. Searight. This is essentially the single element that ties “The Challenge from Beyond” into the larger collaborative universe that Lovecraft and his contemporaries were creating.

Reaction to the story in the letters of Lovecraft et al. is fair, with most of the focus on the interplay between Lovecraft and Howard’s sections—Lovecraft swapping the mind of Moore’s geologist with that of a sentient extraterrestrial worm on a distant world, and Howard deciding that said geologist rather liked being an alien worm and developing a desire to conquer this new planet—but this amusing juxtaposition of style could never have taken place without Moore’s initial contribution.

Debating C. L. Moore’s place as one of the early contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos is a strange hair to try and split, though I have done it myself in discussing “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ. Moore wrote an idea, Lovecraft picked it up and ran with it, and any ties to the Mythos are through Lovecraft’s efforts. This was typical: Lovecraft’s previous collaborations with Anna Helen Croft, Winifred Virginia Jackson, his wife Sonia H. Greene, Clifford M. Eddy Jr., E. Hoffmann Price, R. H. Barlow, etc. had involved him expanding on the ideas of others, while adding his own. The difference here is that we know exactly where Moore’s prose ends and Lovecraft’s begins, because of the nature of the round-robin; in general collaborations, Lovecraft had a tendency to re-write much of the prose himself, muddying the issue of exactly how much each writer contributed in terms of pure wordcount and conception.

Whether or not you agree that Moore should be counted amid the co-creators of the Cthulhu Mythos, she was one of the peers in the circle of Weird Tales pulpsters and her contribution should not be neglected.

“The Challenge from Beyond” was first published in the Fantasy Magazine Sep 1935; it has been republished and recollected numerous times since then. It is out of copyright and may be read for free online.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes

One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious.
—H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Brown-Reed Bishop, “The Mound”

Valerie Valdes is not the first Mythos writer to invoke the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of those peculiarly American outgrowths of Christianity that emerged from the Third Great Awakening (mid-1800s to early 1900s), and best known today for door-to-door evangelism and recruitment. That earlier effort, Robert M. Price’s “Behold, I Stand At the Door and Knock” (1994) focuses on a similar theme, though with a less pronounced element of satire: why don’t the cults of the Cthulhu Mythos proselytize?

The religious aspect of the Mythos have been the focus of many writers; Lovecraft and his contemporaries were generally vague and sometimes contradictory on specifics of theology and cosmology, dogma and sectarian strife. The views of these native or syncretic religions was almost always presented from the skewed perspective of an outsider—someone who had not been raised or initiated into the mysteries—and bound about with much occultism, overtones of Theosophy and other new religions, or anthropological theories and reconstructions of old religion; the main exception being “The Call of Cthulhu,” where the aged mestizo Castro spilled some secrets for the benefit of the audience. Yet the fundamental question always was: why worship the Great Old Ones? Why venerate Shub-Niggurath?

It is indicative of the nature of the short piece as a whole, that while the tone is light and darkly comic, there is real meat in the concepts, and sometimes the questions raised cut to the bone:

“Sister,” I said. “Why did you not tell her that Shub-Niggurath grants immortality to her chosen?”
—Valeria Valdes, “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses”

Valdes has a good answer for this, with a reference to Ramsey Campbell’s classic tale of Shub-Niggurath “The Moon-Lens” (1964) for any Mythos lorekeepers among the reading audience. For the most part, “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” emphasizes the surreal contrast of the secretive, monstrous cultists of Shub-Niggurath going door-to-door, pamphleting the neighborhood (there’s a website on the back), striving to stay on script—and it is an interesting script:

Are there mysteries in your life that do not have satisfying answers?

Have you ever felt that no benevolent god watches over you?

Do you feel your life is insignificant?

That you are a tiny ant in a vast, uncaring universe?

…and if you answer yes to the above, “Then you will be happy to know there are answers to your questions, if you dare to look.”

The target of this pitch is Yourladies Benitez, a young hispanic woman. There’s an implicit frisson to that combination of age, ethnicity, and gender when it comes to religion; Benitez embodies the conflict between the heavy Catholic cultural influence of the older generation and the more agnostic or atheistic youth, and the stereotypes of women as more prone to spirituality. On the front of the pamphlet she is handed, is “a young woman very like Yourladies[.]” To the cult of Shub-Niggurath, Benitez is a likely mark—the very things that would set her apart from more traditional stereotypes of Hispanic women as devout Catholics are exactly what Shub-Niggurath’s witnesses are looking for.

The setup and execution of Benitez’ targeting for initiation riffs off the comment from Lovecraft and Bishop’s “The Mound”: the deliberate contrast of socio-cultural norms between the older and younger generation. Yourladies Benitez (female, Hispanic, agnostic?) offers a contrast to Lovecraft & Bishop’s conquistador Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez (male, Spanish, Catholic), and the different perspectives of the two characters is reflected in their reaction to the worship of Shub-Niggurath: Pánfilo’s disgust and Yourladies’ grudging acceptance.

The glimpses Valdes offers of the theology of Shub-Niggurath in the story are few, but quintessential and nihilistic: “There is no point to anything. No point at all.” Yet that basic tenet proves ultimately freeing to Benitez—freedom from her supervisor, her job with the pin-stripe uniform, eventually even her clothes. As the Cthulhu cultist Castro put it, she became:

[…] as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy […]
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

“Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” appeared in She Walks in Shadows (2015). Valeria Valdes’ first novel Chilling Effect is due out in 2019.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Moonshine” (2018) by G. D. Penman

Hogan’s smile slipped again. “You’re asking me to roll over and take it? How is that going to look?”
“Better than an FBI raid on Innsmouth or the mob squad kicking in your door, I’d bet.”
—G. D. Penman, “Moonshine”

Detective Vergil Levard of the catches a cold one, and the hunt for the murderer takes him from Jimmy Hogan’s speakeasy in Arkham to the small seaport of Innsmouth and back. An investigation only hampered by two things—the victim’s tattoo, which ties into Levard’s unquiet past, and the strange attraction between Vergil and Jimmy…and the 1920s is a dangerous time for bootlegging up the Miskatonic River or lifting shirts.

While Lovecraft set most of his stories in the contemporary period, the tales themselves don’t often evoke the tone of the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age. That’s not to say the Great Depression and Prohibition entirely pass the Cthulhu Mythos by; Lovecraft himself has his protagonist quietly procure a bottle of bootleg whiskey to ply Zadok Allen with in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” but for the most part such human institutions take a back seat to the stranger horrors. Nor did Lovecraft or his immediate collaborators attempt to fuse the hardboiled detective style, made infamous by film noir, with the early Mythos—all that would come later, as succeeding generations of authors visited and revisited the old ground. Lovecraft himself wrote:

There is certainly room for another Antarctic tale—in fact for many more, if told by different authors & with wholly different elements & stresses. No field, as such, can be said to be really exhausted; for a scene or theme is merely an auxiliary of the artist in his unique expression of himself. There can be as many different & non-conflicting stories about the same thing, as there are different artists.

—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 25 Dec 1930, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 285

Penman certainly takes different stresses. The setting is well-researched, peppered with period slang appropriate for a hard-nosed cop and a bootlegger to bandy about, and the homoerotic attraction between Vergil and Jimmy is quick, but not forced, immediate, or without social and personal hurdles. The development given to their relationship is part and parcel of the plot, as are some of the reasons why Vergil is hesitant to enter into it—homosexuality could still get you fired, in the 1920s, and might get you killed. This isn’t a stress normally made in Lovecraftian works, although Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows made a point of it in their comic series Providence (2015-2017).

In a longer work, this might have been explored further—and “Moonshine” definitely has the bones of what could have been a hardboiled or atmospheric psychological horror novel, but the balance is struck toward a story that is shorter, punchier, and faster paced, a touch more Dashiell Hammett than Lovecraft. Readers familiar with the Mythos will have already seen a couple plot twists coming—once Vergil and Jimmy hit Innsmouth, it’s only a matter of time before a few old faithful horrors come into play—but Penman has a few tricks up his sleeves, and a couple permutations that are both original and fitting. No Elder Signs or incantations come in to save the day, no convenient Necronomicons are pulled out of muscular keisters. Like a good detective, Vergil pieces the story together…and with a bit of a bluff, the duo survive.

There is one interesting exchange which deserves a bit of a deeper look:

“That’s why I was scared when you first laid one on me. I thought this thing…This thing we are. It was something they’d done to me. Something they’d put in me.”

Vergil Levard’s confession of a past growing up within a cult of his own is a little less shocking to contemporary sensibilities—the dark side of new religious movements in the United States over the past hundred years makes mumbled ideas of “Blood rituals. Really evil stuff […]” as quaint as Lovecraft’s always-off-the-page orgies and rites concerning his own cults—but there is a fundamental recognition of the homosexual experience here which is not often included. The culturally-impressed self-loathing and self-denial, the idea that there is something wrong or alien with them—and maybe that there is someone or something else to blame for that, some malign influence or experience that caused them to be like this. That doesn’t turn out to be the case in “Moonshine,” but it’s a part of the LGBTQ experience which gets little play in Mythos stories, and the very act of opening up about it is obviously a tremendous relief to the Detective, even if he comes to the conclusion that maybe Yog-Sothoth isn’t the reason he’s gay.

It is a rare instance of a positive personal revelation in a Mythos story, and there are thematic parallels with the personal revelations and acceptance of the nameless protagonist in “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” While Vergil Levard maybe hasn’t processed all he experienced as the child of a cult, he has at least come to some greater knowledge and acceptance of himself. The parallels were addressed by Robert M. Price in a footnote in his essay “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider'” (1982):

Faced with so repugnant a prospect as recognizing as his own a sexuality he has always regarded as perverse, the homosexual may for a time try to avoid admitting to himself what he knows only too well to be true. In the classic “reaction formation” pattern, he will redouble his detestation for acknowledged gays, for he “regards as an enemy anyone who appears to be a mirror image of himself, because his enemy is himself” (Weinberg, p. 81) (emphasis added). The parallel to Lovecraft’s story is stunning: the Outsider at first fears the monster as a dangerous Other. Yet he soon discovers that the hideous enemy is himself, literally his own mirror reflection. *

* “The Shadow over Innsmouth” may be interpreted in a similar light.

In “Moonshine,” Penman toys with this formulation—Jimmy Hogan is both a criminal and out-and-proud, while Vergil Levard is both police and in the closet—but in this case, opposites do attract. Of course, in this case it helps that they have something of a common cause and, soon after meeting, a common enemy: the conflict helps drive what might otherwise have been a couple chapters of self-loathing, introspection, bad feelings and missed connections—not bad stuff for a novel, but would have ruined the pace of a fast-set story like this.

G. D. Penman has written and published a number of short stories, but “Moonshine” published through the queer small press JMS Books, is his first Mythos story.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Are You Loathsome Tonight?” (1998) by Poppy Z. Brite

Now the stage is bare and I’m standing there
With emptiness all around
And if you won’t come back to me
Then they can bring the curtain down
—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Not many writers would say that Elvis Presley had much to do with Lovecraft; the few who would are like to take a comedic bent, as Yvonne Navarro did in “WWRD” (2018). Yet if a writer were to step back away from the Mythos and look at the themes and ideas expressed by Lovecraft in his fiction—there is a horror story to be woven from the life of Elvis, one as terrible and inevitable as all human stories are.

Poppy Z. Brite (Billy Martin) is better-known in Mythos circles for “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” (1990), which has been reprinted many times, including in the seminal Cthulhu 2000: A Lovecraftian Anthology (1995). “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” gets far less attention, and far fewer reprints. The lack of response is probably because it is not what people expect, when they come to a “Lovecraftian” story: no Mythos, no tentacles or eldritch tomes. Parts of it are passages taken directly from books about Elvis’ life, and death, interspersed with stories about snakes which intersect oddly with the rest—they fit, like pieces of a puzzle where the larger picture is still obscure. It’s Lovecraft credits are boiled down to a single quotation, appended at the very end of the text:

Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.
—H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

Like “Hypothetical Materfamilias” (1994) by Adèle Olivia Gladwell and “Commencement” (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates, this is a story which stretches the bounds of “Lovecraftian.” It is a work patently informed by something Lovecraft wrote, yet not dependent on any of his individual creations. The narrative is nontraditional, the atmosphere it develops is one of slowly growing disquiet, rather than cosmic horror.

Images, interposed, become conflated by context. The roiling bolus of snakes in a mating ball. The terribly swollen megacolon of Elvis as he sits on his jet-black throne, drugs slowing his digestive system to a terrible crawl. It takes the imagination of the reader to fit the pieces together, to suggest a greater horror than reality…and there is an art and skill in the arrangement of those pieces, to make readers take that approach. The terrible inevitability of the piece lends a sense of apprehension to the whole affair—because most everyone should know how this ends. Elvis, even in death, is a figure larger than life, his semiotic ghost pervading the popular culture.

The craft of the story can be seen especially in the beginning and the ending; the title and the closing quotation of Lovecraft. The title is a reference to Elvis’ 1960 hit, yet with the twist: what is loathsome? Is it what Elvis would become, as years of abuse took its toll? The title sets up the sense of apprehension, the situation-normal-all-fucked-up; it hints at the reader what to expect—and Lovecraft, at the end, tells them what they just read. What the reader sought, or experienced, whether or not they recognized it at the time.

“Are You Loathsome Tonight?” was first published in the collection of the same name, and has been reprinted in Self-Made Man (1999), The Children of Cthulhu (2000), and is available on kindle. Poppy Z. Brite/Billy Martin currently has a GoFundMe campaign.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“The Insider” (1998) by Stanley C. Sargent

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider”

The conceit of “The Insider” is that it is a prequel to Lovecraft’s “The Outsider.” Although both stories stand well enough on their own, once you get the idea the slight aping of Lovecraft’s diction and the general direction of Sargent’s story takes on a new dimension. It’s a solid, well-written Mythos tale, clever without being extravagant or feeling the need to explain everything, with a satisfying ending.

“The Insider” is not one of Sargent’s better-known tales; his claim to fame, if any, probably rests on the story “The Black Brat of Dunwich” (1997) and his essay “Howard Phillips Whateley, An Observation” (1999, rev. 2002), both of which focus on alternative interpretations of Wilbur Whateley—who, like the eponymous Insider/Outsider, is marked from birth as one apart. It’s a subject that Sargent, growing up as a homosexual, could and did empathize with. It was Sargent who has made the strongest, or at least most elegant argument that Lovecraft himself might have been a closeted homosexual:

I read “The Outsider” when I was about 14 and beginning to realize there was something very different about me, my deep dark secret. We are talking about growing up in the farm country of Ohio in the early ’60s here. When I read “The Outsider,” I felt convinced the author had gone through the same situation I was going through, the abject horror of recognizing you are gay in a very anti-gay world.

Years later, I tried to find an alternative reason for HPL considering himself such an extreme “outsider,” but I discovered no plausible other reason for such an extreme feeling of being an isolated monster. I didn’t really care a whit about HPL’s sexual orientation (I am not trying to claim him as one of “us”), so at the time it occurred to me that I might be projecting a bit.

Yet, as I read more about HPL’s life, I began to see that all the ingredients were there. His upbringing with a dominant, overly protective mother (who dressed him as a girl for the first few years of his life) and the nearly total absence of a father is the classic formula for a male child being gay. Although he declared his distaste for homosexuals, in particular effeminate males, he was often described as effeminate himself. Plus he was a close friend with Samuel Loveman for many years and Loveman was hardly in the closet about his activities. Finally, I can come up with no other logical explanation for HPL’s close relationship with the teenage Barlow during the last years of his life, to the point of making Barlow his literary executor.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe HPL was able to cast off the conventions he clung to so desperately enough to actually “come out.” I think HPL saw in Barlow the self-accepting talented writer he had always wanted to be himself but couldn’t be. I wouldn’t be surprised if Barlow had discussed his own “outsiderness” with a very understanding HPL, but I doubt HPL could have ever brought himself to own up to his own similar orientation.

It all makes even more sense if you interpret “The Dunwich Horror” as an autobiographical cloaked confession of his dilemma. Wilbur obviously represents HPL, all the way down to HPL believing his own appearance was “hideous” (again, thanks to mom), and I believe the twin brother was the a symbol of the homosexual desires HPL so desperately tried to suppress. No one could see the monster and it was essentially so evil that it had to be contained. Yet it kept growing and even Wilbur feared it would someday break out (read “come out”) and destroy the world (Lovecraft’s little conservative world). That thought terrified him as being gay went against everything he believed in; it must have been awful for him. He surely married Sonia, a mother figure, in hope of changing his orientation, a very common and futile mistake. If he didn’t confess his problem to her, she undoubtedly guessed and was sympathetic.

I suppose I’ll be up for a lynching when die-hard Lovecraftians read this, but I’m convinced I’m right. Even my friend Wilum Pugmire disagrees with me strongly on this point. Lovecraft would certainly have equated his unnamable secret with Wilde’s unspeakable love.
—Stanley C. Sargent, interview with Peter A. Worthy (1998)

Whether or not readers agree with Sargent’s interpretation as fact, from a literary standpoint the idea has a degree of merit: it is possible to engage with Lovecraft’s creations from that viewpoint…and why not? It’s a fair cop. Robert M. Price engaged with the idea in his essay “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider'” (1982). It was probably not Lovecraft’s intent in this case to provide such an interpretation…but readers are free to interpret an author’s work as they would.

Knowing Sargent’s thoughts on “The Outsider” can in turn influence a reader’s response to “The Insider.” The theme of the lonely, ostracized young man that resorts finally to cutting as a release from the stigma of being different—only to be further punished and set apart for his behavior—resonates. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” is designed to provoke empathy in the readers, and “The Insider” is both a response and an echo to that. “The Insider” need not be an allegory for homosexuality per se, any more than “The Outsider” must be read in such light; both stories focus on both external appearance and the desire for acceptance, aspects of human experience which are adaptable to many different syntax—because we all live in a world where discrimination is real, be it based on age, gender, sexuality, physical appearance or ability, race, or faith.

Have we not all been an Insider/Outsider at some point, if only in our own heads?

“The Insider” was published Tales of Lovecraftian Horror #8 (1998), and was republished in Sargent’s collection The Taint of Lovecraft (2002).

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Some Distant Baying Sound” (2009) by W. H. Pugmire

Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Hound”

St. John is dead, and Christina Sturhman takes the revolver out of her mouth, determined not to end her life in so cowardly a fashion. She travels instead to Sesqua Valley, the secret corner of the Pacific Northwest which W. H. Pugmire has built and claimed for his own, to ask for help from the strange beings there—the sorcerer Simon Gregory Williams, his assistant Marceline, and his brother the poet William Davis Manly. Ever following her is the hound…

Like “Houndwife” (2010) by Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Some Distant Baying Sound” is in ways a continuation and a tribute to H. P. Lovecraft’s seminal tale of two grave-robbing decadents who eventually unearth something profane and come to a grisly end because of it—and it is interesting and sometimes enlightening to see what two different authors will make of the same material, and the different directions they will take from the common beginning in Lovecraft’s story.

Both Pugmire and Kiernan take Lovecraft’s story essentially at face value: though they may add details, they subtract nothing, and by luck they happen to focus on different aspects of the story, so the three stories could almost form a little trinity—such is the way the Cthulhu Mythos grows. The major difference is that Pugmire makes the unnamed protagonist of “The Hound” a woman, where Kiernan implicitly suggests they were male. The latter is more likely Lovecraft’s intention, but the story is ambiguous enough to permit either reading.

The question of why Pugmire went with this interpretation is an open one. Both Lovecraft and Pugmire’s stories have Sturhman and St. John in an intimate friendship, but not explicitly a romantic or sexual one…and even if it were sexual, there is no reason why it could not be homosexual; Pugmire has depicted gay men in relationships in his fiction before. Having Sturhman as female perhaps side-steps any question of sexual attraction to two great beasts of Sesqua Valley, Simon Gregory Williams and Williams Davis Manly, allowing them to be platonic enemies and friends, respectively…although again, Pugmire has never shied away from the inhabitants of the valley having a fluid sexuality.

Upon arriving to meet Simon Gregory Williams and his assistant, Sturhman succumbs to Marceline’s seduction rather easily, though the subtle insinuation of Simon orchestrating the affair for his own purposes raises questions of consent. This gives an opportunity for Pugmire to indulge in the sensual, poetic prose that he is known for, and it is a curious coincidence that both Kiernan and Pugmire, following their own muses and devices, both feature lesbian sexuality so openly in their tributes…although there is a bit of play to be considered between sexuality and gender identity in the two stories.

What is the gender of the Hound/sphinx entity, which pursues in the three stories? In Lovecraft’s original, gender is unknown and irrelevant: it is the figure of pursuit. “Houndwife” suggests implicitly that the Hound is a male figure, but the gender (and even reality) of the Hound is again left ambiguous, and again is irrelevant for the Hound’s function in the story. Yet in “Some Distant Baying Sound,” there is a crucial binary presented by Williams Davis Manly, between the female and male sphinx, and this indeed turns out to be the case because in the story the distinction becomes a necessary one. In all the story, the actual gender of the Hound/sphinx is relevant only insofar as it relates to their relationship with the individual being “hounded,” and as this never includes sexual predation, gender largely doesn’t enter into the plot.

The denouement of “Some Distant Baying Sound” comes in a rush. The early parts of the story had a rather dream-logic pace that fits with Pugmire’s style and his characterization of the Valley itself. The pieces fit together well enough, but the expected confrontation turns into more of an acceptance of self—one more obvious in hindsight, and which yet leaves some unanswered questions…although it seems clear that Sesqua Valley has gained a new permanent resident.

Neither Pugmire or Kiernan’s stories offer a particularly deep exegesis of the Mythos, although fans might appreciate their attention to detail, and the subtle expansion of certain elements connected to the jade of Leng. These are not tributes meant necessarily to explicate a murky corner of Lovecraft’s world, but sensual explorations and extrapolations of the basic atmosphere and key elements of “The Hound.” Celebrations of the mood that Lovecraft evoked, with mysteries yet remaining mysterious and some graves left unspoilt for the next generation of necrophiles.

“Some Distant Baying Sound” was first published in Pugmire’s collection Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley (2009), and republished in his collections The Tangled Muse (2010) and Uncommon Places: A Collection of Exquisites (2012). Unlike “Houndwife,” “Some Distant Baying Sound” stands less well on its own. Full appreciation requires at least a passing familiarity with either Lovecraft’s story or Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley tales, and preferably both. Given that the story is published primarily in Pugmire’s own collections, among his other Sesqua Valley tales, this works out fine. If at some future date it ends up in an anthology next to “Houndwife,” the editor might need to add a bit of clarification for readers unfamiliar with Pugmire’s corpus.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Houndwife” (2010) by Caitlín R. Kiernan

In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper’s neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker’s seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Hound”

“Houndwife” is a tribute to Lovecraft, and a continuation. It is not a pastiche, as are so many Mythos tales, because it does not attempt to borrow or even suggest anything of Lovecraft’s prose style, however much it may take specific images and ideas from his stories; break them apart, expand on, and rework them. Lovecraft’s story is a background episode: it is unnecessary for the reader to have knowledge of “The Hound” to appreciate and understand “Houndwife,” but those who have read both have perhaps a greater understanding than those who have only read one. It stands on its own, but together they suggest more. That’s rare.

Caitlín R. Kiernan has style.

“Houndwife” revolves around several of her familiar foci—lesbians, the American South contrasted with New England, the Lovecraft Mythos, ghouls, the Church of Starry Wisdom, the occult, and broken perception. The protagonist is an unnamed woman, unlearned but highly intuitive: wisdom borne of experience contrasted against book-knowledge. And this is the story of how she went through a transformative experience, died and was buried, rose again. Not as a martyr or a messiah, not quite as a sacrifice. The experience changes the protagonist, unglues her from the understanding of time. The reader experiences in a linear fashion the protagonist’s now decidedly nonlinear existence.

Lovecraft’s jade amulet from the corpse-eating cult of Leng is the Chekov’s gun of the piece, waiting to be fired. The central mystery of the curious hound-sphinx remains, refracted through the protagonist’s shattered timeline. Only once in a thousand years is a woman chosen to be the houndwife. What that means, ultimately, the answers the Starry Wisdom (and the readers) want, are not readily forthcoming. This is not a Mythos story with passages of long exposition on cosmology or the family trees of the gods: this is a prose poem to experience. Answers, if there are any, will come with reflection.

Aside from the excellent prose styling, and the masterfully done nonlinear structure of the narrative, “Houndwife” is an exemplar of Kiernan’s careful handling and development of characters and relationships, which is part of what sets her work apart from many Mythos writers. While Kiernan has written erotic works, this is not one of them: the lesbian relationship between the protagonist and her girlfriend Isobel Endecott is not there for titillation, but to drive the connection between the protagonist and the cult, and contrast the ties between Isobel and the cult and Isobel and the protagonist. Glimpsed only in fragments, the sense is there of a real relationship, one where both partners are clearly distinct, but a strong attraction and attachment binds them—although strained and slightly alienated by the ritual of death and rebirth.

That too is one of Kiernan’s familiar themes, the strained relationship despite mutual attraction, and is reminiscent of her earlier story “At the Gates of Deeper Slumber” (2009), where the unnamed narrator and Suzanne are not the perfect lesbian couple: they have disagreements, fights, and flaws. They quibble and worry over gender roles and each other’s space. Suzanne refers to the narrator as a “butch dyke” in reference to the persona she projects, but the narrative itself reveals the uncertainty and discomfort—perhaps even jealousy—that accompany the invasion of her home by the Shining Trapezohedron. The narrator cannot give full force to her worries for fear of alienating her partner, and it is the fear of losing Suzanne that is the consuming dread of the piece, more than anything else. Kiernan has revisited this theme of love, loss, and the Shining Trapezohedron in her later piece “Ex Libris” (2012).

The “Kiernan Mythos” is a bit hazier than comparable efforts by other writers, her contributions tend to be free-standing, without the need for strong tie-ins, though they may exist if you look for them: Isobel Endecott probably related to the Endecotts of “Pickman’s Other Model (1929)” (2008). She has developed no single common setting like Lovecraft’s Miskatonic region, Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley, or W. H. Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley, although certain works like the recent Agents of Dreamland (2017) and Black Helicopters (2018) are tied together, and she has four connected stories in the “Dandridge Cycle”, but she does not invent new gods with unspeakable names or eldritch grimoires which are consistent in story after story. Kiernan’s Mythos tales like “Houndwife” are strange growths sprouting from the Lovecraft Mythos, new stories growing from old soil, each unique and distinct.

I should hope that not even the most die-hard admirer of H. P. Lovecraft’s work would date argue that “The Hound” (1922) is a well-written story. And yet I love it. Despite all it’s garish purple-prose histrionics, the story pushes my buttons. So, it was probably inevitable that I would someday write a tribute to this minor Lovecraft tale, and in March 2010 that’s exactly what I did.
—Caitlín R. Kiernan, Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan vol. 2, 360

“Houndwife” was first published in 2010 in the Sirenia Digest, and first saw print in Black Wings of Cthulhu 2 (2012). It has been reprinted in hardcover twice in her collections Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan vol. 2 (2015) and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales of Caitlín R. Kiernan (2018).

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)