Harlem Unbound (2017) by Darker Hue Studios

Black Harlem—of possible interest to you as a source of sy[n]copated melody—is impressive to the Easterner chiefly on account of its size, since all the eastern towns have large African sections. To many westerners—as, for instance, a friend of mine in Appleton, Wisconsin, who never saw a nigger till he was in college—it would be quite stupefying. I don’t know whether are are any blacks in your part of the world or not—of, if so, how thick they are. In Harlem there must be about as many as there are in all the southern states put together—one realises it unpleasantly in the uptown Broadway subway, one of whose three branchings above 9th St. leads to the black belt. […] All the drug stores carry rabbit’s-foot luck charms, dream books, anti-kink fluid & pomade for the wool of dusky sheiks & sirens, & (also for the rites of Congolese coiffure) devices called “straightening-irons.” The clothing-stores feature gaudy & eccentric suits & flaming haberdashery.
—H. P. Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, 27 Mar 1934
Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel & Nils Frome (2016) 65-67

Harlem Unbound is a roleplaying game supplement published by Darker Hue Studios for use with The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game (Chaosium), and compatible with the GUMSHOE system used by Lovecraftian roleplaying games like Trail of Cthulhu (Pelgrane Press). The brainchild of Chris Spivey and a multiracial group of writers, artists, editors, etc., it has the distinction of being the first Lovecraftian roleplaying product to focus on the black experience during the 1920s in the United States—a period of legal segregation, jazz and blues, the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Yet to appreciate what Harlem Unbound is and why it is important, it is necessary to look back on what Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying is and where it came from.

Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974, and initiated the popularization of roleplaying games as a hobby and the roleplaying game book as a form of literature. Heavily inspired by pulp fiction, Lovecraft and other Weird Tales favorites appear in “Appendix N: Inspirational and Education Reading” in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), and Cthulhu Mythos made an appearance in the 1980 supplement Deities & Demigods—but quickly discovered that another company, Chaosium, had acquired license to adapt Lovecraft’s works for roleplaying game purposes. They published the first edition of The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game in 1981; almost forty years later, the game is on it’s 7th edition, and has spawned innumerable spin-offs and third-party supplements: Delta Green, Achtung! Cthulhu, The Laundry, Trail of Cthulhu, etc.

The conceit of Call of Cthulhu is that the player’s characters are investigators; one takes the role of the Keeper to guide the game, adjudicate rules, and act as referee and storyteller. By default the action is set during the 1920s-1930s period (though other settings have since expanded the scope of the game and its various spin-offs). There is a heavy simulationist element to the game—vehicles, weapons, and other equipment are adapted primarily from what would have been available in real life, with prices for goods taken from contemporary catalogs; contemporary fashions and events like World War I, the Great Depression, and Prohibition often feature in the setting materials; and historical individuals like Duke Ellington, Al Capone, and Aleister Crowley are included alongside fictional characters. Real history blends with the fictional background of stories by Lovecraft and others.

The endemic racism, misogyny, and nativism of the period is a bit of a sticking point, and not one that Chaosium and various other companies and writers have handled well. There is a conflict in writing Call of Cthulhu material between catering to contemporary sensibilities and the accurate depiction of hard realities of what African-Americans and other people of color experienced during Lovecraft’s lifetime—and in his fiction. There are few black or ethnic characters in Lovecraft’s fiction, and those that do exist are not generally portrayed positively; the Cthulhu Mythos fiction generated by Lovecraft’s contemporaries such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and August Derleth are not much better in this regard. To adapt the material of the Cthulhu Mythos to the purposes of play the writers have to balance accurate portrayal of the material versus contemporary knowledge and acceptable use.

It can be a difficult balance to strike. The horror evoked by Lovecraft when he presented Marceline Bedard from “Medusa’s Coil” as being mixed-race reflected the horror of white people to the idea of people of color that could “pass.” Today the “revelation” is downright offensive to contemporary audiences; a straight adaptation of Marceline that focused on her black ancestry would be accurate to the source material, but unacceptably tone-deaf. Yet one of the issues faced by Call of Cthulhu products is meeting these very challenges…and failing. Charles Saunders wrote of a similar issue in fantasy fiction in his essay “Die, Black Dog!”, where contemporary writers were repeating the characterization of pulpsters from the 1930s:

[…] in the worlds of today’s fantasy, the racial atmosphere remains unchanged. Blacks are either ignored or are portrayed in the same hackneyed stereotypes that should have died with colonialism.

The latter has been especially true for supplements set in Africa such as The Cairo Guidebook, Secrets of the Congo, Secrets of Kenya, Secrets of Morocco, Mysteries of Sudan and the Achtung! Cthulhu Guide to North Africa; or Asia such as Myseries of the Raj, Secrets of Japan, and Secrets of Tibet; and to a lesser extant in supplements dedicated to cities with large multiracial populations, such as Secrets of New York and the New Orleans Guidebook. Most supplements to the game frankly ignore race, or if it is an issue deal with it curtly and perfunctorily. Long-time players will probably be familiar with the scenario “Dead Man Stomp” and its “Special Comments”:

Race is important in this adventure. Identify the race of each investigator before play begins. Choice of race brings no penalty, but a questioner’s race can determine the accessibility of information. Read this adventure before presenting it: if all the investigators are African-American, for instance, rather than a racial cross-section, or are all white, or are all Asian-Americans, the keeper must devise some patches. The scenario presumes that the investigators are white.
—The Call of Cthulhu (2005, 6th edition) 270

For most Call of Cthulhu products, “presumes that the investigators are white” is the default. Just as it is in Lovecraft’s fiction. When the writers, editors, and audience are all largely white themselves, the “presumption” often goes unnoticed, unquestioned, and un-examined. Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying, as an extension of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, ultimately faces many of the same issues regarding race, and for the same reasons.

Harlem Unbound is something else. The book itself is written very typically for Call of Cthulhu supplements: roughly the first half is dedicated to background materials, systems, character options, scenario hooks, and non-player characters for a game set in Harlem, while the back half contains a handful of scenarios for the Harlem setting. The books aren’t so standardized that they write themselves, but there’s a clear goal for every book written in a real-life historical setting after the advent of the World Wide Web: be better than the equivalent Wikipedia page, provide enough hooks for roleplayers to build stories off of.

Harlem Unbound easily does that: the writing is crisp, informed, and focused. Tangents like the Harlem Hellfighters, the Harlem Race Riot of 1935, and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan are relegated to sidebars. The Mythos elements are generally slight in the first half of the book, but given the dearth of Mythos fiction set in Harlem, the writers didn’t have much raw material to work with. The game presents character creation rules for Harlemites using both Call of Cthulhu‘s Basic Roleplaying System and the GUMSHOE system; from a game design standpoint it’s a professional product, with little touches of flavor in the new occupations made available for players, like Conjure Woman and Hellfighter. The production values are very high, especially considering this is the first product from an independent studio: the vivid use of red against the white page and black text stands out well, and extends into much of the artwork, making for a striking visual aesthetic that’s easy to read.

The very best section, and worth the price of the whole book, is the chapter on storytelling. This is traditionally an area which Call of Cthulhu fails to provide much if any useful guidance, and almost never with regards to racism and racial appropriation. The approach is hard-hitting and to the point:

When playing someone of a different race, there must be sensitivity to avoid any form of cultural appropriation. It is possible to honor and interact with the culture on more than just an aesthetic level. Blackface? Just don’t. Don’t try to talk with a “black” accent. Don’t try to have “black” mannerisms or fall into any of the countless stereotypes.

These are real issues for players to deal with. While it might be laudable in a period drama to depict the realities of life and language of discrimination that people of color lived under daily, in a casual roleplaying game environment the realistic depiction by gamers of 1920s racism is generally not acceptable—players do not want to be discriminated against in-game for the race or gender of their characters, nor should the casual racism of the period be accepted as something for players to perform “in character.” If you are going to incorporate racial discrimination as part of the game setting, it needs to be front and center, part of the social contract that players enter into when they agree to game—and there need to be limits.

Case in point, in a film or television program, the N-word will be weighed in the script long before an actor ever utters it, the impact and meaning judged according to the needs of the plot and the characterization of the players—roleplaying gamers cannot be expected to evaluate that kind of context on the fly, nor should they be encouraged to use it without restraint simply because it was in common use in the 1920s. Casual racism, even in “fun”, should not be encouraged. As Spivey puts it:

CAN I USE THE N-WORD IN MY GAME?
Short answer? No.

It is never okay for a non-black Keeper to use it, and even black Keepers should be wary of it. “Wait, what? It’s just a game…” is possibly the thought going through your mind.

Let’s assume that everyone who would want to say that word in the game is not racist or bigoted (that laughing you hear is my internal cynic). Even if all of that remains true, what does using the word really bring to a scene? Is it impact or shock you’re looking for? If so, that can be conveyed by the actions of your antagonists.

The last half of the book mostly consists of five scenarios (“Harlem Hellfighters Never Die,” “Harlem (K)Nights,” “The Contender: A Love Story,” and “Dreams and Broken Wings”). This is followed by “Souls of Harlem,” a guide to the Harlemites with important focuses on issues like LGBTQ, the Italian and Jewish communities, Nelia Larsen’s novel Passing, the all-black 1921 musical Shuffle Along, and Beta Israel; and brief appendices with a guide to period slang, a timeline of major events, recommended media, etc.

Harlem Unbound is a very solid Call of Cthulhu supplement. Like many CoC products, the writers focus on setting and verisimilitude first, and if Mythos material seems lacking, the material integrates well with other CoC products: Keepers can drop in NPCs or locations from Secrets of New York without a problem, or borrow the Voodoo rules from The New Orleans Guidebook to give root doctors and Hoodoo practitioners more bite, for example. Gumby’s Bookstore could serve as the focal point for a Bookhounds of London-style campaign set in Harlem (Bookhounds is a Trail of Cthulhu expansion using the GUMSHOE system). The 369th Infantry regiment, the famous Harlem Hellfighters, saw service in World War II, and could easily fit into an Achtung! Cthulhu campaign.

The straightforward approach to difficult subjects like racism, language, segregation, and roleplaying are all appreciated. Harlem Unbound provides something new to Call of Cthulhu that isn’t yet another avatar of Nyarlathotep or one more sinister cult or terrible tome: a game that doesn’t presume players or their characters are white.

I backed the Kickstarter for the publication of Harlem Unbound on faith; I haven’t read any of Chris Spivey’s work on Cthulhu Confidential, or seen anything of the work of the other writers Bob Heist, Ruth Tillman, Alex Mayo, Sarah Hood, and Neall Raemonn Price, but I liked the look of the samples and I’m glad to have backed the project and received the finish product. As a genre, Cthulhu Mythos roleplay has been so stuck in a rut for so long, we need books like this to really shine a light on how little attention most works for Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu and related games devote to the portrayal and experience of people of color, either as characters within the game as as players and Keepers.

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

“Magna Mater” (2015) by Arinn Dembo

One thing—you may be sure that if I ever entitled a story The White Ape, there would be no ape in it. There would be something at first taken for an ape, which would not be an ape. But how can one ever get those subtleties across?
—H. P. Lovecraft to Edwin Baird, 3 Feb 1924, Selected Letters 1.294

The story opens with a reflection on the essential narcissism of homo sapiens as the nameless female protagonist approaches the British Museum, sometime in the 19th century. A good time to reflect on the species. Anthropologists and biologists began to re-evaluate what it meant to be human, and racialists muddied the waters.

Evolution, that gentle assertion of gradual change in a species over time, had proved both contentious and poorly understood well into the 20th century—put on trial and lost when John Thomas Scopes was found guilty and fined in 1925. Evolution resisted hierarchical relationships, defining human beings as just one animal among many; racists depended on hierarchies to support their prejudices of superior and inferior, measured skulls and facial angles to “prove” their claims. It was common, during Lovecraft’s lifetime, to classify black people as biologically primitive by ascribing them ape-like qualities or directly inferring close kinship:

The negro is obviously a link betwixt apedom & man; though all species do not show equal affinity to the beast. The Bantu of Central & Western Africa (The Guinea Coast nigger) is the most gorilla-like; whilst the tribes of Eastern & Southern Africa are more or less permeated with blood from other races. The Bantu is undoubtedly the purest negro type—the ape-man in all his sweet simplicity.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 22 Jun 1917, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 111

Sentiments like these can sometimes lead to reading of Lovecraft’s fiction as racial allegory. “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” can be read as a thinly-veiled parable of miscegenation, with the mysterious bride out of Africa and the social and biological degeneration of her descendants among what was an upper-class British family. Yet that reading is too simple by itself: there are distinct parallels between “Arthur Jermyn” and the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, including the white or grey apes, the lost city in Africa, and the princess of that lost race—and the cultural complex of ideas surrounding eugenics, devolution, and the blurry line between hominid species popularized by “missing links” like the Piltdown Man hoax.

Missing links are a subject that weighs on the nameless protagonist of “Magna Mater,” as she bewitches her way into the depths of the British Museum. The story bares similarity to “ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” (2012) by Molly Tanzer, not just for the common setting, but because it is predicated on the reader being familiar enough with the references to Lovecraft’s fiction to understand what is going on—Dembo doesn’t reiterate the entire plot of “Arthur Jermyn.” She doesn’t need to. The story wasn’t written to re-package Lovecraft’s mysteries, or to rebut them, but to expand on and explore them in a new way. “Homo jermynus” is enough to clue in readers to the story’s background as the narrator narrows in on the common object that binds “Magna Mater” and “Arthur Jermyn.”

Virginia Richter in Literature after Darwin (2011) identifies several tropes of popular Victorian and early contemporary fiction, including regression (the fear of devolution), simianation (the blurring of boundary between human and ape), and assimilation (the threat of contamination through contact with the evolutionary Other, through regression, miscegenation, etc.) Several of these play out through “Arthur Jermyn,” and by extension needed to be addressed in “Magna Mater.” Not reiterated, exactly, but revisited, reimagined, and reworked. Lovecraft’s story is one of anthropological anxiety, the biological doom that cannot be escaped save through self-destruction; Dembo’s story is one of anthropological otherness and acceptance.

Regression is a problem of perception: the stress is made that jermynus is a hominid species, evolutionary equal to homo sapiens, separate and distinct from apes. Simianation is addressed through an almost scientific examination of jermynus, anthropological anxiety giving way to anthropological voyeurism—not just of mere biology, but of culture. Like homo sapiens, homo jermynus is an intelligent, social animal. Yet the crux of “Magna Mater” is assimilation. Where Lovecraft wrote:

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.

Dembo’s nameless protagonist expresses empathy:

Things are always hard for mixed children.

Assimilation still proves a threat to homo sapiens, but the manner in which it is achieved is more akin to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. Rather than being a source of degeneration for the human race, homo jermynus:

The women of a superior race are always ‘beautiful.’ You want to make with me and make strong children. Offspring who will inherit my superior genes […] Our children pass on the traits for golden hair, for blue eyes, or stronger bones. Wherever you see those features, you are seeing our descendants among you.”

There’s a reversal of expectations here: racists of Lovecraft’s vintage denigrated black people as being primitive, more closely akin to apes because of their physical features, while in “Magna Mater” the script is flipped so that the stereotypical “Aryan” traits of blonde hair and blue eyes is revealed to be because of their intermarriage with homo jermynus, rather than any innate quirk of evolution. As a story element, it is problematic: making white people special isn’t the opposite of claiming black people are inferior. While it is doubtful Dembo intended the reading in that way, since it is really an elaboration of Lovecraft’s emphasis on “white apes,” it is an exemplar of the difficulties that can come from trying to address racial text and subtext in extant works. Dembo’s approach bears similarities to certain readings of “Arthur Jermyn,” notably:

What Lovecraft appears to be suggesting is that the inhabitants of the primeval African city of “white apes” are not only the “missing link” between ape and human but also the ultimate source for all white civilization. The entire white race is derived from this primal race in Africa, a race that had corrupted itself by intermingling with apes.
—S. T. Joshi, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999, 365)

The nameless protagonist doesn’t go quite so far in her claims, but just as the Übermensch manages to destroy the normal man by their very presence, her very presence destroys many of the narcissistic precepts which homo sapiens had of themselves which she had commented on in the opening paragraph.

“Magna Mater” packs a lot into a relatively short and simple story. The plot is exhausted in a few pages, the challenges that the narrator encounters are few and relatively easily overcome; she enters the story with a single motivation and there is never a sense that she will be stymied from accomplishing that, nor is she. Much of the conflict occurs not with the characters in the pages but in the reader as they work to assimilate the new information—and it works. Every setup in the story has a payoff, the characterization is en pointe throughout, so that the very ineptitude of the human characters underscores the overt exposition regarding homo jermynus. Even the brief action scene is well-played to contrast the sapiens and jermynus characters, in action and reaction, and reinforce the central themes of the story, revisiting and reworking those introduced by Lovecraft.

The nameless female protagonist is, in more ways than one, a good example of the complementary nature of the “Magna Mater” and “Arthur Jermyn.” In Lovecraft’s story the ancestral mater familias is an unnamed, veiled figure, whose very existence drives the plot. Yet she is a figure without agency, unspeaking, unable to act in life, and in death represented only by her descendants and her preserved corpse. The lead of “Magna Mater,” while still nameless and veiled, is the active figure that the nameless grandmother was not, and it is her will and actions which accomplish things, her knowledge that enlightens the audience—and her reaction to the body of that ancestral African princess markedly different than Arthur Jermyn’s.

“Magna Mater” was first published in She Walks in Shadows (2015), an anthology of Lovecraftian fiction by female writers, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. Arinn Dembo’s other Lovecraftian stories include “Between the Lines” (2003) and “ICHTHYS” (2009).

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

“Keeping Festival” (1997) by Mollie L. Burleson

I first “met” Lovecraft around 1950, when I saw Orson Welles read “The Rats in the Walls on TV. I was stunned. Later I searched for Lovecraft at libraries, book sales, and just about everywhere. Finally in 1971 I found a copy of Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft. I wrote an inscription in it stating how happy I was to find it! […] He took me to Marblehead (Kingsport, as I soon learned), and we met Ken Neily there to celebrate the real Yuletide. What a wonderful experience that was. We went there for fifteen years, never missing a one. We went in sleet, snow, ice, rain, etc. In time, other lovers of HPL joined us […]
—Mollie Burleson, The Providence Pals 47

Marblehead, December 21st. Lovecraft aficionado Paul wants to experience Yuletide in Kingsport, for the first time, to try and find something of what inspired Lovecraft to write “The Festival”—and finds, along the way, an unexpected bit of company. A three page story which is not exactly an homage to Lovecrat’s fiction, but to the meaning of that fiction to one person. A prose poem about the experience of Lovecraft’s fiction, which can be both solitary and intensely personal or a shared and communal.

As with “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ, there is a degree of awareness involved in this story. “Keeping Festival” establishes quickly that Lovecraft existed, as a writer of fiction, as he does in the world we know; there is never a suggestion, as is sometimes popular in works like Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons (1978), that the Cthulhu Mythos is also real—the world presented is as close to a realistic and accurate portrayal of contemporary Marblehead as possible. It is not, strictly speaking, a fantastic story at all but an episode from life.

Until a nameless man arrives to share the experience, one as immediately familiar to Cthulhu Mythos fans as the appearance of a particular beekeeper would be to Sherlockians. At this point, the brief sketch dips into magical realism—or perhaps just a daydream—as the stranger takes their leave, and Paul is left in a sublime moment of reliving a scene from their story.

Without being a sequel or prequel or in any way a part of the narrative of Lovecraft’s “The Festival,” Burleson’s is nevertheless completely beholden to it. In three pages she tries to capture something like fifteen years of Yuletide gatherings on the same scene. Not for the sake of Lovecraftian horror, or to add on to the Cthulhu Mythos, or as a commentary on Lovecraft’s fiction but as a testament to how it made her feel. The old familiar ritual, the desire for a communion with Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who had walked those snow-laden streets which he had set down on paper in 1923.

On each 21st, Don would stand on the steps of the church, prototype of the one in “The Festival,” and recite from it with all of us looking on, beginning with “The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see.”
—Mollie Burleson, The Providence Pals 48

Is the reader then a participant, or a witness? Context is important. This is not a story for the uninitiated: readers without a fair familiarity with “The Festival” are not going to pick up on the references to that story, just as readers unfamiliar with Lovecraft himself will not pick up on the Easter egg of the piece. This is the kind of short fiction that can really only be written to an audience already steeped in Lovecraftiana—and combined with the realistic and almost sentimental tone, it’s perhaps no surprise that its one and only appearance in print is the relatively obscure Return to Lovecraft Country (1997).

Mollie Burleson has written a handful other pieces of Lovecraftiana and Mythos fiction, including “The Buglight” (1994), “Literary Remains” (1996), “The Dome” (2010), “Hotel del Lago” (2014), “The Quest” (2016), and “A Yuletide Carol” (2016), but is probably best remembered for her essay “The Outsider: A Woman?” (1990, Lovecraft Studies #22/23), which suggests an alternative and influential reading of Lovecraft’s story.

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

“Flash Frame” (2010) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House”

Scene: Mexico City, 1982. A character in its own right, which fills in the role of the story just by showing up. The narrator is a freelance journalist, hard-boiled as they come, carefully devoid of name or gender. The framing of the story is so slight, the reader might gloss over it: the narrator is in the present day, where Wikipedia makes a mockery of research, but recalling an incident from 28 years prior. A new editor wants something better than the usual stories, the journalist sniffs around for one—and finds it, at an adult theater named El Tabu, where a cult does private screenings, once a week.

“Flash Frame” is a member of an obscure club, literary kin to Ramsey Campbell’s Ancient Images (1989), Theodore Roszak’s Flicker (1991), Simon Spurrier and Smudge’s Chiaroscuro (2000 AD Prog 1507-1517, 2006), and John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns (2005). Weird fiction where instead of a forbidden book or manuscript, the central mystery revolves around a film. A throwback to the idea that the camera captures something more than mere image. Lovecraft toyed with a similar concept in his story “Nyarlathotep”, but the possibilities remained undeveloped until succeeding generations of writers brought it to the page and the screen.

The story is lean, devoid of excess description or introspection from the narrator, who remains very grounded—like a journalist, presenting the facts and their impressions, not their theories. Unlike many Lovecraftian tales, the horrors are described, sometimes in terse but graphic detail; it’s the surrounding mythology which is only hinted at, a blank space left for the reader to fill in by reading between the lines…and that is not the Cthulhu Mythos. Not explicitly.

The book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours of this book (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The History of the Necronomicon“

Before Lovecraft ever put together the idea of a shared universe, Robert W. Chambers some names from Ambrose Bierce’s stories “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886) and “Haïta the Shepherd” (1891) for stories in his weird fiction collection The King in Yellow (1895); Lovecraft and his contemporaries would go on to add elements from that seminal work to the Cthulhu Mythos, but the “Yellow Mythos” as an original expansion of Chambers’ work and shared concept in its own right, not dependent on Cthulhu or the Necronomicon (though occasionally tying into it), has developed a fairly dedicated audience and coterie of contributors.

“Flash Frame” sits in no easily definable frame of Mythos reference. Moreno-Garcia doesn’t play the game of name-checking popular entities like Cthulhu or Hastur, no tomes pop up in the course of the story, and even the name of the cult is an unfinished, undefined ellipsis trailing off into disinterest. The framework of the narrative borrows strongly from the Lovecraftian tradition, but it isn’t written to be a defined part of the shared universe. It exists as it’s own thing, ambiguous enough to suggest an avatar of the King in Yellow or Nyarlathotep without needing to nail it down with exact certainty what is going on or what entities are involved. The narrator probably doesn’t even know. They heeded the warning.

The story works as well as it does because the narrator and the setting are absolutely grounded, far way from the poor pasticheur’s focus on cramming Mythos references into the story, Moreno-Garcia makes sure the character of the narrator and the city are well-defined, because they help carry the story. Readers believe that El Tabu existed, and that’s because it, or something like it did—in the Mexico City of the author’s youth.

Well my Mexico, the Mexico of my youth is quickly eroding through the work of time and distance, although I suppose that is true for any of us when we look back at our youth. What is captured in the stories is my vision of a time and place that was and never was because any time we look back we distort the place we came from. The factories near my home are gone, they’ve built expensive condos. The butcher moved. The park got a makeover. So every time I go back to visit I’m looking at a superimposed image of what was there and what is there now.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia”

This transposition of the Mexico of yesterday and today is brought home in the end of the story, where the frame completes itself and the narrator brings the story back from 1982 to the present. El Tabu is gone, replaced by a block of condos. But something survives…

“Flash Frame” was first published in the Cthulhurotica (2010) anthology, edited by Carrie Cuinn. It contains sexually explicit imagery, but the way sex is presented in the story is as a vehicle for horror, rather than a mechanism of reproduction. The yellow woman is an intrusive, otherworldly element, the juxtaposition of carnal imagery with the vivid description of imposition and disgust demonstrates the violation of the narrator’s personal space—even into their mental space. There are always images we cannot unsee, sounds we cannot unhear, words we cannot unread. The narrator’s response to this unwanted contact is not arousal, but unease and revulsion…not because of risk of pregnancy, or rape, but from mere exposure.

This is an aspect of sexual horror which is often overlooked: the exhibitionist who violates taboos of acceptable dress—in the past, exemplified by the naked man or woman in the trench coat, today the unsolicited dick pic—and it is different from biological contagion. An STI can be treated like any other disease, but information cannot be so easily forgotten or erased; nor can the subject forget their inherent vulnerability. A victim can potentially fight back against a physical assault, but it is impossible to close oneself off completely from all unwanted sounds and images…though the narrator, who has given the matter some thought, definitely makes a considerable effort to do just that.

“Flash Frame” has been reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu (2011), and in Moreno-Garcia’s collection This Strange Way of Dying (2013); it was also adapted on Tales to Terrify (2012). Despite her success with short stories and novels, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is perhaps better known as publisher at Innsmouth Free Press, and together with Paula R. Stiles edited works including Historical Lovecraft (2011), Future Lovecraft (2011), Innsmouth Magazine (2009-2014), Sword & Mythos (2014), and She Walks in Shadows (2015, also published as Cthulhu’s Daughters).

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

“Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection” (2003) by Ann K. Schwader

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewellery vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

The story takes place in a desert town, far from the ocean. A lonely businessman traveling far from home, steps into an art museum to relieve a moment’s boredom. What follows is an exercise in titillation. “Gillman-Waite” is the hook; “Iä, Hydra Mother!” is the sinker, and in between is the line, reeling the reader in slowly, paragraph by paragraph.

Ann K. Schwader is a poet laureate of the Mythos, but her fiction receives relatively little attention. In stories like “Mail Order Bride” (1999) and “Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection” (2003) she offers a quiet, but distinct, embellishment on the Deep Ones. Both stories focus on the oft-neglected feminine side of their life and worship, but both are also written so that the narrative viewpoint is that of a male human, and this point-of-view character’s relationship with the Mythos in the story is complicated by their relationship with women. The alien nature of the Deep One hybrids is never apparent on the surface, because they find women themselves alien and incomprehensible. Yet chauvinism is far from their only or worst sin, as the protagonist of “Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection” recalls:

The strain and twist of muscles under slick cold skin, almost slipping from his grasp as she struggled…

A past episode of sexual violence tends to evaporate any good will the reader has toward a protagonist, but even this is a cue that Schwader plays with. Rape is an act of domination, a show of power and physical strength against someone weaker rather than an expression of lust—and the protagonist even recalls “he did what he’d done in anger”—but his victim’s response emasculates him (figuratively), and there hovers over the story the question of who, exactly was (and is) in control. That anxiety as much as anything drives the mood of story.

Mechanically, Schwader astutely utilizes several familiar devices from Lovecraftian storytelling. The structure of the story thus takes on two parallel narratives: the nameless protagonist viewing the exhibit in the museum, and the flashbacks of the same protagonist to a drunken night in a college town in Massachusetts and the secret shame of what he did there. This is a common track in much Lovecraftian fiction, where the events of the current day are one level of the narrative, and the uncovered history (biographical, genealogical, etc.) forms a secondary narrative, both progressing toward a common conclusion; compare to “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where present-day exploration of the town is juxtaposed with the story of how it came to its current condition, and the author’s own story and that of his family are intertwined in the narrative of both.

The story sets a steady pace: marked not by the number of the exhibits but by the protagonist’s growing sense of dread, and the completeness of the memory of the night he wants to forget. In many Mythos stories the climax of the plot or action, and the climactic revelation are often two separate events—the latter typically occurring, in Lovecraft, at the very end of the story, sometimes as the final line of the story. In “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for example the climax is the raid on Innsmouth by federal authorities and the torpedoing of Devil’s Reef, but the climactic revelation is when the protagonist discovers their own Innsmouth heritage—and embraces it. In this story however, the climax and revelation occur essentially simultaneously, coming together naturally at the end of the tour with the final exhibit, past memory merging with terrifying present. Schwader also uses a familiar trick of Lovecraft’s where an aesthetic element slowly grows throughout the piece to set the pace; in this case, the humidity grows steadily throughout, a marked contrast from the dry desert air of the opening that takes on sinister connotations by the time the protagonist reaches the final exhibit.

To call “Objects in the Gilman-Waite Collection” an embellishment is to recognize that the story, while it can stand on its own, is really building off of something larger than itself. Schwader doesn’t recap the whole history of Innsmouth here; she doesn’t need to. No explanation is ever given regarding Cthulhu, Mother Hydra, or the Deep Ones, and the author does not try to cram in any new Mythos entity or large chunk of exposition explaining some aspect of Mythos lore or carving out some unique corner of Lovecraft Country. What it does do is successfully gild the lily.

All in the band of the faithful—Order o’ Dagon—an’ the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon what we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn—”
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Mother Hydra is mentioned only once in Lovecraft’s fiction: a single throwaway line in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a sort of Eve figure or mother-goddess, her character, worship, and cult are never explored or expanded upon by the Providence gentleman. It’s not much to work with, but rather than writing paragraphs of exposition to expand on Mother Hydra, Schwader does it subtly. The little expansion on Mother Hydra during the climax and revelation at the end of the story serves the plot, not the other way around…and in the end, there are still things left unexplained, mysteries for the reader to make up their own mind about, and perhaps explore.

“Objects from the Gilman-Waite Collection” first appeared in Ann K. Schwader’s collection Strange Stars & Alien Shadows: the Dark Fiction of Ann K. Schwader (2003) and the limited edition (100 copies) Cthulhu’s Creatures (2007), and was reprinted in Ross E. Lockhart’s anthology The Book of Cthulhu II (2012). Why the story hasn’t been reprinted more broadly is hard to say—there’s been no shortage of Innsmouth-themed anthologies since 2003—and what little critical appraisal it has received is in the brief notes in Strange Stars & Alien Shadows. Editor Kevin O’Brien notes a “feminist tone” in her story “Mail Order Bride,” expanding:

Though the protagonist is male, the agents of the Deep Ones are female and their patron is not Dagon but Hydra. The tone was obvious throughout, yet it wasn’t blatant. The story was not a diatribe against men, and it even managed to make me sympathize with the otherwise unsympathetic male caricature. Yet almost from the beginning it was clear that the women were in control, and their control only became stronger with time.
—Kevin O’Brien, introduction to Strange Stars & Alien Shadows ix-x

The same basic observation can be applied to “Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection”—but there’s a weird assumption there. Why would a feminist Cthulhu Mythos story be “a diatribe against men?” Joanna Russ, more noted for her feminist fiction, didn’t exactly write a “diatribe” in “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964); Irvin Rubin is a caricature of a certain type of socially awkward male fan, but not all men. The answer might be supplied in part by Robert M. Price’s notes to the story:

Perhaps because of the patriarchal nature of the Mythos, we rarely see women involved in cultic activities, except as sacrificial victims. They are almost certainly involved, among the nameless and faceless crowd of worshippers, but we almost never see them. […] In this story Ann gives us a glimpse of an exclusively female cult dedicated to Mother Hydra, one in which the only service a man might provide is as the sacrifice. Disturbing perhaps; after all, it’s based on the radical feminist idea that, aside from fathering children, men are practically worthless in a society dominated by women. But what’s sauce for the goose….
—Robert M. Price, Strange Shadows & Alien Stars 199

There’s a political angle to both O’Brien and Price’s interpretations of Schwader, and a subcurrent of that is, for all their praise of her work, a negative association of feminism. The implicit idea that female empowerment is somehow a threat to the power, authority, or position of men: that there is a balance of power between the sexes, and if women gain power men must lose power.

As Price notes, the treatment of women in the Cthulhu Mythos is not very pretty. Lovecraft never employed the “virgin sacrifice,” but there are female rape victims in “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Curse of Yig,” and hinted at in the notes to “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; the ape princess in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” ends up stuffed and mounted, Lavinia Whateley births two monstrous children in “The Dunwich Horror,” for which willing or unwilling service she is blocked from the rites and eventually disappeared. Aside from pregnancy and implied sexual violence, this is no worse than the fates of Lovecraft’s male characters—who often end up dead or occasionally worse—but in the wider Mythos, the female sacrifice is a not uncommon trope. Molly Tanzer even invoked it in “ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” (2012) by Molly Tanzer.

The idea of this negative drawback to female empowerment or emphasis is a real part of the horror of the stories—to male readers, at least. Just as Tina L. Jens played with uniquely female horrors of reproduction in “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens, here Schwader may be playing on a uniquely male horror: the loss of privilege afforded by their gender…or maybe that horror is just the natural result of Schwader following her own voice, as an independent female Mythos writer:

Women in the Mythos—why there aren’t more of us, why there are as many of us as there are, or even why we’re here to begin with—have become quite a topic in Lovecraftian circles. […] After spending the last couple of years trying to formulate answers, I’ve come to only one conclusion. One little secret to share about women in the Lovecraftian Mythos.

We were there from the start.

[…] Like all Lovecraftians, I’m interested in the past. In traditions. Women have their own literary tradition to reclaim in the Mythos, and I hope to see more of us doing so in future anthologies and collections.
—Ann K. Schwader, “Reclaiming the Tradition” vii-viii

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

“ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” (2012) by Molly Tanzer

I always preferred to think that strong women and loving couples and flirting and passion and a hundred other delightful emotions existed, somewhere, in Lovecraft’s world, and we just didn’t get told that story. Which begs the question: what if these realistic, flesh and blood and sex and sweat characters did meet up with Lovecraft’s?
—Carrie Cuinn, Cthulhurotica (2010) 5

“ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” begins with an unusual twist on the Greek myth of Pygmalion. The story of Pygmalion and his statue-bride has been adapted to a Mythos vein at least a few times, notably by August Derleth in “Innsmouth Clay” (1971) and Clint Collins in “The Summoned” (2011), but here Tanzer subverts the expectations in a manner that is quirky and surreal: rather than focus on Pygmalion and Galatea, the narrator of the story is Pygmalion’s offering to Aphrodite—inanimate, but possessed of anima. A passive actor in the proceedings of the story, this unique nameless narrator acts as witness of and commentator on the events that follow.

H. P. Lovecraft was a transgressive writer, whose fiction violated the cultural taboos of his era—he wrote stories featuring cannibalism, necrophilia, atheism, nihilism, incest, cosmic miscegenation, and inescapable biological determinism. Molly Tanzer is a subversive writer, whose stories undermine the reader’s expectations; she sets tropes on their head, teases well-worn plots and situations then inverts them, challenges staid conventions with fresh perspective. The Cthulhu Mythos provides plenty of raw material.

As a mature genre, Mythos horror has its own tropes and familiar elements. A reader who has suspended disbelief for the insidious cults of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and “The Dunwich Horror” need not be reintroduced to them fresh; cultists and tentacled entities became a stock element in much of the fiction after Lovecraft and his contemporaries. What was transgressive in the 1930s became accepted, and eventually kitsch: the default late-night gatherings of robed strangers have taken on the verisimilitude of Hollywood Satanism, only with naughty tentacles instead of inverted crosses. Overripe for satire and subversion.

London during the Victorian period; the British Museum, with the relics of a recent archaeological dig on display; a curator with untoward designs on a puritanical innocent maid; a small gathering of cultists; a summoning ritual which requires sacrifice—this is almost a by-the-numbers plot, until the climax. All of which is by design: Tanzer knows the tropes she is invoking, builds the scenario up so that savvy reader’s expectations are pointed in one direction before she pulls the rug out and switches gears. The language, fitting for a story dealing with Shub-Niggurath, titillates and teases of things to come:

“Do you know what a dildo is?” asked the docent roguishly, his mustache twitching as he tried not to smile.

This is not erotic Lovecraftian fiction, although Tanzer deliberately flirts with the possibility. The nameless narrator is not coy, but neither are they crude; sex-positive without being sex-obsessed. Tanzer’s story is a pastiche not of anything Lovecraft wrote specifically, but of an accepted standard of Mythos fiction, where virgins are to be sacrificed by robed cultists, preferably in as leering and erotic a manner as possible, such as put to film by Roger Corman in The Dunwich Horror (1970). The Hollywood version of the Mythos, where all the real horror and atmosphere has been boiled off, leaving a handful of reoccurring images and predictable plot devices. Then Tanzer flips the script.

“ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” is a piece it would be hard to write before the 21st century. It requires the build-up of Mythos fiction tropes from the 70, 80s, and 90s, and it requires a publisher and audience willing to deal with such a surreal, adults-oriented approach as far as the unique narrator and the overall plot of the story. It’s not erotica, but it’s also not for kids: that weird middle ground of adult fiction that is sexually explicit but isn’t porn. There weren’t a lot of publishers for that material, and still aren’t. As kitsch as the robed-cultists-sacrificing-the-virgin is, the Mythos is still transgressive to many people, to the point that a sex-positive protagonist in a Mythos story is subversive.

That’s really the interesting thing about this story, not so much the events of the plot or characters but what the plot and characters say about the average understanding and approach to Mythos fiction. In M. L. Carter’s “Prey of the Goat”, Shub-Niggurath is a figure of negative sexuality, characterized by unhealthy lust, violation, non-consensual sex, and threats of sexual violence; in Tina L. Jens’ “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” the protagonist is the center of a plot that involves her being coerced into sex; in Joanna Russ “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” a Lovecraftian entity entraps the male character with promise of a romantic relationship—these are all essentially negative depictions of sexuality, sex as a medium for horror.

Sex itself is not demonized in Tanzer’s story. The depiction of Shub-Niggurath is effectively the same as in “Prey of the Goat,” but the sexual act is portrayed by the narrator and the helping characters as a positive thing with many warm recollections, when everyone involved is willing and has a good time. Tanzer does not dismiss the possibility of rape—that is a real and vital source of conflict throughout the story—but sexual assault and horror are not the sole depictions of sexuality in the narrative. This is a marked contrast from a great deal of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, and although Tanzer doesn’t dwell on the implications in the story itself, it feels almost like a response to the question Carrie Cuinn posed in her introduction to Cthulhurotica.

“ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” was first published in The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction #7 (2012), and then reprinted in the ebook-only anthology Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2014). Molly Tanzer has written a number other Mythos tales such as “Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee” (2011), “Herbert West in Love” (2013), “The Curse of the Old Ones” (2015, with Jesse Bullington), and “The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad” (2015); and has carved out her own corner of Lovecraft Country with the Ivybridge Twins stories, set in the Victorian period and collected in A Pretty Mouth (2012).

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

“Commencement” (2001) by Joyce Carol Oates

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I discovered H. P. Lovecraft in the Lockport Public Library, in upstate New York—the collection of Lovecraft stories was large and unwieldy with a distinctive font, which I can “see” vividly if I shut my eyes. The stories that riveted me immediately were “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Dunwich Horror.” At once I fell under the Lovecraftian spell—subsequently I have reprinted Lovecraft tales in anthologies of “literary” stories in the hope of breaking down the artificial barriers and unfortunate prejudices between genres.
—Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft Unbound

Joyce Carol Oates had written eloquently about Lovecraft in The King of the Weird (1996), and curated a collection of his best fiction, Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (1997). Two of her novelettes have appeared in the Lovecraftian anthologies: “Commencement” in Lovecraft Unbound (2009) and “Shadows of the Evening” in Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2015). Neither is a story of the Cthulhu Mythos. Oates does not partake of the shared creative universe created by Lovecraft and his contemporaries, her works are not set in and do not expand on the setting as Tina L. Jens does in “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” or Margaret L. Carter does in “Prey of the Goat”; she does not reference Lovecraft himself as Joanna Russ in “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It Into My Pocket…But By God, Eliot, It Was A Photograph From Life!” or Adèle Olivia Gladwell in “Hypothetical Materfamilias.”

What is a Lovecraftian tale, without the Mythos and without Lovecraft?

Ellen Datlow, editor of Lovecraft Unbound, states in her introduction that she had read and enjoyed Lovecraft, but:

I’ve also read the multitudes of pastiches in anthologies of work “inspired” by Lovecraft, but most—for me, at least—are too obvious and bring little new to the table.

It’s a fair observation, and goes hand-in-hand with Oates’ remark on the prejudices of genre fiction. Lovecraft is more than just a bunch of strange and evocative names, and in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, the Providence gentleman himself observed:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Lovecraftian pastiche may replace “bloody bones” with “eldritch tentacles” and the “clanking chains” with the Necronomicon, but the same principle applies: what writers are trying to recapture should not be the outward form of Lovecraft’s Mythos, but the central mood or essence. This is what Oates tries to capture in her tale, without recourse or reference to any of the outer trappings of the Mythos.

“Commencement” is a work of weird allegory. It is time for Commencement at the University, the annual academic ritual through which graduates get their degrees. There are no names, for even though this is a special event (the two hundredth anniversary of the University), it is also somewhat timeless, a ritual repeated every year without fail. The formula of the university commencement gives the shape of the story. As the pomp and symbolism of the ceremony slowly unfolds, so too do we get a glimpse of the broader setting—advancements in human genetic engineering, cloning, hints of hard science fiction—and the themes of continuity, of the marriage of ancestral strength to contemporary progress.

Then comes the climax, the conferring of the honorary degrees. The mystery of the Pyramid, foreshadowed slowly and with a slow build up of suspense Lovecraft would have approved of, is revealed but not explained. The viewpoint character for the story is the Assistant Mace Bearer, a nameless protagonist that harkens back to the initiates of “The Festival” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”—unsure and unready for what transpires, as the Commencement continues in its final stages of the Recessional and Disrobing, they find the central truth to all such rituals: to participate in it is to experience a profound change. Like the protagonist in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” they accept this new self that they have become.

The crux of Oates’ conception is the subversion of expectations; the fact that the ceremonies of medieval universities are still used in the present day are taken as granted. Lovecraft could not have contrived a better source of robed cultists or strange rites than reality provides. What Oates adds is the secondary layer of meaning—the mystery that the outward forms hide and disguise—and then drives it how during the climax. The horror of “Commencement” is not in the visceral details of the conferring of the honorary degrees, but in the culpability of the thousands of attendees, the group acceptance and participation which normalized such bloody exercises as the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, Madama la Guillotine during the Terror, the Salem Witch Trials, or the sacrifices of Xipe Totec atop the Pyramid of the Sun in Tenochtitlán.

Is it Lovecraftian? The University is not Miskatonic University, not as Lovecraft envisaged it. A story does not automatically become Lovecraftian because an editor includes it in an anthology. Context can color a story, suggest associations which the author might not have intended. If encountered outside Lovecraft Unbound—Oates’ novelette first appeared in Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction (2001)—would it strike the reader as Lovecraftian? Without any direct allusion to Lovecraft’s works, the average reader probably wouldn’t make that connection. Technically, the story does not even have any supernatural element. Yet the influence of Lovecraft is certainly in the piece, with echoes of his themes and methods. Critical readers would no doubt pick up on the Lovecraftian vibe, as Datlow appears to have done, and scholars might look at Oates’ own definition of Lovecraft’s fiction:

Lovecraft with the fusion of the gothic tale and what would come to be defined as science fiction, and with the development of a species of horror fantasy set in meticulously described, historically grounded places (predominantly, in Lovecraft, Providence, Rhode Island; Salem, Massachusetts; and a region in northern central Massachusetts to which he gave the name “the Miskatonic Valley”) in which a seemingly normal, intelligent scholar or professor, usually a celibate bachelor, pursues a mystery it would wiser for him to flee.
—Joyce Carol Oates, Tales of H. P. Lovecraft viii

This is, if not exactly a synopsis for “Commencement,” at least highly evocative of the final product. It may not fulfill Lovecraft’s definition of a weird tale, and readers may never know whether or not Oates consciously had Lovecraft in mind when she conceived and executed this story, it certainly shows his influence. Not with tentacles or the Necronomicon, but by reproducing in form the shape and mood of Lovecraft’s stories, at least as she understands it.

So yes, “Commencement” is Lovecraftian.

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

“Prey of the Goat” (1994) by Margaret L. Carter

…so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales Aug 1931)

Few of the entities of the Cthulhu Mythos created by Lovecraft & his correspondents in the 1930s were implicitly or explicitly female; of those the most enduring in the imagination of Mythos writers and fans is Shub-Niggurath. Mother Hydra, whatever her literary charms, has not inspired multiple anthologies dedicated to her. Shub-Niggurath is itself nebulous, never appearing on the scene, but as an element of ecstatic worship and invocation in several of Lovecraft’s stories; in “The Mound” Shub-Niggurath is portrayed as a “sophisticated Astarte,” in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Holiness of Azédarac” the familiar epithet is given a masculine twist as “the Ram with a Thousand Ewes”; it is only in his letters Lovecraft described Shub-Niggurath explicitly:

Yog-Sothoth’s wife is the hellish cloud-like Shub-Niggurath, in whose honour nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young. By her he has two monstrous offspring—the evil twins Nug and Yeb. He has begotten hellish hybrids upon the females of various organic species throughout the universes of space-time (cf. “The Dunwich Horror”) [. . .]
—H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, 1 Sep 1936, Selected Letters 5.303

Most of the stories about Shub-Niggurath that have been published are written by men. This may not be terrible surprising: most Cthulhu Mythos published has been written by men. When “Prey of the Goat” first appeared in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle (1994), M. L. Carter was the only woman whose work was represented among the offerings.

The horrors of Lovecraft were, by and large, of equal terror to all—you don’t need to be a white male to appreciate cosmic horror, and assigning sex and gender to some of the more alien creatures of the Mythos may be a somewhat laughable enterprise—a diminution of these eldritch deities to prosaic human concerns. But there is a caveat: sex exists in Lovecraft’s fiction, and with the purpose: procreation. Female characters, be they willing participants or victims, may lay with and beget monsters. Important segments of Lovecraftian fiction fall into the familiar cycles of the “demon lover” or “rape fantasy,” which Margaret L. Carter recognized:

H. P. Lovecraft, who was strongly influenced by Arthur Machen, has a wizard’s daughter raped by the outcast dark divinity, Yog-Sothoth, in “The Dunwich Horror.” The girl gives birth to twins, one a queerly repulsive boy who grows at an impossible rate but looks outwardly human, the other an invisible monstrosity, formed of elements alien to this universe. Asenath in “The Thing on the Doorstep” is the result of a union between a blasphemously evil necromancer and a “thing from the sea.”
—M. L. Carter, introduction to Demon Lovers and Other Strange Seductions (1972)

Carter brings this understanding and approach to the sexuality of the Cthulhu Mythos to “Prey of the Goat.” As a horror story, it hits familiar beats: a strange, horrible old artifact. Disturbing dreams. Carnal acts that hint at possession. Prayer and invocations. A victory…with an aftermath. The “demon’s” name is Shub-Niggurath, but the aesthetics are not beholden to Lovecraft; this is the erotic nightmare in a Christian Episcopal mold, a new priest facing an old Catholic terror without even a rite of exorcism in his arsenal. The Mythos elements are prominent, but reserved; Carter seeds a few connections without going overboard. This is a story that ties in to the larger Cthulhu Mythos, but its world is intimate, focused on just two people and their relationship.

The protagonist is Father Michael Emeric, the recipient of the amulet of Shub-Niggurath is his wife Terri. Much of the fine detail in the plot is not devoted to Mythos minutiae, but on the dynamics of the relationship between the two, their respective roles of husband and wife, man and woman; Michael tries not to overstep, to respect Terri’s agency, but when he does feel the need to undermine it finds it surprisingly easy. There’s an undercurrent in the story when it demonstrates how easy it is for Michael to slip into stereotypical masculinity to get what he wants, yet also how reluctant he is to do that. Terri for her part shares a distinct parallel with the female protagonist of Tina L. Jens’ “In His Daughters’ Darkling Womb (1997)”:

If they could have had a baby—but years of trying had produced no conception, with infertility tests failing to reveal the cause. Now that Terri was past thirty, they’d given up.

Infertility as a literary device has its uses: it it obviates the question of why characters do not have children, it makes conception (if it does happen) all the more miraculous or unholy. Yet there is a fundamental difference in approach between how Carter and Jens use it in these stories—in Jens’ story, the protagonist is female, the miscarriages she suffers are a result of failing to carry to term rather than failure to conceive; in Carter’s the protagonist is male, and the cause of the infertility is more ambiguous. If the infertility tests have failed to reveal a cause, is that because the cause lies not within her, but within her husband?

Carter essentially is putting the infertility fear on the other foot: not the feminine fear of miscarriage, or inability to have children, or birthing a monster, but the masculine fear of being cuckolded. The title “Prey of the Goat” forces the reader to ask the question: who is the prey, Michael or Terri? Certainly, the pastor’s wife is the one possessed by Shub-Niggurath, the one who has to suffer through the terrible erotic dreams where:

Then the goat stepped down into the crowd. She grabbed the first man and forced him to—forced him into her. He screamed.

But Terri tells her husband, when he asks her role in the dream, “I was the goat!” Later on, Michael wakes to find his possessed wife riding him—a rare example of rape of a man by a woman in Mythos fiction—the first dream is revealed as foreshadowing. Terri is the focus of the supernatural activity of the story, but the plot involves both of them, and this feeds into the ambiguous sexuality of Shub-Niggurath, who blends male and female characteristics in its appearance here. Whether Michael is threatened by the superior masculine aspect of Shub-Niggurath, or by the sexual dominance asserted by Terri under the Goat’s influence, the unexpected menage has Michael questioning his inadequacy, an attitude that carries right through to the foreboding end of the story. Abortion is ruled out by faith, but also by Michael’s impotent clutching at straws: “Besides, she might be wrong. It might be mine.”

“Prey of the Goat” almost never appeared at all; it was originally accepted for Lin Carter’s Weird Tales published by Zebra Books, but that series ended in 1983. If not for The Shub-Niggurath Cycle a decade later, it might never have seen publication at all. Which is a shame since it is a deceptively simple plot which is well worth deeper consideration. Carter has returned to the Mythos a few times, most notably with the romance novel Windwalker’s Mate (2008) and the erotic novella Tentacles of Love (2009).

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

“Hypothetical Materfamilias” (1994) by Adèle Olivia Gladwell

The eerie nostalgia of Gladwell’s enigma might have resonated in Lovecraft’s skull.
—Ramsey Campbell, introduction to The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraftian fiction tends to be fairly conservative in form. Pulp tales were designed for ready consumption, even if readers did occasionally have to reach for the dictionary, and the stories follow the lines of standard genre tales for the most part. The writers in the generations following Lovecraft & co. were not obligated to follow the same constraints for publication, but many fell back on conventional narrative structures, especially for homages and pastiches. Experimental Lovecraftian fiction remains rare.

The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (1994) was an entire anthology of Lovecraftian fiction—Lovecraftian in the sense that many of the stories were about Lovecraft and his influence, not just embellishments on the Mythos, much of it experimental or at least unconventional. By luck or dint of effort, the anthology has proven surprisingly influential in the long term; Alan Moore’s “The Courtyard” went on to inspire several successful comics and graphic novels, and other noteworthy contributors include J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Grant Morrison. In addition to prose it contains John Coulthart’s classic adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu”, a graphic stories by James Havoc & Mike Phillbin and Rick Grimes, and three essays on the Lovecraftian occult. It was a groundbreaking, forward-looking collection of a very different kind of Lovecraftian fiction than the collections of reprints and pastiches that were being put forth by Chaosium at the time.

Adèle Olivia Gladwell is the only female author in the book.

“Hypothetical Materfamilias” is a non-traditional narrative, partaking of a stream-of-consciousness, but really it is the kind of half-poetic speech of ‘zines, underground comix, and white label remixes. Like a lot of experimental fiction, the nuance of the piece is less in a coherent account of a series of events than the feel and rhythm of the words, the emotions and associations evoked by the images they describe; weird phrases rise to the eye at random from what at first glance might be literary noise. Readers bring their own experience to such a piece which will color any interpretation, yet there is a story there, in the flow of words.

Lovecraft, from within a tableau of fastidious time, knows IT comes for him. IT keeps coming.

The focus of Gladwell’s piece is on IT—never named or defined, the story works around the definition of IT with the promise and portent that “IT comes. And you know IT comes for you.” The gist of the narrative is of death and birth, except played in in a kind of reverse, like watching a baby being born in rewind, disappearing back into its mother. An unbirthing portended and sometimes shrouded in symbolism, and focused on a male figure who is, by context, probably Lovecraft; the unnamed female figure that appears in italicized paragraphs might be his mother, the eponymous “hypothetical materfamilias” of the title; the author herself is “I,” the one writing the story, who breaks through occasionally to speak directly to the reader, and she is the medium through which the message is expressed. Identifications are necessarily vague—is IT death? Lovecraft? Cthulhu? Is IT knowable, in any sense, or is it defined by being undefinable?

Lovecraft is mentioned by name exactly three times in “Hypothetical Materfamilias,” and no other Mythos entities or architecture are mentioned explicitly by name: while some of the images and descriptions appear to coincide with elements of Lovecraft’s fiction, there are no direct references or allusions as in Tina L. Jens’ “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb.” This story is essentially as far as a work of Lovecraftian fiction can get away from being Cthulhu Mythos fiction; Joanna Russ’ “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It Into My Pocket… But By God, Eliot, It Was A Photograph From Life!” would still be Lovecraftian in tone and content even if you removed any explicit reference to Lovecraft, but remove three words from “Hypothetical Materfamilias” and the piece isn’t “Lovecraftian” in the strictest sense.

Most Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction do not challenge the reader; they may play with uncomfortable scenes and concepts, but the communication of those images and ideas is usually couched in a very familiar narrative framework—the discovery of old family secrets, an exploration into the forbidden, an extraordinary event to be witnessed or explained—”Hypothetical Materfamilias” is more of an experience. It challenges the reader to question what they just read, to derive sense from it, to fit it into a rational framework; but the normal levers and handholds of Mythos fiction are absent here. There is little for the reader to grasp, save the three uses of Lovecraft, and those don’t help very much; a sift for themes and images will turn up similarities with other things Lovecraftian, but how much of these are a reflection of the writer’s intent versus the reader “reading in” to the text?

Gladwell’s few writing credits before this piece were entirely through Creation; it isn’t hard to see these as possible vanity publishing projects, and this represents her last known published work. While the piece meets the bare minimum for inclusion in the book by the triple invocation of “Lovecraft,” like calling forth Bloody Mary or the Candy Man, the lack of any real Mythos or Lovecraftian theme have probably doomed it to obscurity. All of which may be reasons why “Hypothetical Materfamilias” have failed to gain traction, besides the 1999 reprint of The Starry Wisdom.

Yet there is no work which is not due serious consideration—every writer starts and ends somewhere, every person has relationships. Every writer starts and ends somewhere, and every story has to be appreciated and judged on its own merits, and in its context. In this case, that means to consider Gladwell’s piece next to the rest of The Starry Wisdom anthology. In that context, “Hypothetical Materfamilias” fits rather well.

Many of the works are experimental or use a nontraditional narrative, not all of them refer directly or indirectly to Lovecraft or the Cthulhu Mythos, most of the writers are not familiar names in Mythos anthologies, and few of the works have been republished. So in that respect at least, Gladwell’s story is of a piece with the rest of the anthology. It may not be an instant classic of Lovecraftian fiction like Coulthart’s graphic adaptation or Moore’s “The Courtyard,” and stands separate from the kind of borrowing and elaboration that marks much of Mythos fiction such as Robert M. Price’s “A Thousand Young” and Grant Morisson’s “Lovecraft in Heaven,” but it works fine as a standalone piece separate and outside of the usual Lovecraftian tradition, as an example that Lovecraftian fiction need not be constrained to familiar channels.

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

“In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens

[…] his Secret Seed, Cthylla, in whose darkling womb he planned to rise up again one day reborn, had been threatened.
– Brian Lumley, The Transition of Titus Crow (1975)

As with “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket . . . But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” by Joanna Russ, the title of Tina L. Jens’ piece is a signal about the nature of the work, a reference for readers as to the nature of the piece. A fitting homage to the works of Brian Lumley, given that her novelette was published for the first and only time in Singers of Strange Songs: A Celebration of Brian Lumley (1997). The reason why it has languished mostly forgotten does not reflect on the individual merits of Jens as a writer or of her novelette as a work of fiction, but the nature of the Cthulhu Mythos itself.

There is no canon to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft and his contemporaries wrote their stories independently, none absolutely behooved to the other to keep their shared mythology consistent—although they played and collaborated: Lovecraft (with the aid and argument of August Derleth, E. Hoffmann Price, Farnsworth Wright, and C. C. Senf) derived a German name for Robert E. Howard’s Black Book, and so we have the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Clark Ashton Smith offered some clarifications on the genealogy of his alien entities to young fan R. H. Barlow, and so we have the family tree of the gods.

Genealogy is a fine tradition in the Mythos: it establishes relationships and offers infinite room for expansions, amendments, and additions. Most writers default to Lovecraft’s fiction as “canon,” and so build off of the material in his stories in preference to anything else. Lovecraft, in ghost-writing for Hazel Heald in “Out of the Aeons” (WT Apr 1935) created Ghatanothoa. Lin Carter in “Out of the Ages” (1975) made Ghatanothoa the son of Cthulhu, and gave him two brothers: Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog. Brian Lumley, in turn building off Carter, introduced Cthylla in his novel The Transition of Titus Crow (1975).

Fewer writers build off the works of later Mythos writers. Aside from possible issues of copyright, the mythology gets convoluted and contradictory, and the quality of the writing and approach to the material varies greatly. Yet many of the concepts created by writers are more enduring than the fiction; Frank Belknap Long’s Chaugnr Faugn appeared and was destroyed in the forgettable novella The Horror from the Hills (WT Jan-Mar 1931), but still inspired W. H. Pugmire’s classic “The Child of Dark Mania” (1997); Robert Bloch’s Mythos tales featuring the tome De Vermiis Mysteriis were out of print when featured by Caitlín R. Kiernan’s in “Derma Sutra (1891)” (2008). The success of these stories lies in the ability of later writers to pay homage to their forebears, while doing something innovative with the material.

“In His Darkling Daughter’s Womb” is Jens’ homage to Lumley and his creation—but she does that not by rote recital, nor does she attempt pastiche. “In His Darkling…” is episodic; is built from brief scenes and snatches of field journal entries which provides a brisk pace for what could otherwise have been a good-sized novel. The opening verse (“In his darkling daughter’s womb | Great Cthulhu will be born”) sets the stage for readers who have never read Lumley or Lin Carter before—they may not catch all the references, but they are more informed than the protagonist, Dr. Katherine Cullom.

She is a scientist, skeptical of myth and legend, but entranced by the wonder of what they have captured: a giant, unique octopus specimen. A set-up with all the nuance of bringing an alien lifeform aboard the space station in a horror movie, but the trope works: it allows the reader Cullom’s perspective of Cthylla, behind the glass in her giant aquarium tank, even as the reader get a look into the personal life of Dr. Cullom…and the story really is about her, as much as all the Mythos lore being referenced:

I am tired of the moralizing, the pompous righteousness of all these men, who see me as nothing more than a cold-hearted bitch who cares more for work than her unborn child. What do they know of the pain I must endure as I wait, helpless, hopeless, and without distraction, as yet another child withers and dies in my womb?

Miscarriage is a reproductive horror that is unique to women, and in the Mythos a horror generally unexplored; infertility and the loss of a child are mundane horrors that come to us from within, rather than from outside…and there is no running from them. There are shades and borrowings in Jens’ story familiar to many horror fans—the everyday miracle of conception and birth is ripe for perversion, as famously illustrated by Rosemary’s Baby (1967)…or “The Nameless Offspring” (1932) or “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) or “The Great God Pan” (1890)…but those stories are all about human women being subject to conception, often against their will. Jens’ story takes a different tack: there is no rape in this story, and the primary focus is not on a human woman being impregnated. The lack of violence in the sexual act, if nothing else, sets this apart from most Mythos stories that deal with the reproductive theme.

The story has probably too many in-jokes and a little too self-aware to be a classic of Mythos fiction. The crew outside of those Cullom’s immediately interacts with are faceless, nameless, and disposable; her emotional distance from them is reflected in our lack of information about them. David Gaugham is the closest thing the piece has to a villain, and spends the story plotting and dropping Alhazred’s rhymes ham-handedly (with a brief but excruciating drop to work in a moment on abortion rights—probably just to close off one potential avenue of escape). By contrast, Cthylla gets the most development of any of the characters: Cullom’s obsession with her work lavishes the female Mythos entity with attention. While the reader knows the prophecy of Cthylla, where she comes from and what she is intended to do, she cannot reproduce asexually. It is not without irony that Cullom, who has suffered through fertility treatments and attempts at in vitro fertilization, suits up in a set of tentacles to artificially inseminate Cthylla.

“In His Darkling Daughter’s Womb” is in many ways a dual narrative; Cullom’s tale of very human emotional pain, loss, scientific curiosity, and eventually hope intertwines with Cthylla’s own story, and through Cullom does Cthulhu’s daughter conceive, and through Cthylla does Cullom reach her own kind of redemption—yet at the same time the whole sequence of events takes place within the larger narrative of Lumley’s prophesy of Cthulhu’s return. Even the small triumphs of humanity are, ultimately, no more than steps leading to something greater, and like Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby, Collum cannot even see how she is being manipulated to bring about what others desire. Scrape all the unnecessary Mythos references out of this story, and it still holds up as a decent story of a weird monster that has been captured by a female scientist dealing with her own issues; add them in however, and it becomes part of a larger story…which is the point of the Cthulhu Mythos.

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