Tag: 2009

“Mongoose” (2009) by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

BEAR SAYS: My introduction to Lovecraft came, strangely enough, through the non-Mythos story “Cool Air,” which remains my favorite. I feel moved to explore his work in part because it’s such an uncomfortable blend of the unsettling and the problematic. I feel moved to question the boundaries of Lovecraft’s (often uncomfortably racist and misogynist) biological determinism, and find that his own metaphors of alienation and internalized inhumanity make an excellent tool for doing so.

MONETTE SAYS: I found Lovecraft in graduate school and feel instantly in love, not only with his darkly elaborate cosmology, hi ghouls and shoggoths and Elder Gods, but also with his own love affair with the English language. And somehow, for Lovecraft and for me, the two things to together: the words and the monsters, the monsters and the words.
—Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, Lovecraft Unbound 372-373

Deeper down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, the readers are drawn back to the setting of  “Boojum.” In Bear & Monette’s second collaboration, both of their authorial voices blend and find expression, and the setting is fleshed out. Now in addition to boojums, gillies, and Mi-GO we have cheshires, toves, raths, bandersnatch—and Christians, Arkhamers, and political officers. The human monsters may not be quite as scary as the aliens phasing in from some other dimension, but that’s only because the reader is more likely to be familiar with them.

“Words and monsters”—”boojum” was the name of a nonsense creature from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits) (1876); “toves,” “raths,” and “bandersnatch” are taken from Jabberwocky (1871); “cheshire” from the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).  The first four are nonsense words—the mind has no reference for what they look like, because they are not based on anything in human experience, so the reader is forced to use their own imagination—a neat trick which works better in a Lovecraftian context than simply making the alien entities unnameable and indescribable.

“Cheshire” however has a more specific context: the cat that slowly disappears, except for their smile, fading in and out of existence. In the lived-in, blue collar setting of “Boojum,” the cheshires and their handlers have to work for a living—and that’s where the story starts, on Kadath Station, as Israel Irizarry and Mongoose come to deal with an infestation of toves…and all the complications to what is otherwise a relatively straightforward pest removal story set in a space station.

The complications to the plot demand context, some of which we’re given, some of which is left hinted at but unsaid; meat for the reader’s imagination and future developments. Nothing from “Boojum” is discarded, but some of it is given more shape: multiple space stations with familiar names (Providence, Kadath, Leng, Dunwich, Arkham), some sort of Earth-Moon alliance that has commissar-esque political officers running in parallel authority with the stationmaster apparatchiks and bureaucrats. Boojum movements causing rents in space where creatures from an alien food chain can slip through, proliferate, and the tears widen, letting bigger things in…there’s a rationale to the indescribable things that phase in and out of this dimension with the nonsense names. A biological determinism in the food chain established.

Human prejudice has its place too, although the details are scant. The Christians are weird, heavily modified, barely glimpsed, but obviously an unfamiliar and discriminated-against minority; the same applies to the Gillies and the Arkhamers. This is not the Star Trek future of clean ships and racial harmony; there are biases and politics, hints of extremist cults and unsettling human-alien interaction. Somehow, that makes it more believable. Imperfect futures are dynamic, creative; there are places to go…and oh, the places Mongoose and Irizarry will go in this story, on their own quest in Kadath, where the reality grows thin and the toves and raths swarm…

As with “Boojum,” the focus of “Mongoose” is on the relationship between a human and an alien. The relationship alienates the human partner from other humans, and yet at the same time is what makes them unique and special. It is a literal case of alienation by dint of an intimate relationship with an extraterrestrial—and a positive, respectful one. Irizarry is conscientious of his partner’s health and well-being, worried for her safety, her likes and dislikes; they communicate frequently. It is the kind of ultra-personal interaction which is the antithesis of many Lovecraftian stories. The alien never stops being “alien,” but humans—at least some of them—learn to adapt and interact with them. But there is, as the culminating revelation of the story shows, always more to learn.

The Mythos takes a stronger place on stage in “Mongoose” compared to “Boojum,” although casual readers won’t miss much if they haven’t read Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos” (1929). Bear & Monette re-imagine and re-invent Mythos concepts, rather than simply regurgitate old familiar names. They work actively to build on the setting hinted at in the first story, but the two remain standalone, complementary: you don’t need to have read “Boojum,” but they don’t explain boojums in “Mongoose.” This is an aggregate mythology, and the sum is greater than the parts—but the readers can enjoy the parts independently. Which is good, because they haven’t been collected yet.

“Mongoose” first appeared in Lovecraft Unbound (2009), and was subsequently reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Four, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2010 (all 2010), New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011), Clarkesworld Magazine #81 (Jun 2013), and In Space No One can Hear You Scream (2013). It was adapted to audiobook by the Drabblecast in 2010. It is the second of Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette have collaborations, preceded by “Boojum” and followed by “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” (2012).

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)