Howard, Mon Amour (2018) by Martine Chifflot

Sonia (Assise en train d’écrire, elle s’interrompt, levant la tête et s’exprimant a voix haute): Howard est mort. Quelle tristesse! Et moi, qui ne suis plus tout à fait sa veuve… Divorcée, remariée, je ne peux plus être sa veuve officielle.	Sonia (Sitting down to write, she interrupts herself, raises her head and speaks out loud): Howard is dead. What sadness! And I, who am not quite his widow anymore… Divorced, remarried, I can no longer be his widow, officially.
Howard, Mon Amour 19	English translation

Scene 1

Ever since the publication of The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis in various recensions, there has been great interest in the marriage of H. P. Lovecraft, and in his wife Sonia Haft Greene, who remarried in 1936 and became Sonia H. Davis. As the story of their marriage has unfolded in letters and memoirs, the narrative possibilities have struck several writers. Richard Lupoff included Sonia as a character in Lovecraft’s Book (1985), later expanded or restored as Marblehead (2015), to give one prominent example. Readers and scholars who have traced the story of their meeting, their work on the Rainbow, their collaborations “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923), “Four O’Clock” (1949), Alcestis: A Play (1985), and “European Glimpses” (1988), and their final separation all speak to a dramatic narrative—some might say a tragedy, for all human lives tend toward tragedy at the end.

Howard, Mon Amour is a short drama in 23 scenes by Martine Chifflot. The scene is 1946; their mutual friend Wheeler Dryden has informed Sonia of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, nearly a decade prior. The two had fallen out of touch, and apparently contact had been broken prior to her third and final marriage to Nathaniel A. Davis. Alone while writing, the phantom of Lovecraft appears…whether his ghost, or a hallucination born of her grief, never quite clear. It doesn’t really matter.

Howard: Je suis ici, Sonia; je resterai aussi longtemps que tu vivras. Les choses là-bas ne sont pas tout à fait semblables à ce que l’on raconte, à ce que, moi-même, j’en ai dit et je ne suis pas autorisé à en parler mais il a été permis que je revienne… pour toi, comme pour t’accompagner, comme pour te remercier.	Howard: I am here, Sonia; I will stay as long as you live. Things down there are not quite the same as we are told, as I myself have said, and I am not allowed to talk about them, but I have been allowed to come back… for you, as if to accompany you, as if to thank you.
Howard, Mon Amour 22	English translation

Scene 2

The French found an early appreciation for Lovecraft, and not just his fiction but many of his letters and associated biographical materials have been translated into French, including Sonia’s memoir. “Un mari nommé H.P.L.” (“A Husband Named H.P.L.” in Lovecraft (Robert Laffront, 1991) appears to have been Chifflot’s main source of data on the marriage, and Chifflot’s drama is fairly accurate to the facts. She may put words into her character’s mouths, but the events play out largely in accordance with Sonia’s account of the marriage, warts and all; the drama of the scenes is a little heightened in the telling, the events more emotional and detailed, but also emotionally true to how Sonia told them herself.

Tante Lilian (ou Sonia L’imitant), apres un moment de silence):
Chère Sonia, nous vous remercions mais cela est tout bonnement impossible.

Voyez-vous, Howard et nous-mêmes sommes des Phillips et nous ne pouvons envisager que l’épouse de Howard doive traviller pour vivre à Providence. Cela constitue une sort de déshonneur que nouse ne pouvons tolérer pour Howard et pour nous-mêmes.

Non. L’épouse de Howard Phillips Lovecraft no peut entretenir son ménage, ni ses tantes. C’est le devoir du mari de subvenir aux besoins familiaux et Howard a joué de malchance à cet égard. Nous connaissons, tout comme vous, les grandes qualités de Howard et nouse aimerions vous voir réunis mais cela ne se peut dans de telles conditions. Vous nous entretiendriez et nous seriouns à votre charge. Ce serait une honte pour nous malgré votre générosité. Cela ne se peut, chère Madame… et nous devrons tous souffrir en silence.

Aunt Lilian (or Sonia imitating her), after a moment of silence):
Dear Sonia, we thank you but this is simply impossible.

You see, we and Howard are Phillips and we cannot contemplate Howard’s wife having to work to live in Providence. This is a dishonor that we cannot tolerate for Howard and ourselves.

No. The wife of Howard Phillips Lovecraft cannot support his household, nor his aunts. It is the husband’s duty to provide for his family, and Howard has been unfortunate in this regard. We know, as you do, the great qualities of Howard and we would like to see you reunited, but it is not possible under these conditions. You would be supporting us and we would be in your charge. It would be a shame for us despite your generosity. It cannot be, dear Madame… and we must all suffer in silence.

Howard, Mon Amour 64

English translation

Scene 16

Most of the scenes are monologues, recalling some incident from their married lives; the more interesting scenes are dialogues, where Howard and Sonia actually have a bit of back-and-forth; other characters like Howard’s aunts Lillian and Annie have brief roles, and as suggested, could simply be retold by the actress playing Sonia doing their parts. It is a work meant to be not just read, but acted out; Chifflot herself has performed on stage in the role of Sonia:

*Howard, Mon Amour*. Scène 10. Sebastien Ciesielski et Martine Chifflot

For all the research that went in Howard, Mon Amour, there are a few idiosyncrasies that go beyond the facts. Little attention is given to Sonia’s Jewish identity or how Howard’s prejudices and antisemitism spiked during his stressful stay in New York, for example. There is an odd moment where Sonia believes that Howard’s correspondence with his revision client Zealia Bishop caused a “cooling” (refroidissement) of their relationship; and another where Sonia is said to dislike Crowley (in reality, Sonia and Aleister Crowley never met, it’s all an internet hoax). Which can all be explained as dramatic license rather than error or intentional misdirection. These are things that might stand out to a Lovecraft scholar with a penchant for pedantry more than a Lovecraft fan.

The emotional core of the work is true, however. In many ways, Sonia did find herself haunted by Lovecraft’s ghost for the rest of her life; his legacy clung to her as people asked her about the marriage, and many of her surviving letters survive because they are about Howard or addressed to his friends like August Derleth and Samuel Loveman. In Howard, Mon Amour, Sonia seems to accept that…and that she still loves him. Which, perhaps, is true. It was never love that got in the way of their relationship, but everything else around them: her health, his aunts, their finances, a difference in wants and needs, what they were and were not willing to do.

Howard, Mon Amour by Martine Chifflot was published in 2018 by L’Aigle Botté, and has been performed on stage as “Lovecraft, Mon Amour.” An English translation by Claude Antony has been announced:

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

“Down into Silence” (2018) by Storm Constantine

We know the secrets of Innsmouth, or what the alleged witnesses told us were true so long ago. Nearly a hundred years has passed. […] Maybe none of it was true. The surviving records sound like witch trials to me, more imagination than fact. Yet standing here on the bridge over the tumbling River Manuxet, gazing out to sea, I wonder. The fact is, I want it to be true, all of it.
—Storm Constantine, “Down into Silence” in
What October Brings: A Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween 19

Salem, Massachusetts proudly advertises itself today as Witch Country. The 1692 trials have become fodder for tourists, something for the ancient city to hang its hat on. Sightseers gawk at Gallows Hill, take pictures of the Witch House to post on the internet. Lovecraft did some of that himself, nearly a hundred years ago, and it’s only gotten more commercial, more elaborate.

What if that happened to Innsmouth?

Kenneth Hite in his essay “Cthulhu’s Polymorphous Perversity” in Cthulhurotica commented on the advent of Cthulhu kitsch:

But Cthulhu is not unique in this. Everything that can be sold in the modern age will be sold, and in every form possible. Count Dracula, after all, not content with great movies, novels, mediocre movies, nonfiction tie-ins to novels, debunkings of non-fiction tie-ins to novels, worse movies, superb comic books, and the entire Romanian tourist industry, appears thinly disguised as a fictional children’s rabbit (Bunnicula) and a molar-corroding breakfast cereal (Count Chocula). There are bobble-heads, and illiterate T-shirts, and clever board-games, and plastic toys, and ridiculous cameo appearances devoted to Dracula, and James Bond, and Batman, and every other figure of modern myth. (You can also get a plush Cthulhu dresses as Dracula or James Bond.) (291-292)

We live in the now of Cthulhu kitsch; 3D-printed idols and plushies, action figures and posters, cereals and soda and beer. But we do not live in a world with a real Innsmouth, where the Gilman Hotel has been refurbished and dressed with Hallowe’en decor for the kind of guests that like seeing strands of dried corn and pumpkins strewn about the lobby for that Authentic Old New England™ flavor. How would that work, exactly, if you could read “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and then go drive to Arkham and Innsmouth in your car? If Robert Olmstead, instead of living forever in glory, died of a brain tumor in a sanitarium after publishing his narrative?

This is the kind of mood that Storm Constantine explores in “Down into Silence.” The desire for something real, something dark and magical, and being sold instead the licensed, authorized version of the experience. It is in many ways something of the other side of “The Nyarlathotep Experience™” (2019) by Miguel Fliguer, where we see someone trying to craft that kind of experience for others.

At the same time, it is also an interpretation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”—and not necessarily a cynical one. What if there was some truth to the story? Not everything, not nearly everything. What would Innsmouth be like, if it had been a real place, a small town with an Esoteric Order of Dagon and a Devil’s Reef, and the g-men had come and there had been blood in the streets? What would it look like, if the town had survived that, and bore the scar proudly, and charged people to take photographs of it?

“If it hadn’t been him, then it would have been someone else, Kezia. Innsmouth couldn’t have stayed hidden for ever. The modern world doesn’t allow that. If Innsmouth had—or has—an enemy it is time, the changes in society, not merely the word of one man.”

“He was bitter,” Kezia says, in a voice craving for vengeance. “He wanted to be here, he was one of them, but he ruined it. They chased him out and then, like a mean little boy, he told tales.”
—Storm Constantine, What October Brings 32

Is Storm Constantine’s Innsmouth your father and mother’s Innsmouth? No. It’s a mark of a more mature phase of Lovecraftiana. You need a certain hit of commercialization and nostalgia, like Hallowe’en itself has become, to appreciate what she’s driving at. Before you could have “Down into Silence,” you needed the Cthulhu kitsch zeitgeist. So it has, and so here she is.

In the sense that Innsmouth is a real place—in the sphere of human ideas, not the physical world—it took a Lovecraft to mark it on the map. Once, perhaps, it was a bit of a secret. Fans of weird fiction were few, they shared their pleasure of discovery with each other…and word got out. Now everyone knows about Innsmouth, it seems. There are comics and erotica, entire anthologies dedicated to Innsmouth and its diaspora. Like a tattoo that fades in time, but keeps getting re-inked, the memories of the old lines distorted but still there like a shadow, adding depth. Innsmouth is in the now, constantly re-discovered, re-invented, re-visited—and the Mythos needs that to stay relevant, to grow and change rather than stagnate and sink into decay. Fans need not fear the tourists, the new readers attracted by films like Dagon or Innsmouth. New blood, new ideas, new media to keep the old concepts alive for another generation. Just so that one more crop of visitors can find Innsmouth, and leave wanting more of that strange town with its weird shadows and furtive mysteries.

“Down into Silence” was published in What October Brings: A Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween (2018).

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

Orphne #1 & #2 (2018) by Mani C. Price

We live in a Golden Age of Mythos comics. More Mythos comics have been published in the last two decades than in the four that came before that. Lovecraftian references can, and do, appear in everything from webcomics to manga, from The Woman of Arkham Advertiser (A・Aの女): Article 01: In The Vault (2019) by Takata Yuki (高田悠希) to “The Elder Sister-like One, Vol. 1” (2016) by Pochi Iida (飯田ぽち。) to Innsmouth (2019) by Megan James and Calla Cthulhu (2017). Independent presses have risen with the advent of affordable print-on-demand comic publishing services like IndyPlanet and digital comic marketplaces like Comixology have made it much easier for creators to get their work out there—and to highlight more diverse voices.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
—H. P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

“The gods travel into men’s dreams by way of a key hole and exit from whence they came once their divine mission is complete.”
—Artemidorus, quoted in Orphne #1

Mythos comics cover all the ground that prose Mythos fiction does, from pastiche and parody to genre-bending and genre-blending; it is rarely four-color superheroes punching out the minions of Great Cthulhu. There is room for comedy, erotica, dark fantasy, science fiction, and sometimes quite subtle and atmospheric horrors. What sets comics and graphic novels apart from their pure prose counterparts, or even illustrated stories, is the ability of art and words to come together a such a way as to create a unique reading experience—there are things that can be done in a graphic novel that would be difficult or impossible to pull off in a prose story.

Mani C. Price is a visionary artist and diviner; her penchant for Lovecraft and mythology is evident from her artwork. As the writer and artist for Orphne, Price brings her interests to bear with references to Classical Greek mythology, magic, and Lovecraftian references that are present but not pressed on the viewer. There is no mention in these stories to Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key,” yet the artistic theme of both issues emphasizes keys and key-holes; the figure of Mr. Angell is the image of H. P. Lovecraft—whom Muriel Eddy described as “The Man from Angell Street,” referring to his family’s house in Providence, Rhode Island.

Orphne prefers to show rather than tell; there are mysteries for the reader to unravel, characters are not introduced, and their identities must be divined by what they say and do. We know little about the main character Victoria, but that little we do know is intriguing…she is, more than Mr. Angell, the central character and mystery of the story so far. What key will unlock those answers?

But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Hypnos”

Lovecraft also had a penchant for Greek and Roman myth, and in the second issue this brings in the figure of Hypnos, Lord of Dreams. Some readers may draw parallels between this character and another popular comics character: Dream of the Endless, created by Neil Gaiman for his run on Sandman (1989-1986). The similarities are superficial, however; Gaiman and Price (and Lovecraft) are drawing in common from the well of Greco-Roman mythology in populating their Dreamlands. As the holder of the artifact that Victoria seeks, Hypnos is being set up as the primary antagonist in a story where most of the conflict so far is unseen—a combination of internal conflicts and unknown forces acting on Victoria, secrets unspoken, hints of supernatural influence.

Where the story goes from here is another question that goes unanswered. Issues #1 and #2 were published in 2018, but the series is not yet finished. Art takes time, and as Orphne is being produced by an individual rather than a big company, some delay is to be expected before we see issue #3. Yet it seems certain that it will be worth the wait.

Orphne #1 and #2 are written and illustrated by Mani C. Price, coloring and layout by Justin Wolfson, lettering by Jason Price, editing by Jason Price and the late Sam Gafford. Issues can be purchased directly from the website Mani The Uncanny.

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

“Red Stars/White Snow/Black Metal” (2018) by Fiona Maeve Geist

The comments frequently contain the cryptic couplet:

The wallowing darkness of rutting pigs
Suckling at the teat of a stillborn goddess

—Fiona Maeve Geist, “Red Stars/White Snow/Black Metal” in Ashes and Entropy 133

The weft of the story is built on the bones of Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials and Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. There are threads of Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson in the warp, though nothing so garish as a direct callout to “The Rats in the Walls” or “The Hog.” Mostly, it is dense ideas fired at machine-gun speed but with great precision, perforating the paper targets of a pretty fundamental premise:

What if Black Metal got into something properly Lovecraftian?

Which is not to say that metal hasn’t already gotten pretty Lovecraftian at times, with everyone from Arkham Witch to Innzmouth, Morbid Angel to Nox Arcana getting in on the act. Bands have named themselves after Shub-Niggurath and Yog-Sothoth, and the Lovecraftian influence spreads across genres, from the 70s psychedelic band H. P. Lovecraft to the punkish Rudimentary Peni to the rocking Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. All that really binds them together is Lovecraft.

Black metal, though, has a certain appeal. While getting a little long in the tooth, it has always been a subculture that sought certain extremes, reveled in rebellion, wrestled with the consequences. Which is probably why Geist wisely doesn’t look to name-drop actual Lovecraftian metal bands, instead building a new mythology and symbolism for her protagonist to pursue. One that marks itself with ouroboros of twined maggots and the face of a corpulent sow.

Geist’s protagonist Kelsey is a journalist in the way Arturo Perez Reverte’s Lucas Corso from The Club Dumas is a book detective. Someone puts them on assignment, gives them money and tells them to sniff it out like a good truffle-hunter. It’s a classic plotline which has worked for everyone from William Gibson on down, and Geist makes good use of it. In the words of one famous journalist:

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
—Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt 530

So much for the “Black Metal” of the title; the “Red Stars” gets into the Marxist connections of the Brotherhood of the Black, Corpulent Sow, the weird connections that metal music has had with politics over in Europe. This is closer to Cyclonopedia or Charles Stross’ Laundry Files than most anything else in the Lovecraftian milieu; old conspiracy theories, shades of cyberpunk, the occult underground of the Cold War gently unraveling in the present day.

This isn’t a mystery that you need a key to, although at least a passing familiarity to the bones of what the characters are referring to and experiencing certainly help. As prose goes it’s fairly dense, but there’s a texture to it. New flesh on old bones; the ending isn’t particularly surprising, but neither is it unsatisfying. Mythos readers often like works like this, spiritual heirs of John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where the search for something leads to a personal transformation or transfiguration.

“Red Stars/White Snow/Black Metal” was published in Ashes and Entropy (2018), it has not yet been reprinted. With Sadie Shurberg, Geist wrote the essay “Correlating the Contents of Lovecraft’s Closet” in Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 3 (2019).

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

“Are You There, Cthulhu? It’s Me, Judy” (2018) by Beth W. Patterson

When the other two would leave the cabin together, I’d try doing my pectoral exercises in private, in hopes of expediting my development into womanhood. bending my arms, I’d swing my elbows in and out, chanting under my breath, “Get back, get back, I must increase my rack!” But of course I’d inevitably start to feel silly and switch to pushups, whispering, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah ‘nagl fhtagn.”
⁠—Beth W. Patterson, “Are You There Cthulhu? It’s Me, Judy” in Release the Virgins 50-51

Judy Blume’s 1970 classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a story about a 6th-grade girl who, without much formal guidance or religious affiliation, finds a personal relationship with God while going through the normal pitfalls and travails of school and puberty. Beth W. Patterson’s twist on the subject shifts the setting to an equestrian summer camp in the contemporary period, and her title character Judy has more interest in the Virgins and Lovecraft than Judaism vs. Christianity. The mafia, cursed Indian burial mound, and zombie horse scare are just icing.

The story was made-to-order for the anthology Release the Virgins, which has as its raison d’être one brief anecdote (told in the foreword) and one simple commandment (followed by a caveat):

Every story must contain the phrase ‘Release the Virgins’ somewhere […] After a week, I amended the process with the admonition “No more unicorns!”
—Michael A. Ventrella, “Introduction” in Release the Virgins 9

The story is not Mythos in any real sense, and claims of Lovecraftian might be dubious: there is nothing of super-nature in the story, at least nothing that isn’t explained away before the end. But there is something interesting just in the idea of a young girl with a personal relationship to Cthulhu, which reminds me a great deal of Scott R. Jones’ When The Stars Are Right: Toward An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality (2014) or even Phil Hine’s The Pseudonomicon, because as dogmatic as folks might be about the artificial nature of the Cthulhu Mythos and skeptical about the nature of spirituality, some folks just have a Cthulhu-shaped hole in their hearts and need something eldritch to fill it.

Which is really the most endearing part of the story. Judy doesn’t really seek intercession or favor, isn’t a young sociopath or fanatic looking to sacrifice her friends to awaken the dreamer of R’lyeh, but wants…someone she can honestly address her innermost thoughts and desires to.

Are you there, Cthulhu? It’s me, judy. I know you must be awfully busy in the mighty city of R’lyeh, and might not hear my thoughts with you being dead and all. But my friends don’t understand me, and I really think that I could ride Slipper if the counselors would only give me a chance. People say that you will be ready for resurrection when the stars are ready. Don’t you think the stars are ready for me too, Cthulhu?
⁠—Beth W. Patterson, “Are You There Cthulhu? It’s Me, Judy” in Release the Virgins 51

If there’s ever proof that Lovecraft can be applicable to more than just horror and weird fiction, I think it’s summed up in that final line. For those who are less interested in personal spirituality and want a story with horses, virgins, and Shub-Niggurath, I would recommend Charles Stross’ excellent novella Equoid (2014), which covers all of that very nicely…but would probably have not made the cut for the Release the Virgins anthology. Too many unicorns.

“Are You There Cthulhu? It’s Me, Judy” was published in Release the Virgins (2018); it has not yet been reprinted.

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

“A Creak in the Floor” (2018) by Victoria Dalpe

Don’t you know there was a mill on Copp’s Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650? I can shew you houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model”

A story doesn’t have to reference Richard Upton Pickman by name to invoke “Pickman’s Model.” When you boil Lovecraft’s story down to its essence, the soul of it’s core message is simple and perfect: there are monsters in the earth, and they eat the dead. So that is what Victoria Dalpe takes a her premise. No Necronomicon, no blasphemous artwork—just a bunch of art school kids renting a space in an old mill in Boston that’s been converted into illegal housing.

The art school kids tell each other stories, urban legend-building in real time, Dalpe working from her Lovecraftian substrate and layering on all the hints and suggestions. The girl who died in the elevator. The guy that got mugged. Where’s Pete? If this was drawn out to novella length or adapted to film, we might get the full Lovecraftian investigation, the secret history unveiled one onion skin at a time. The inexplicable rendered down, explained, pre-digested for the audience.

“A Creak In The Floor” is a short story. It doesn’t have time for that. Everyone knows what it’s about, or they should. Dalpe ends the story by going for the jugular. And she didn’t need a single reference to Pickman to do it, barely uses the g-word. Compared to a lot of Lovecraftian pastiche, it’s refreshing to see someone that can invoke the Mythos without calling the old names. It is reminiscent of “Pugelbone” (2010) by Nadia Bulkin in that way, though Dalpe’s tale hews a little closer to the Lovecraft canon.

If the things-beneath-the-mill are the crux of the story, Where is Pete? is the key to the plot. It is what drives the protagonist Charlie Chan deeper into the darkness. Pete is the reason Charlie is there. Pete is the boy Charlie is in love with. The human connection draws Charlie inexorably in after his friend, his hinted-at one-time lover. The missing Pete’s interpersonal connections with his flatmates is woven in and around the urban legends that Dalpe builds, much as Pickman himself has been built up from Lovecraft’s ghoulish artist, drawing bits of legend to his own personal Mythos as writers weave their stories around him—like “Pickman’s Other Model (1929)” (2008) by Caitlín R. Kiernan, or “Pickman’s Modem” (1992) by Lawrence Evans-Watt.

Victoria Dalpe turns the page before we see what crimson end is in store for Charlie, and that is appropriate. While his story could have gone on, the story that Dalpe was telling really ends with the final revelation. In a twist of irony that only Lovecraft readers will get, it once again involves a photograph from life…

“A Creek In The Floor” was published in Pickman’s Gallery (2018). Victoria Dalpe’s other Lovecraftian contribution includes “Mater Annelinda” in Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2014).

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

“Moonshine” (2018) by G. D. Penman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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