Tag: Angela Slatter

“The Song of Sighs” (2013) by Angela Slatter

I am hidden, but lovely, O ye daughters of darkness,
as the dreams of Great Old Ones
as the drowned houses of R’lyeth
—Angela Slatter, “The Song of Sighs” in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth 169

The pathos of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is that the nameless narrator does not know who he is. What should be a homecoming, a prodigal son awaiting the proverbial fatted calf, the embrace of heritage and belonging, all goes terribly wrong. The various sequels to the story, written in the years and decades after, usually mark the nameless narrator as a traitor or black sheep for their unknowing betrayal, rather than the pathetic figure that they are. For those who survive in the Innsmouth diaspora, as in “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys, the loss of community, accumulated knowledge, and shared identity is as important as the actual lives destroyed and people killed.

Memory and identity thus make appropriate themes for Angela Slatter’s “The Song of Sighs.”

Lovecraft painted the Innsmouth identity in broad strokes: clannish, taciturn, inward-looking, forward-looking, religious, conscientious of appearances. The rites of the Esoteric Order of Dagon are not given in any detail, no holidays are named, no community activities described, or peculiarities of dress or cooking. The vast majority of what makes up “Innsmouth culture” or identity was built up by later writers, using what little fragments Lovecraft left in his writing. The result is somewhat stilted; imagine trying to recreate the ancient druid religion from Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico: what you get is largely based on biased, partial accounts by outsiders, filled in with a great deal of extrapolation and wishful thinking. There’s little enough there that writers can do practically whatever they want with the inhabitants of Innsmouth—and have.

So when readers begin the journals of Vivienne Croftmarsh, they look to seize on what they know. To place this story, this fragment of the Innsmouth Cycle, in context with the other fragments. Like scholars piecing together the Dead Sea Scrolls, the “truth” is a bit plastic: here is the evidence we have, where do the pieces fit? Are we even looking at the right puzzle? In this case, the situation is complicated by Croftmarsh’s own faulty memory: like the protagonist of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” she does not know herself. Which is as clever a way for a writer to get the readers as any other; a clever reader will path themselves on the back as Dr. Croftmarsh scratches at her neck, as she worms her way deeper into the secrets of the school she teaches at. They think they know what’s coming…because they’ve read this story before, or at least variations of it. The wayward Innsmouthian that comes to know themselves, that discovers their heritage.

Of course, if Angela Slatter was just parroting Lovecraft’s story, it wouldn’t be much of a story at all. The point of invoking the same themes is to seize on the reader’s expectations before subverting them; to give, if not a genuine surprise, than at least a bit of a shock that the reader hadn’t thought to ask the right questions before the answers were given to them. Slatter is a deft hand at this sort of writing, and the crumb-trail left for Vivienne Croftmarsh to follow, and for the readers to vicariously pick up as they read along, is just that: a way for someone to find their way back over ground they’ve covered before. It isn’t that the readers’ memories of Innsmouth are wrong, but the trail may be leading them to a different destination than they might expect.

That is the lesson which readers are sometimes long in learning: sometimes you have to forget what you think you know. Don’t anticipate. “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is so familiar to many stalwart regular readers of the Mythos that it is sometimes difficult to forget that there are other ways to read and interpret the events, and that some things are, if not best forgotten, than not the pleasant reconstructions of those who like to think of the Innsmouth folk as purely victims.

“Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had ’em ages afore, but lost track o’ the upper world arter a time. What they done to the victims it ain’t fer me to say, an’ I guess Obed wa’n’t none too sharp abaout askin’. But it was all right with the heathens, because they’d ben havin’ a hard time an’ was desp’rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o’ young folks to the sea-things twict every year—May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en—reg’lar as cud be. Also give some o’ the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty o’ fish—they druv ’em in from all over the sea—an’ a few gold-like things naow an’ then.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Caesar’s druids were a bloody-handed lot too; human sacrifice was anathema to the Romans, and for those cultures that followed the Romans, it became a familiar polemic (cf. cannibalism and Relatione del Reame di Congo (1591) by Filippo Pigafetta). The “reality” of these practices remains a key part of Innsmouth identity in many stories of the Innsmouth diaspora: Brian McNaughton in “The Doom That Came To Innsmouth” leans one way, Ruthanna Emrys in “The Litany of Earth” and her subsequent novels leans another. Fewer readers sympathize with an Innsmouth diaspora that does practice human sacrifice in some form.

There’s probably a thesis to be written on the finer philosophical details of that point. For the Innsmouth identity to have verisimilitude, there should be unpleasant or alien aspects, things that set it apart from contemporary culture at more than a superficial level. If all of the survivors of Innsmouth were virtuous, ethical, hardworking, and not hurting anybody, then they’d be a culture of Mary Sues. Angela Slatter holds the reader in suspense on that point to the end, and for good reason.

Angela Slatter’s “The Song of Sighs” was first published in Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth (2013), and has been reprinted in New Cthulhu 2 (2015), her collection Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales (2016), and Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good (2018).

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

“Rising, Not Dreaming” (2011) by Angela Slatter

The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Only the outlines of what the various cults believe are revealed in the course of Lovecraft’s fiction, snippets of translations from the Necronomicon, the names of the entities they revere, suggestions of a history that far outstretches anything of human record—and a promise, a prediction, as certain as the eventual demise of our own sun at some impossibly future date, that the stars will come right, and these entities will come again. That is the gospel according to Lovecraft.

“Rising, Not Dreaming” is the Mythos equivalent of apocrypha. Not exactly in agreement on every point of Lovecraft’s eschatology, presenting an alternate perspective on events. The narrative comes from a viewpoint that is much more personal and immediate than a quotation from a dusty tome:

I think of the wife I had, sweet and tender.
I think of her belly swelling, rich and round.
—Angela Slatter, “Rising, Not Dreaming” in Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth 276

The result is closer to dark fantasy than normal Lovecraftian horror, reminiscent of “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys or “Take Your Daughters to Work” (2007) by Livia Llewellyn in that respects—and it is worth considering how these “alternate Mythos” add to the overall experience of the reader.

Lovecraft and his contemporaries largely were working independently of one another, pursuing their own fiction, using references to each other’s fiction as more of a skein of connective tissue than collaborative plotting. While there were a few efforts to keep their material in agreement, these were largely focused internally—Lovecraft himself liked to use variations on the names of the various entities. For example, in “The Electric Executioner” the familiar Mythos entities appear with Nahuatl-influenced names like “Cthulhutl” and “Niguratl-Yig” and “Yog-Sototl.” These alternate names are never explicitly explained by Lovecraft: it was later generations of fans and writers that would work to “fill in the gaps” and attempt to write fiction that agreed with the “gospel” version in Lovecraft’s “canon,” worrying over details of spelling and consistency.

The literary game of writing fiction that agrees with Lovecraft & his contemporaries, that builds off his fiction and is in communion with it is one that many writers continue to play today, extending the Mythos in one way or another. Of course, many of these continuations themselves are taken in different directions, so while you might argue that “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens, “Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection” (2003) by Ann K. Schwader, and “A Coven in Essex County” (2016) by J. M. Yales are all true to Lovecraft’s original stories, it is a little difficult to see them all co-existing within the same continuity. They are good stories, and each emphasizes or develops different aspects of the same material, but can they all be true for a particular canon without some baroque efforts on the part of the reader?

Slatter’s approach in “Rising, Not Dreaming” is deliberately apocryphal in this respect. Like Lovecraft, she emphasizes this in a subtle choice of words:

Too long had the dreams of men been troubled with the ructions of the star lords. Too often did they rise at whim from their undersea city, their R’lyeth, to walk the earth and bring darkness with them.
—Angela Slatter, “Rising, Not Dreaming” in Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth 275

R’leyth instead of R’leyh could be a slip of the keyboard, but Slatter’s spelling suggests antiquity, or perhaps the imperfect translation of inhuman speech. The story too contains within it a greater sense of human agency than typical for Lovecraftian horror—the unnamed Masters cast spells of immortality and water-breathing, and dare to pull an Erich Zann/Pied Piper play. Slatter is weaving a fable on the bones of Lovecraft’s mythology, but the approach given is very much not one that has to do with the alignment of the stars, volcanic activity in the Pacific Ocean, or ships in the night. There are echoes of his language and philosophy in the story, but it is clearly a world apart from the canon Mythos.

Which must be immensely freeing, to many authors. To not be slaved to follow the exact details of Lovecraft’s stories, but to use his creations and ideas to help tell the stories that they want to tell—as is perhaps exemplified by “Showdown at Red Hook” (2011) by Lois H. Gresh, where time and place can be freely distorted to achieve the right mood. Slatter has certainly worked to achieve a mood here, one of loss and rebellion, pride and regret, and finally a kind of diminution as the narrator realizes how small they are, physically and otherwise, in comparison to Cthulhu. That is the very Lovecraftian terminal revelation of the tale, a kind of gnostic wisdom, albeit too late.

“Rising, Not Dreaming” was first published in Innsmouth Free Press #3 (2011), and has been reprinted in the collection Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth (2013), and was translated into Russian in 2015. Angela Slatter’s other contributions to Mythos fiction include “The Song of Sighs” (2013) and “Lavinia’s Wood” (2015).

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