“A Clicking in the Shadows” (2002) by Chad Hensley & W. H. Pugmire

Roach smell is distinctive. A kind of sickly, musty reek that clings to places; sign of the often unseen dwellers in darkness. At night, sometimes, you can lie awake, dreading the skitter of tiny feet. Knowing they’re there. Knowing they could appear anywhere. On your toothbrush. On the ceiling. Walking across your face… and they often incite a visceral reaction, these alien creatures which cohabit the welcoming space that is human habitation. A kind of horror that has nothing to do with grimoires or ancient gods, but of much more mundane and realistic issues of filth, disease, and the invasion of personal space.

What a wonderful idea for a story, they must have thought, before writing “A Clicking in the Shadows.”

“Can you smell them? Yep, they’re nearby now, right enough. By their stench shall ye know them! Tryin’ to squeeze through the spaces, sure enough. They stink to all-mighty heaven.”
—Chad Hensley & W. H. Pugmire, “A Clicking in the Shadows” in
A Clicking in the Shadows and Other Tales (2002) 7

By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”

W. H. Pugmire was one of the most evocative voices in Lovecraftian horror from about the 1970s until his death in 2019. Chad Hensley is probably better known as the editor of EsoTerra: The Journal of Extreme Culture than as a horror writer, though he’s put out a fair bit of work over the years. The two writers collaborated together, and “A Clicking in the Shadows” is the premiere piece in their (now very obscure) joint collection A Clicking in the Shadows And Other Tales (2002).

From 1997 until 2003, I lived in Seattle, Washington. Wilum Pugmire lived down the street from me. So it was easy to meet up, critic each other’s fiction, as well as collaborate. We’ve written one poem and three short stories together, one of which wound up in the mass market paperback anthology The Darker Side: Generations of Horror. Wilum and I also collaborated on a chapbook of short stories titled A Clicking in the Shadows and Other Tales published in 2002. The lead story received an honorable mention in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. I’m really pleased and proud to have collaborated with Wilum and hope to do so again one day.
—Madhouse Introduction: Meet Chad Hensley (6 Apr 2014)

Oftentimes with collaborations, one name may be more recognizable than the other, and gain the bulk of the attention from critics. In this case, Pugmire is certainly the more well-known in Lovecraftian circles, and in his introduction to A Clicking in the Shadows, Robert M. Price writes:

All seven of their tales herein contained seem to take place in Sesquas Valley or at least in a kindred state of mind. In fact, a perfect image for the mood of these stories would have to be the scene in “A Clicking in the Shadows” where one character frantically wields a can of poison bug-spray to whelm a looming tide of horrific vermin. The spray itself is as poisonous as the I’ll it aims to eradicate, and one is not sure whether its intended path to relief is to destroy the pests or to put the pestered out of their worldly misery! Such is the desperate, sweetly poisonous atmosphere through which we move in these stories. (4)

I don’t think that’s strictly accurate. While one story in the collection, “Hairs of the Mother” by Hensley, is explicitly set in Sesqua Valley, none of the others are. “A Clicking in the Shadows” is set in Mississippi, far from the Pacific Northwest where Sesqua Valley is located, so from a purely pedantic geographical point, it doesn’t hold up. The question of whether it occupies a bit of psychogeography akin to Sesqua Valley is more subjective. Pugmire’s bit of personal Lovecraft country is aggressively rural or semi-rural; there are houses, a small town, but it’s the unmanaged wilderness that is the Valley itself. Hensley’s stories, at least in this slim volume, tend to more urban locales; nor is Hensley building a mythology. Some of the stories in A Clicking in the Shadows are explicitly or implicitly part of the Arkham myth-cycle, but they’re not the legends of some particular eldritch entity or place, but it is primarily an aesthetic anthology. Two different voices that sometimes work in harmony.

“A Clicking in the Shadows” is an effective bit of harmony. The story is brief, and holds to a very down-to-earth horror vibe until near the end, when things ratchet up from the realistic to the uncanny to the frankly eldritch. It reminds of another collaboration, “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson, where the resulting product is reminiscent of the work of both authors but also finds its own voice, which isn’t quite the same as either on their own.

Late in the night, Thorp was awakened by an itch on his nose. Numbly, in groggy stupor, he clumsily scratched at his face. His fingers found a small, flattened body that squirmed in his hand as he grabbed it.
—Chad Hensley & W. H. Pugmire, “A Clicking in the Shadows” in
A Clicking in the Shadows and Other Tales (2002) 8

It would be nice if, one of these days, a new collection were issued with all of Pugmire’s collaborations. Maybe it would lead more readers toward Chad Hensley; maybe not. Certainly, such a collection would be worth reading, if only to showcase the talents involved.

“A Clicking in the Shadows” was first published in A Clicking in the Shadows And Other Tales (2002); it was republished in Inhuman #6 (2015).

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Horror in the Stable” (2017) by R. C. Mulhare

The winter evening settled down over the town of Bolton, with snow falling past the windows of the office of Doctors Danforth Kane and myself, Herbert West. Christmas Eve, and while I prepared to ‘hold down the fort’, Danforth donned his greatcoat, preparatory to leaving for the night and a Christmas Eve fete with his intended. As I no longer believed in Jesus of Nazareth as the avatar of God who had clearly turned his back upon his own celebration, if he existed at all, I no longer saw much need for me to celebrate it.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 50

Of all of Lovecraft’s works, “Herbert West—Reanimator” is arguably the most deliberately and gleefully outrageous; with West as the caricature of the mad scientist without conscience, and outrage often heaping on outrage. This lends itself equally gleeful parody, as in “Kanye West—Reanimator” (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky, “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon, and Reanimator (2020) by Juscelino Neco & H. P. Lovecraft, and to reinterpretation that unveils new sides of West and his work, such as “Herbert West in Love” (2012) by Molly Tanzer and “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters. Even direct expansions of the Reanimator mythos, such as Peter Rawlik’s Reanimators (2013) and Reanimatrix (2016), and the anthology Legacy of the Reanimator (2015), are often gleefully transgressive. It’s the nature and appeal of the characters and their stories.

But what does the Re-animator have to do with Christmas?

Arguably, the first Herbert West/Christmas episode was “Herbert West—Reincarnated: Part II, The Horror from the Holy Land” (1999) by Brian McNaughton. This was part of a series of sequels to Lovecraft’s original stories, postulating on the continued existence and adventures of West and the nameless narrator of his tales. In this case, McNaughton had the pair working for Nazi Germany, and tasked with reanimating an almost two-thousand-year-old corpse recovered from the Middle East. This second miraculous resurrection was accomplished, although what returned for its second birth was typical of West’s other experiments. The reanimated Jesus, however, only makes this a Christmas tale by technicality. For stories that are set at the right time and setting, we have to look at works like R. C. Mulhare’s “The Horror in the Stable.”

Horror is a Christmas tradition, although that tradition began with rather staid ghost stories, as composed by M. R. James (and as lampooned by Jerome K. Jerome), and today is more common with horror films set during the holiday, from the classic Black Christmas (1974) and Gremlins (1984) to more contemporary fare like Krampus (2015) and Red Snow (2021). Many of these works take advantage of both the natural attributes of the winter holiday setting—the weather, the social gatherings (or lack thereof), and the emotions those invoke—and the juxtaposition of the bright, festive holiday with gore, terror, melancholy, and fear that are hallmarks of the horror tale.

“The Horror in the Stable” does both of these things. It reads like a lost episode from the original “Herbert West—Reanimator” series, save that it is told from West’s own point of view; the nameless narrator has the night off for Christmas (and, as a jest, Mulhare borrows a bit from Re-Animator (1985), giving the narrator’s name as Danforth Kane). West is called by the police to a nearby barn, though he finds no expectant mother or manger prepared to house a holy infant. Instead there are a pair of brutalized child patients, one of whom is a little too far gone…for anyone except Herbert West.

Taking a vial of the serum which Danforth and I had worked to perfect, from a hidden pocket inside my satchel, I filled a clean syringe with the liquid and injected it into the back of the boy’s skull above the top of the spine. “A painkiller to ease their sufferings in this state,” I said, answering the officer’s questioning look and the better to hide our work in plain sight.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 53

Which has the expected results. If there is a criticism to level at this story, it is that despite West’s victim being a child and the events being set at Christmas, it isn’t quite as outrageous as it could be. The one is more melancholy than sanguine; much of the horror of the story is subtle. The children are orphans who lived hard lives, and West, surprisingly, isn’t unsympathetic. Mulhare takes advantage of the opportunity to flesh West out a little, without detracting from his overall menace or obsession. The finale, when it comes, is gruesome—but it is also familiar.

In his arms he clutched, as a child might clutch a new toy given him for Christmas, a small, pale leg, with one tattered shoe covering the foot.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 56

We’ve seen this before, so it loses something of its impact here. Yet neither is it inappropriate. This is an episode that could slot easily into the existing Herbert West mythology, without need for extensive glosses. Like picking up an old book and finding a leaf uncut, never read all these years, and with the swipe of a knife the lost episode is revealed.

What is Herbert West to Christmas? In the canon of Lovecraftian Christmas tales, like “Keeping Festival” (1997) by Mollie L. Burleson and “A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann, “The Horror in the Stable” slots in as a tale that acknowledges the holiday without celebrating it. West is an atheist; he stands apart from the carolers and the revelers, and if he blasphemes against God and Christ, he does so without acknowledging them. The horrors are secular horrors for a largely secular holiday…and in the context of the Re-Animator tales, that works.

“The Horror in the Stable” by R. C. Mulhare was first published in Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017). It has not been reprinted.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann

My first positive utterance of a sceptical nature probably occurred before my fifth birthday, when I was told what I really knew before, that “Santa Claus” is a myth. This admission caused me to ask why “God” is not equally a myth.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922)

From a strictly literal viewpoint, Christmas is a Christian holiday, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. That simple truth, so celebrated and shorn of pretension during Linus’ famous recitation at the end of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965) should not be forgotten or disputed. However, in the last two thousand plus years since the death of Christ, things have gotten complicated. How and when and why Christmas is celebrated has changed; traditions have arisen, fallen out of favor, or been borrowed in. Christmas tress became popular, and stockings, and gifts wrapped in bright paper and ribbons, but many of these are things essentially secular in nature, enjoyed both by devout Christians of various denominations and folks who have never darkened the door of a church.

The Christian origins have been bedecked by a more elaborate and peculiar mythology of traditions, folkore, fakelore, and rituals. The most notable entity outside the baby Jesus itself might be Saint Nicholas or Father Christmas or Santa Claus; but celebrants certainly know others. Song, story, and film have given St. Nick a wife, reindeer, and a troop of elves, at least in many English-speaking countries. A more shadowy and often peculiar extnded Christmas-time pantheon that might include the Krampus, Zwarte Piet, Père Fouettard, Belsnickel, Yule Cat, Befana, Grýla, Perchta, and Elf-on-a-Shelf, among others.

Why not add Cthulhu to the holiday mythos?

While Lovecraft may not have believed in Santa Claus, or even necessarily the historical Jesus, he certainly enjoyed Christmas, and even had a Christmas tree when he could afford it, exchanged gifts and notes with friends and family. Nor was he immune to the general charms that the holiday offered, as evidenced by “The Festival” (written 1923), where he imagines a strictly pagan celebration “that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.”

Followers-on in the Lovecraftian tradition don’t necessarily go that hard. Some stories are just a bit of Xmas fun.

It was the night before Christmas, and in a haunted house on Ash street, a tiny creature in a floppy red Santa hat and coat manifest in the dark beneath an ornamented tree.
—Melissa McCann, “A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016)

This short tale is not a word-for-word riff off Clement Clarke Moore’s classic “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” although it probably takes general inspiration from the idea. Christmas Eve. The house is quiet. Everyone is safely tucked away. Yet something is stirring.

The short tale works because while it is set on Christmas Eve, it is also set in a haunted house whose inhabitants are more than a little eldritch, though many of the details and backstory are very much left hinted at rather than explicit. The story treads a fine line between humor and seriousness, and the overall tone is vaguely reminiscent of Roger Zelazny’s classic A Night in the Lonesome October. It is a very secular Christmas tale; Linus would have no place here, although a reading from the Necronomicon would probably be appreciated by the inhabitants of this particular house. Nor does McCann try to hamfistedly tie Santa Claus into the Mythos. It is a Christmas story in the way Die Hard is a Christmas story, because of setting and props, recognizable elements and old familiar names.

Which works. McCann isn’t trying to save the world and/or Hanukkah, or set up a Hallmark romantasy with tentacles, but she sets out to tell a well-paced, straightforward tale where the tropes of two very different cults mingle and overlap in ways that are both funny and appropriate.

“A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann can be found as a standalone Amazon ebook, and is also included in her collection King of Midwinter (2019).

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Re-Quest Denied” (1998) by Stanley C. Sargent

Dedicated to W.H. Pugmire, the culprit concealed behind every bush of Sesqua Valley.
—Stanley C. Sargent, “Re-Quest Denied” in Mythos Online, Vol. 1, #8 (Feb 1998)

In 1996, Stanley C. Sargent wrote “For Wilum, Gent.,” published in the obscure journal Leathered in Crimson #1. In 1997, Sargent reviewed Tales of Sesqua Valley by W. H. Pugmire; it was Pugmire’s first fiction collection. In 1999, Sargent co-edited and illustrated Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror, Pugmire’s next collection. They were friends, they were admirers of each other’s work. And in 1998, Sargent penned a small tribute to his friend.

“Re-Quest Denied” is a rare tale of Sesqua Valley written by someone other than Pugmire himself, and interestingly it parallels some of the themes expressed in “Vyvyan’s Father” (2013) by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. Both stories essentially deal with an escape into disenchantment, the refusal of the call of beauty and emotion to focus on logic, rationality, mundanity, dullness—and both ultimately come to regret that choice and embrace what they had once rejected.

There is a question as to how much of Sargent himself went into this story. Not in the exact details, but in the emotions. In his own brief bio, he wrote:

Born at high noon on the summer solstice, 1950, in Ohio, Stanley C. Sargent grew up near his grandparents’ 200 acre farm. He populated three large, abandoned gravel pits on the farm with prehistoric and mythological beasts only he could see.

At age 18, Stan pulled up stakes and moved to San Francisco, where he could live as he liked and be openly gay. He attended a conference on Mayan hieroglyphs in Guatemala City in the mid-1970’s, and he spent a month in Iran in 1979. He worked for many years for corporate law firms, as word processing department supervisor.

In 1991, Stan abandoned the business world. He continued his long-time interest in and production of art (ink pointillism and later airbrush painting); in 1999, he completely illustrated a paperback book by W.H. Pugmire. At age 44, he began writing horror fiction inspired by the style of H.P. Lovecraft.

Compare that to:

Victor had dedicated every moment of his waking life to work, to the exclusion of all else. He had never even stopped long enough to get married. Emotions, longings, and his natural romantic lean had been suppressed and ignored completely. The result had been a brilliant career as advisor to the most powerful men and women on Earth; all the world had known and honored him. Now he was retired, and none of it meant anything to him.

At age sixty-five, Victor felt his life had been wasted. Without the endless distractions he had always known, a tidal wave of emotion rose up from deep within his soul, overwhelming him with the realization that, regardless of his worldly success, his life was a total failure.

He had lived a one-sided existence devoid of love and passion. He had spent his life building a magnificent palace in which he dwelled alone; in all his years, he had never found anyone with whom to share the love or passion that resided within him. And now that he was an old man, overweight and wrinkled, loosing his hair, it was too late.

Likewise, it seems clear that “Pug” is inspired by W. H. Pugmire, even if it isn’t meant to be him. A sort of idealized Pugmire, the eternal youth that echoes the kind of masculine beauty that written about in stories like “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Pug is a dream, a promise, a part of Sesqua Valley made flesh, the fire the moth is drawn to.

In terms of writing, this is one of Sargent’s minor works; the prose is straightforward, a bit basic, the plotting fairly straightforward and heavy with foreshadowing. Readers might compare it to The Substance (2025), only in reverse. Perhaps wisely, Sargent doesn’t step on Pugmire’s toes, doesn’t add much to the lore of Sesqua Valley. A single legend, a couple of inhabitants. Nothing that Pugmire would have to write around or contradict in his own works, but also not much to tie it in except for Mt. Selta itself.

“Re-Quest Denied” is far from a lost work, although it remains fairly obscure. Originally published in the now-defunct Mythos Online webzine in 1998, it was reprinted in the print journals Al Azif #3 (May-Jun 1998), Dreaming in R’lyeh #1 (2003), and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Cthulhu’s Creatures (2007), all of which are long out of print. Unfortunately, Sargent never included it in any of his own collections; even more unfortunately, the original art that accompanied this work (titled “Pug” and with the alt text: “Yet it was the nude youth of breathtaking veauty that was the true centerpiece of Victor’s dreamlike vision.”) appears to be lost, as it wasn’t captured by the Internet Archive.

Alas.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Vyvyan’s Father” (2013) by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

In H. P. Lovecraft’s body of work, the town of Innsmouth is mentioned by name only in four stories (“Celephaïs,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House”) and a couple “Fungi from Yuggoth.” The core of Lovecraft’s Mythos, which so many writers have expanded upon over the decades, tends to be fairly scanty. Lovecraft country, that literary realm where the Old Ones walk, was painted in broad strokes and a few fine details, and it is everyone else who has filled in the gaps.

Writers who came after Lovecraft have, when not playing in his sandbox, carved out their own spaces. The most famous are Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley stories set in and around the literary Brichester and Goatswood in the United Kingdom; and W. H. Pugmire‘s Sesqua Valley and associated towns and mountains set in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Since these writers lived much longer than Lovecraft, and had more opportunity to write and publish, it might not be surprising that they have produced correspondingly more lore for their associated locales than Lovecraft did for his.

And yet, these places often feel smaller, because the voices associated with them tend to be singular. While anybody can write a tale of Innsmouth, it is generally considered uncouth to poach a living author’s copyrighted creations without permission. Some of them have consented to letting other writers splash in their ponds—Ramsey Campbell, for instance, consented to Made in Goatswood (1996), a tribute anthology; and in 2013 the Lovecraft eZine #28 did a similar tribute to W. H. Pugmire.

These tales represented a first step at a wider Sesqua Valley Mythos. New ideas, new perspectives, new angles. Pugmire was never dogmatic about his Sesqua Valley lore, preferring to expand it in hints and suggestions, a tale at a time, and there has not yet been an effort to correlate all the contents of his fiction into a single concordance or wiki. Perhaps, in the future, there will be more. For now, one particular tale from Lovecraft eZine #28 is worth discussing, because it does something different than the rest. Something very Pugmire-like in its approach to the Sesqua Valley tales.

“Vyvyan’s Father” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy does not mention Sesqua Valley. Simon Gregory Williams and William Davis Manly do not appear on the page. Uniquely of the tribute stories in the eZine, Satyamurthy chose to write a story that is definably set in the world of Sesqua Valley—for anyone who is familiar with Pugmire’s work, at least, it is obvious from the clues and details as much as the context of the issue—without falling into the same trap of Mythos pasticheurs who load up a story with familiar names. It is an approach that echoes Pugmire’s own insistence that writing Lovecraftian fiction should echo the aesthetics of Lovecraft, not just pay lip-service to Arkham and Innsmouth, Dunwich and Kingsport, Cthulhu and the Necronomicon.

His eyes beguiled me, being slightly slanted and of a silver hue that seemed to contain particles of other shades in their pale irises.
—W. H. Pugmire, “The Horror on Tempest Hill” in An Imp of Aether 142

If his eyes were open, they would startle you with their timeless, silvery-grey depth.
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, “Vyvyan’s Father” in Lovecraft eZine (2013)

There is something very appropriate in how Satyamurthy’s tale is a bridge between India and Sesqua Valley; the lost child, the orphan of the Valley, is caught between two worlds in a way that echoes something of India’s own history as a crossroads of empires, with those who fall outside the established social orders caught like nuts in a pulau: a part of the whole, yet apart from the rest. This between-two-worlds tension defines Vyvyan’s character, but it also echoes the story as a whole: instead of just playing in Pugmire’s backyard, Satyamurthy builds a bridge between the setting of many of his own stories and Pugmire’s. Instead of submitting himself to Pugmire’s aesthetic, he shows how their themes can connect. Like New World tomatoes incorporated into a quintessentially Indian paneer gravy.

The slow expansion of Sesqua Valley beyond the bounds of Pugmire’s fiction is not the trauma-driven diaspora that marks much of contemporary Innsmouth tales. It is a different kind of cultural diffusion, spread by wanderers and their children, artifacts and ideas that spread out and draw strangers in. Where it goes from here…who can say?

“Vyvyan’s Father” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy can be read online at Lovecraft eZine #28, and print edition is also available.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“In Their Own Voices” (2025) by Lavie Tidhar

Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup.
—Irvin S. Cobb, “Fishhead” (1913)

She remembered college well. It was so different to junior high, when the kids used to push her, gathered round in a circle so that she couldn’t escape. Fishhead! Fishhead! they’d cry.
—Lavie Tidhar, “In Their Own Voices” in New Weird & Decadent (2025) 29

The 21st-century story of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is the diaspora. It is a very post-colonialist idea; the concept of identity and ethnicity, which has been forcibly divorced from geography. The people of Innsmouth were forced from their homes by government violence, military force. Arrested, imprisoned, murdered.

Yet they survived.

“The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys, “Legacy of Salt” (2016) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts” (2016) by Sonya Taaffe, and Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys are some of the stories that deal with the way the survivors of the government raid on Innsmouth scattered, and how their descendants connected, formed their own groups, attempted to preserve and reclaim their legacy.

Glad your collaborator found my Massachusetts atmosphere convincing.
The plot I am now experimenting on concerns another fictitious Mass.
town—“Innsmouth”—which is vaguely suggested by the ancient & almost
dead city of Newburyport. Of course, there is no sinister, un-human shadow
over poor old Newburyport—but then, there never was a festival of worms
at Marblehead (Kingsport)!
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 14 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.411

One of the biggest parts of the diaspora mythology is the return to Innsmouth itself. The town that Lovecraft described takes its real-life inspiration from his visit to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and while its literary antecedents include Irvin S. Cobb’s “Fishhead,” Herbert S. Gorman’s “The Place Called Dagon,” and Robert W. Chambers’ “The Harbor-Master.” This is not portrayed as irredentism, however; the return is not a military re-conquest, violence meeting violence, but a peaceful reoccupation. Innsmouth is portrayed as ground of little to no value aside from those who are bound there by ties of ancestry and memory.

Lavie Tidhar’s “In Their Own Voices” is about such a return. It is not a horror story, though horror is part of its history and heritage. This is about the healing that comes after the horror, about reunion, self-acceptance, and finding your tribe. Tidhar has done well to ground the story in the genuine Massachusetts geography, much as Lovecraft himself did.

Silvia linked hands with her sisters; and when she smiled she tasted salt on her tongue, and it took her a moment to realize she had been crying.
—Lavie Tidhar, “In Their Own Voices” in New Weird & Decadent (2025) 29

Readers could easily imagine the Silvia of “In Their Own Voices” and Aphra of Ruthanna Emrys’ “The Litany of Earth” meeting together, stranger cousins at a family reunion—and that’s part of the game. Writers like Tidhar are surfing the same wave that August Derleth, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sonya Taaffe, and so many others have ridden, but they are all on their own journey, and the emphasis is different for each writer. The legacy of Innsmouth is both horror and acceptance, monsters and orphans. That speaks across generations.

“In Their Own Voices” by Lavie Tidhar was published in New Weird & Decadent (2025), also available on Amazon.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Under an Arkham Moon” (2014) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire

(To the memory of Robert Bloch)
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire, “Under an Arkham Moon” in
Black Wings III (2014) 57

Teratophilia is the love of monsters and the monstrous. This can be love of any sort, the fondness of familiarity or a sibling-like bond of friendship to sexual desire or even some unchangeable, devoted, and obsessive agape. There are many forms of teratophilia on display in this short tale by Salmonson and Pugmire. The love of human oddities, so often misconstrued as monsters; the love of Arkham, that fictional town that is so steeped in evil it corrupts the dreams of those within it; and a hot, burning physical desire for the monster in the attic…but above all, there is the love for that very human monster H. P. Lovecraft, and the story is written in such a way to pay homage to his creations, while taking them a step or three further.

The dedication to the memory of Robert Bloch is a nod to his story “The Mannikin” (WT Apr 1937), and this story shares a character with a similar conjoined twin and a connection to De Vermis Mysteriis, and may owe itself to a certain idea from Lovecraft. The plot is essentially a sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” (1925), evident from its references to “The Attic Window” in Whispers (albeit with a nod toward the Indiana Magazine War), and the thing with the blemished eye. However, for the most part this is a story that reveals in the decadent Lovecraftian aesthetic. That really soaks in the sensuous language, the dark atmosphere, the terrible hints and lore.

This was a story written by a pair of monster kids that grew up into adults still in love with a world of dark delights and evil that was something more than the banal of canceling school lunches or denying health care claims to the sick. A story that tells how someone might be drawn back to old haunts to, as Conan the Cimmerian once put it in “The People of the Black Circle”: “like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom from some source of sorcery.”

Sometimes, we return to Arkham for renewal.

I had returned to Arkham from the “real” world with fewer victories than I expected. I had been defeated, I of noble blood, noble of its kind. I needed Ambrose’s familiariaty, even that part of him that could slip from poetry to venom in a single heartbeat.
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire, “Under an Arkham Moon” in
Black Wings III (2014) 59

The twist in this story, when teratophilia proves both sexual and reciprocal, is a delicious one of its kind. Lovecraft always left the nature of the Unnamable deliberately ambiguous, and Salmonson & Pugmire have kept it so here. The terrible truth behind Lovecraft’s original story was very different, but this is still a fine sequel. A return to Lovecraft country, a refreshing dip for dark spirits who remember when Lovecraftian fiction was less hung up in the trappings of the Mythos and evoked more of the strange, decadent mood of Lovecraft’s early fiction, when friends scared each other to look into a house haunted by something they could not give a name to.

“Under an Arkham Moon” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire was first published in Black Wings III (2014); it was reprinted in Pugmire’s collection An Ecstasy of Fear (2019, Centipede Press).

The Terrible Truth Behind The Unnamable

The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable”

Lovecraft gets a bit of a ribbing for “unnamable,” “unspeakable,” or “indescribable” critters – which he never had a monopoly on and was never so addicted to as a lot of critics like to think; the story in question in fact begins by making fun of the tendency in stories like Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” or Guy de Maupussant’s “The Horla.”

Beyond that though, Lovecraft would take his inspirations where he found them, and this includes the family copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which purports to be a religious history of New England but manages to cram in so many weird bits and pieces that you’d be amazed—witchcraft narratives, ghost stories, sea monsters, the works. The bit which inspired Lovecraft’s story is a very obscure bit of gossip about a “thing with a blemished eye”:

At the Southward there was a Beaſt, which brought forth a Creature, which might pretend unto ſomething of an Humane Shape. Now the People minded that the Monſter had a Blemiſh in one Eye, much like what a profligate Fellow in the Town was known to have. This Fellow was hereupon examin’d; and having upon his examination, conſeſ’d his inſandous Beſtialities; for which he was deſervedly Executed.
—Mather, MCM Book VI, Chapter V, Tenth Remark

Which was a hard go, the worse so because while Mather names no names, we know what actually inspired the anecdote.

George Spencer, an ugly balding man with one “pearle” or false eye, had probably been whipped in Boston for receiving stolen goods, and had also been punished in New Haven for botching an attempt to escape to Virginia. He admitted that he had gained no spiritual benefit from the ministry of the famed John Davenport, that he had not said a single prayer during his five years in New England, and that he read the Bible only when ordered to do so by his master. In February, 1642, Spencer’s life took a cruel turn when a sow gave birth to a dead deformed piglet. The “monster” was completely bald and had “butt one eye in the midle of the face, and thatt large and open, like some blemished eye of a man.” Out of its forehead “a thing of flesh grew forth and hung downe, itt was hollow, and like a mans instrum’ of genration.”

The magistrates arrested Spencer and put him in prison. New Haven had not yet tried a capital crime. Spencer had seen enough of the colony’s system of justice to know that the magistrates expected offenders to confess and repent. He had recently seen a man merely whipped for molesting a child, and as Spencer made clear, he thought that child molestation was a more disgusting crime than bestiality. Yet he denied his guilt until one magistrate “remembered him of thatt place of scripture, he that hideth his sin shall not prosper, butt he yt confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall finde mercie.” Spencer then “answered he was sory and confessed he had done itt,” only to learn that his confession would get him hanged and that mercy would come only from the Lord, not the Colony of New Haven. He retracted and repeated his confession several times in a desperate attempt to find a formula that would save his life. But on April 8, 1642, two months after the birth of the monster, the sow was put to the sword in front of the unrepentant Spencer, and he was hanged, “a terrible example of divine justice and wrath.”
—John M. Murrin, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Colonial America”

Lovecraft was no doubt taken by the layers of obfuscation in Mathers’ account, which only really hinted at the appearance of the unfortunate piglet. Stripped of this mystery and romance, we are left with a man who was wrongly accused and ultimately was executed for an accident of nature by an intolerant society of religious fanatics. A much more banal but frighteningly very real moment in history that served as the seed for some very strange stories.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” (1979) by Janice Arter & “To the Shade of HPL” (1981) by Margaret Carter

Dr. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club in 1965 after a trip to Romania; this was before the publication of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), but after the first full biography of Stoker, Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula (1962). It was the beginning of a serious opening-up of Dracula scholarship, serious scholarship that had fans and researchers scouring archives, uncovering Stoker’s original notes and manuscript, critically annotating and comparing different editions of the text. The work was international, and the fan club contained both enthusiastic vampire fiction fans and literary historians, and it published official journals and other publications.

In 1985, the Count Dracula Fan Club published an annual, a special Lovecraft-themed collectors issue. The highlight of the issue might be Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s brief article “The Revision of Dracula”—the first real address of the Lovecraft/Miniter Dracula revision anecdote from the Lovecraftian scholar’s point of view. However, it was full of more than that, including two neat little Mythos poems by women authors, “The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter and “To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter

Published for the first time in The Further Perils of Dracula (1979), a Count Dracula Fan Club poetry anthology, Arter’s 18-line poem is a lyric poem, opening with the invitation “Come live with me and drink my blood,” and working through a list of familiar activites, including:

Come live with me and we shall learn
The power to make the oceans burn,
The secrets of the Scroll of Thoth,
The chant to summon Yog-Sothoth,
And we shall be as one.

This is a poem for lovers in multiple senses of the term. It is a very romantic invitation, of one horror fan to another, inviting activities that would be horroric to anyone except another horror fan. By the 70s, Lovecraft’s Mythos was being woven into the pantheon of familiar horrors, and Yog-Sothoth could comfortably rub shoulders next to vampires and witches. It is the kind of opening-of-the-heart that would only really work from one true horror fan to another, someone who will both get the references and the appeal of going to the Sabbath or dwelling in unimagined space with someone else who gets it.

“To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter

Published for the first time in Daymares from the Crypt (1981), a chapbook collection of Carter’s poetry, and was re-released in an ebook of the same-name in 2012. Carter’s verse takes the form of an ode in 12 lines, a tribute to Lovecraft and the Mythos he had spawned, which Carter herself had contributed to over the years, and would continue to do so in the years to come. Some of the imagery is in the same vein as Arter’s poem, emphasizing the Mythos experience and aesthetic:

The hand that traced those tales of nameless lore
Never lent its grave-chilled touch to me—
Yet I have groped my way down Arkham’s hills
To watch the rites of Innsmouth by the sea.

The difference is, Carter isn’t just evoking Lovecraft’s Mythos, but Lovecraft himself. The Old Gent had already become a part of his own Mythos, his growing legend entwined with the stories he had written, and the artificial mythology being slowly expanded by fans and pros alike. Carter isn’t directly inviting the reader to participate in nameless rites or to dance with ghouls, but is expressing her own experience of doing so, made possible only by H. P. Lovecraft.

While both of these poems are fairly minor in the grand scheme of fantasy and horror literature, they are examples of the growing acceptance of Lovecraft and the Mythos in the 1980s, even in Dracula fandom, which was only tangential to Lovecraft.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi (최재훈) trans. Janet Hong

THE CALL OF THE FRIEND is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project, where leading Korean speculative fiction writers reimagine the works of horror master H.P. Loveccraft, while honoring his eerie, grotesque imagery and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, they update his ideas for a global audience.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), inside cover flap

The Call of the Friend (친구의 부름) is a standalone black-and-white graphic novel by Korean comic artist and writer JaeHoon Choi (최재훈), first published in 2020. The English translation by Janet Hong was published in 2025 by Honford Star. The story is set in contemporary urban Korea, where university student Wonjun checks in on his friend Jingu, whose sister (a K-pop idol) has recently committed suicide, implicitly because of a scandalous affair. It is in Jingu’s apartment that Wonjun spots a strange idol.

The story that unspools is not a straightforward linear narrative. It is intimate, focused on Wonjun, with everyone other than Jingu essentially faceless. Readers get pieces of the puzzle, but the full story isn’t spelled out for them, readers are forced to interpret the evidence as best they can. In this, they are given a single helpful hint in a short essay at the end of the book:

Some live a life of violence, while others make every effort to avoid stepping on an insect. But no matter the severity or type of sin, the moment we realize we have sinned, we experience fear. The fear isn’t so much the dread of punishment or retribution. It stems from the knowledge that we’ve hurt someone or caused their unhappiness, and the sin manifests as fear. Depending on the intensity of this fear, we can either be liberated from our guilt or ensnared by it.

While I don’t want the theme to be too obvious in this story, I hope readers might be able to tangibly experience Wonjun’s guilt. These long, nocturnal reflections on our current human condition, set against H. P. Lovecraft’s world of unexplained fears, have prompted me to contemplate the words we’ve spoken, the conflict and guilt we’ve endured, as well as the subsequent death and feat they cause.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), 104-105

As an essay, it is slightly reminiscent of Arthur Machen’s prologue to “The White People” on ‘sorcery & sanctity.’ The idea of fear as a fundamental response to a transgression—an instinctive response to some imbalance caused by action or inaction—and that this fear can liberate or ensnare guilt, has its attractions. Yet how does this philosophical approach jive with Lovecraft’s famous proclamation that “the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”?

When you don’t know what the sin was. When the only way you have to measure how badly you’ve hurt someone is the measure of the fear you feel in response to it. Whether this is what JaeHoon Choi intended with The Call of the Friend I cannot say, but the presence of the Cthulhu Mythos in this story is suggestive of something that goes beyond tawdry K-pop star drama and the suicide of the sister of a friend. It suggests that there’s something much bigger at work here, something unseen and unknowable, and it threatens to ensnare Wonjun entirely.

The Call of the Friend is somewhat reminiscent of Minetaro Mochizuki’s Hauntress (1993) in general outline—both of them deal with young university students living on their own, the one checking in on the other to whom something has happened, and with a supernatural horror creeping into their lives—and more importantly, that sensation of an urban legend unfolding in a space of familiar, contemporary surroundings. These are characters ill-equipped to deal with the psychological terrors of their experiences. They have no strong faith, no occult skills or leanings. They are regular people, with limited resources, facing the uncanny.

That works. JaeHoon Choi takes advantage of the prosaic setting and characters to make the distortions of perception all the more disturbing for taking place in setting of absolute reality. Readers will question how much of this is in Wonjun’s head, will wonder when we slip into dream, hallucination, or twisted memory. The idol forms a locus of manifestation, a central image to embody what it is happening, but even until the end, readers have to decide how much of this is really happening.

The comic ends like an unresolved chord. Readers don’t get answers. Only the impression that they have witnessed something. Perhaps that is the answer itself.

Janet Hong’s translation of the graphic novel into English is very readable and smooth. While most of the graphic novel itself has relatively sparse dialogue, the essay at the end is very clear and easy to understand, and a valuable key to understanding the work.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi and translated by Janet Hong is available at the Honford Star website as an ebook or softcover.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Body to Body to Body” (2015) by Selena Chambers

Every woman’s body is a story, you see.
—Selena Chambers, “Body to Body to Body” in She Walks in Shadows (2015) 132

Lovecraftian genealogical narratives tend to focus on a single, often the paternal, line. What that tends to exclude is a large number of other ancestors and relatives: mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters, half-sisters, and step-siblings. Writers following Lovecraft were not averse to filling out and following other branches of various family trees. August Derleth’s “The Shuttered Room” (1959) follows some Whateley cousins, for example, and Lavinia Rising (2022) by Farah Rose Smith expands on Lavinia Whateley’s background.

These Mythos family reunion stories are often a bit contradictory; that’s the point. By expanding on unspoken relations, authors have the opportunity to give alternative narratives, fresh viewpoints, different and more complex takes on a set of events or individuals. That’s how myth cycles—and, more often than not, family stories, repeated in games of telephone down generations—tend to work. Readers get to balance the narratives and decide for themselves what “really” happened.

Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”

“Body to Body to Body” by Selena Chambers is set up chronologically as an immediate sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Thing in the Doorstep,” and narratively is structured in parallel: the police are interviewing a suspect, and she tells her tale. What marks this story as different is that the interviewee is Asenath Waite’s half-sister—from before their mother’s marriage to Ephraim Waite—and so the events she relates are largely a prequel to Lovecraft’s tale, expanding on Asenath’s background and childhood. How she became who she became, in every sense of the word.

Like “The Thing on the Cheerleader Squad” (2015) by Molly Tanzer and other stories that spin out of Lovecraft’s original, this story explores a different relationship dynamic with Asenath and Ephraim. In Lovecraft’s original story, questions of identity ultimately make Asenath a victim, overpowered and replaced by her father’s mind; stories like Tanzer and Chambers give Asenath more agency, and more of an identity of her own distinct from her father’s.

Chambers’ depiction of the Waite’s home life makes no bones about Ephraim Waite as a bigoted old occultist; it feels like there might be a hint of Lovecraft in the portrayal, reminiscent of how Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia borrows some characterization from Lovecraft for its villain. However, the real delight in the story is the little details from the protagonist’s point of view, the hints of Innsmouth culture that go beyond Mythos lore and speak of lived experience in the town. And it offers an alternative ending to “The Thing on the Doorstep” which is more hopeful than Lovecraft’s vision.

“Boby to Body to Body” by Selena Chambers was published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and its variations. It has not otherwise been reprinted.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate” I earn from qualifying purchases.