“The Adventurer’s Wife” (2015) by Premee Mohamed

Whatever by the case, it is clear the African ethnology and history are a tangled and obscure affair; involving many a dramatic surprise for the future historian and archaeologist. It is not for nothing that Africa has been labelled a continent of mystery.
H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 30 Jan 1931, A Means to Freedom 1.141

We have better maps of Africa today than they did in 1931. Archaeologists have excavated the ancient cities, dug up the bones of primal ancestors. A few have even listened to the indigenous peoples, to take down their own history in their own words. With colonization and de-colonization, the myth of Africa has greatly retreated. Like the Old West, the period of the White Explorer Archetype and the Scramble for Africa is long over—and like the Old West, the tales spun out of that period have continued for far longer than the actual time when they might have held a grain of truth.

“The Adventurer’s Wife” by Premee Mohamed is a deliberate play on the established tropes. Details are deliberately a bit vague; if Mohamed drew any inspiration from any of the “African Mythos” stories like “Winged Death” (1934) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft, she kept it largely off the page. There are old gods, and there are shoggoths, but no proper names to conjure by or places on the map a reader can point to and say “yes, this is where things happened.”

The vagueness is no doubt deliberate; in the great jigsaw puzzle of the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is a piece that can fit into many different puzzles, and become a part of many different pictures. The ambiguity plays to the strengths of the storytelling; the protagonist Mr. Greene, here to interview the adventurer’s wife, has preconceptions and prejudices that are set up and knocked down…and there is much that is hinted at but not spoken of openly, and some interestingly subtle subversion.

In many stories featuring the white explorer archetype, the focus is on the explorer: they are the protagonist, they are the adventurer. Allan Quartermain is one of the most famous, though Tarzan has likely eclipsed him. Even in stories where the explorer is dead, the focus is generally on their exploits, as revealed by journals or diaries, or as in the case of “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” in wilder stories, gossip, and legend. Notably, we rarely get the viewpoint of the adventurer’s wife, someone who shared in the adventure and had their own viewpoint. It is hard to say more without giving the game away entirely, and the story is slight enough as it is that would be a disservice to those who haven’t read it.

Published in She Walks In Shadows (2015), it is a story that benefits from its place in the anthology as much as the anthology benefits from its inclusion. The theme of this being a woman’s story, a woman’s perspective, an often ignored and unspoken side of the narrative, serves it well in relation to other stories of that type. If it wasn’t in a Mythos anthology, it might feel out of place, or having made too many assumptions for the casual reader; but in that context, alongside stories like “Magna Mater” (2015) by Arinn Dembo, it feels like another facet on a jewel, another piece in a puzzle that may never be complete, but which is all the more intriguing because a few pieces have gone missing.

“The Adventurer’s Wife” was first published in She Walks In Shadows (2015), and has since been reprinted in the US paperback reprint Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016), online where it may be read for free at Nightmare Magazine (Apr 2017), adapted as an audiobook in Far-Fetched Fables No. 152 (2017), and in Premee Mohamed’s collection No One Will Come Back For Us and Other Stories (2023).

Premee Mohamed’s other Lovecraftian fiction includes “Fortunate” (2017, Ride The Star Wind), “The Evaluator” (2017, A Breath From The Sky), and “Us and Ours” (2019, A Secret Guide To Fighting Elder Gods).

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.

“Bring the Moon to Me” (2015) by Amelia Gorman

I wasn’t afraid of the storms or earthquakes that visited the bay. I wasn’t afraid of the depths of the sea or the dark things that swam there. The shadows in our house made me anxious. They came out of the corners when my mother sang and knit, and flew across her face and hands. She sang about shepherds and Hastur and the sweet smell of lemon trees at night.
Amelia Gorman, “Bring the Moon to Me” in She Walks in Shadows 31

One of my favorite early pieces of Lovecraft criticism is the very brief essay “Cosmic Horror” (1945) by Dorothy Tilden Spoerl, who discovered that knitting was a cure to the eldritch horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. Amelia Gorman has taken that idea and inverted it: instead of exorcism, an invocation.

As a story, there is a vast amount that remains unsaid. The core is as perfectly beautiful and simple as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1952), but it is framed through women’s history. Knitting was often relegated to women’s work. So was computing. As Margot Lee Shetterly wrote about in Hidden Figures (2016), it was women at NASA who checked and double-checked the calculations and code for the early space missions. You the reader don’t need to know that to understand the story, but it may deepen their appreciation to know that this isn’t some random programmer; this is a story implicitly set in that point of history where women’s work was transitioning outside the home or the factory and into government offices and research labs. Education was becoming more available, and while glass ceilings and discrimination still existed, the women were in the workforce to stay after World War II, as old trades died away and new careers in computing were just beginning to take shape.

The Mythos elements in this piece are few. Hastur’s appearance is an old, old call back to an often-forgotten aspect of his artificial mythology. Before August Derleth made him a counterpart to Cthulhu; before Robert W. Chamber’s borrowed some names for The King in Yellow (1895), Hastur was a god of shepherds in Ambrose Bierce’s “Haïta the Shepherd” (1891). Shepherds have sheep, sheep make wool. It is the kind of idea so obvious you might wonder why nobody thought to put the pieces together before.

Drawing down the moon is a Wiccan practice. Witchcraft was often seen as the domain of women as well…and while the unnamed protagonist and her mother are not skinning down to dance around outside, or making candles of unbaptized baby fat, there is a current of witchy thought to the whole story. The way that women of two different generations finally learn to communicate, despite the disconnect between their lives; the passing on of secret knowledge, the suggestion of how this knowledge and power can be used against those who discriminate against them because of their gender, all partake of the idea of witchcraft without breaking out a broomstick or pointy hat or Book of Shadows.

It’s a story that works on so many different levels, but perhaps most surprisingly, it’s a story that only really works because it’s told from a woman’s perspective. A young man working as a programmer at NASA talking to his father about weaving fishing nets isn’t facing the same prejudices, the same societal expectations; “the context wouldn’t work nearly so well.

“Bring the Moon to Me” by Amelia Gorman was published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and its paperback reprints; it was adapted as an audiobook on PseudoPod #538 in 2016.

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.

“Turn Out The Light” (2015) by Penelope Love

A re-imagining of the life and death of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft
Penelope Love, epigraph of “Turn Out The Light” in She Walks In Shadows 15

H. P. Lovecraft’s mother is part of the myth. Like Igraine, who bore the boy that would grow up to be King Arthur, she plays her essential role—but there are relatively few stories of her. Unlike Lovecraft’s thousands of letters, little of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft survives, and she was not treated kindly by biographers. Art and fiction have seldom been more beneficent.

The Mythos has permeated H. P. Lovecraft’s biography to such an extent that in fiction it bleeds out into everything else. His conception, birth, upbringing, adolescence, and early adulthood—all aspects of his life that Susie played an active part in—have been re-cast by authors as supernatural terrors that cast a long shadow on the impressionable young lad, and inspired what he wrote. As if a writer of horror could not simply put their imagination to work. That there had to be some reality behind it.

Susie’s part in these little reality plays is often unpleasant. When they re-tell the story of the hallucinations her husband Winfield S. Lovecraft supposedly suffered before he was put away in a sanitarium, such as “Recognition” by Alan Moore, her fictional alter-ego is raped. She may go mad and die insane in the same sanitarium after reading the Necronomicon, as in Lovecraft by Hans Rodionoff, Keith Griffen, and Enrique Breccia. What little facts we have tend to mingle with the distorted ideas of biographies, and then fantasy makes of Susie Lovecraft a caricature, more false face than real.

There is, often enough, very little sympathy for a single mother left alone to raise her son. Even before the shoggoths are brought into the business.

So when a reader turns the page and begins to read Penelope Love’s “Turn Out The Light,” the thing that jumps off the page immediately is empathy. It is not the most accurate, or even the most sympathetic, portrayal of Susie Lovecraft to be published. There is nothing in the limited biographical information we have to suggest that Susie did or thought some of the things that Love suggests she may have, in this story. For example:

In her traveling salesman husband’s absence—philanderer, snob, spineless, whore—her father had spoiled his grandson, told him stories, given the boy the black cat, then given it such a vulgar name.

She had never liked that cat. The one blessing out of all that loss was that the rooming house would not let them keep it. She arranged for it to be drowned, although she told her son it ran off.
Penelope Love, “Turn Out The Light” in She Walks In Shadows 17

This is pure invention. We don’t know what Susie actually thought of Lovecraft’s pet cat with the unfortunate name, there’s no indication she was behind it’s disappearance. Yet that is rather the point: in the absence of hard data, Penelope Love has tried to get inside Susie’s head, to provide a point of view for her. It may not be entirely accurate (her brother Edwin Phillips and sister Annie Gamwell are not mentioned at all), but it isn’t just regurgitating the same old stories either.

Even so, there are parallels between “Turn Out The Light” and works like “Night-Gaunts” (2017) by Joyce Carol Oates. Natural parallels because they are, in a real sense, both working from the same material in similar lines of thought. Retreading the grounds of Lovecraft’s childhood, his fiction; drawing lines and linkages between later works and earlier events and persons. Creating variations on the same myth, like villages in Greece that each have slightly different stories of Herakles. Love’s version of events is a little more subtle, a little less overtly fantastic, and her depiction of Susie Lovecraft a bit more real, though nowhere as sympathetic as “Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” (2017) by Lucy Sussex.

Yet Susie Lovecraft could use a little empathy. She may have born H. P. Lovecraft into the world, but she died just as he began to flower with his stories of the Dreamlands and Randolph Carter, but before Weird Tales came into being. “Turn Out The Light” captures some of the tragedy that is often unspoken about Susie’s relationship with her son. The reason why he did not visit her at the hospital during her last illness is one of those mysteries that will never be revealed, as Lovecraft did not write of such a personal matter, yet it evokes pathos when she begs him not to let them turn out the light…and there is one more thing.

“If I should die, please mark the symbols on the front steps here as you did for your grandfather—and the cat. I know it is nonsense. Just do this for me, please. I would like to think that I could follow the straight line between the stars and come back.”
Penelope Love, “Turn Out The Light” in She Walks In Shadows 26

Some people find immortality of a sorts through their children. Others, through their works. Their name and memory is kept alive. Susie Lovecraft is remembered today through her son, and a tenuous, ghostly, and distorted as that memory may be through the lens of biographers and the liberties of writers and artists—H. P. Lovecraft has secured at least that much for her. With her paintings lost, and no heirs to her body, works like this are the only offerings likely to be made to her memory, to keep it evergreen and safe from final oblivion.

“Turn Out The Light” by Penelope Love was first published in She Walks In Shadows (2015). It has not been republished, except in the paperback editions of that book.

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.

“Ammutseba Rising” (2015) by Ann K. Schwader

This is the second story in this collection that takes place in Boulder; it is also the second appearance of Ann’s Great Old One Ammutseba. The first was in the poem “The Coming of Ammutseba”, which will be published in the forthcoming anthology From Kadath to Carcosa, by Mythos Books. Ann describes Ammutseba as “a very dark version/perversion of the Egyptian skygoddess Nut.” She also blames Joseph Pulber for encouraging her to create her own Mythos “book and beastie”. Her tome is included in this story as well: The Gate of All Lost Stars, the quotes from which are Ann’s own corruption of The Book of the Dead. Ann further informs me that the Obscura Gallery in the story is based on a real establishment, though it doesn’t have quite the same name, and it isn’t located in Boulder. She also did a great deal of research for this story, much of which came from Stanley C. Sargent, whose knowledge of Egyptology is simply phenomenal.

Ammutseba is one of only a handful of female Mythos deities. Most are simply mentioned; only five others have actually appeared in stories: Shub-Niggurath, Yidhra, Cthylla, Hydra, and Coatlicue. This may be due, at least in part, to the unspoken chauvinism that has pervaded the Mythos; it may also be due in part to the patriarchal nature of the existing pantheon. Whatever the reasons, however, Ammutseba is a most welcome addition (what am I saying?!) and I personally would like to see more of her.
Robert M. Price, introduction to “Lost Stars” by Ann K. Schwader in Strange Stars & Alien Shadows: The Dark Fiction of Ann K. Schwader (2003) 219

From Kadath to Carcosa never appeared; Mythos Books shut its doors. “The Coming of Ammutseba” was finally published in Twisted in Dream: The Collected Weird Poetry of Ann K. Schwader (2011). In 2015, “Ammutseba Rising” was published in She Walks in Shadows, as a kind of opening invocation:

At first, a spectral haze against the darkness,

some appairtion less of mist than hunger

made visible afflicts our evening. Stars

within it flicker, fettered by corruption

we sense but dimly. Terrible & ancient,

it murmurs in the dreams of chosen daughters.

Not it, but She […]
Opening lines of “Ammutseba Rising” by Ann K. Schwader, She Walks in Shadows 13

Taken together, we might call “Lost Stars,” “The Coming of Ammutseba,” and “Ammutseba Rising” as the Ammutseba Cycle, or possibly the Devourer of Stars Mythos. Relatively late additions to the wider body of Lovecraftian fiction, plagued by publishing delays, and currently not collected together—but such small details have hardly mattered.

Ammutseba exists…and in the days of the internet, has proliferated in odd ways. David Conyers refers to Ammutseba in the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying book Secrets of Kenya (2007); a Finnish metal guitarist has adopted her name, and so did a Maltese metal band (they later changed their name to Nokturnal Void), while there is an Amnutseba in France; J. Nathaniel Corres borrowed the name for an independently published space opera/Mythos novel, Elder Offensive: The Ammutseba Protocol (2018), Ed Russo borrows Ammutseba for his novel The Nameless Monster (2019). DeviantArt and other online galleries include plentiful fanart, some of it not even algorithmically generated.

In the spirit of the game that Mythos authors play, most of these later borrowings are at best impolite. Ammutseba is not in the public domain, as is the case of Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu and Necronomicon and whatnot are acknowledged as communal property. Back when most Mythos authors knew each other, it would be expected that at least some sort of permission would be asked and given first. This probably isn’t the case for most of the above. It is the nature of the internet that it makes it very easy to share information, but also very easy to steal ideas, intentionally or not.

It is easy to lose sight of Ammutseba as Schwader first depicted her—in part because there is no single consolidated source, no Bullfinch’s Mythology for these territories. In large part, this is because the Mythos is still living, growing, and evolving. Physical encyclopedias go out of date, online wikis and websites succumb to too many hands, or web rot as sites are abandoned, not backed up, and finally lost. Such things have happened before.

The eldritch entity Rhogog supposedly first appeared in the story “Sacristans of Rhogog” by Michael Saint-Paul. Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game writer Scott David Aniolowski liked the idea so much he worked it into a scenario, and from there Rhogog has proliferated. Unfortunately, that original story only appeared on a blog in the 1990s, never in print, and the blog long ago disappeared. As of this writing, no one has been able to find the original story or its author.

Her mystery eclipses tarnished stars

we kept for wishing on. Perhaps our daughters

will walk in shadow gladly, holding hunger

inside them for a weapon. […]
Lines from “Ammutseba Rising” by Ann K. Schwader, She Walks in Shadows 14

There is something terribly appropriate in having “Ammutseba Rising” open She Walks in Shadows. The idea of a goddess who bucks the patriarchy of cultists and eldritch entities, whose cosmic horrors can also connect, so very intimately, with the horror and experiences so unique to women, as Schwader demonstrated in “Lost Stars.” A Mythos entity that does not deserve to be forgotten, or misremembered.

“Ammutseba Rising” by Ann K. Schwader was first published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and reprinted in Schwader’s collection Dark Energies (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.

“Hairwork” (2015) by Gemma Files

Picture for a moment what it might look like if you could visualize the spiderweb connections of the Cthulhu Mythos, with each story a node, each line a connective thread. “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Call of Cthulhu” would be dense starbursts, referenced by dozens of successive stories…and further out from the “core” of Lovecraft’s Mythos tales would be the less popular tales, the revision and ghostwritten stories which contributed little to the collective mythology…or were simply less popular with fans and authors. Far out on the periphery, barely connected to anything else, is “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft.

In 2015, Gemma Files added a few lines, a new nodal point: “Hairwork” is one of the very, very few works which dared to do anything with Marceline Bedard and “Medusa’s Coil.”

“Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”

“‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”

“Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected—you know, high yaller? Same as me.”
Gemma Files, “Hairwork” in She Walks in Shadows 99-100

She Walks in Shadows is a collection of stories that revisits Lovecraft’s Mythos from the view of the often-ignored and neglected women characters. Marceline Bedard is arguably one of the most prominent and interesting of these, if only because so rarely did Lovecraft ever write a woman of color into his stories, much less give her a prominent role. There are many possible reasons for this: the story is only incidentally connected to the wider Mythos, for instance. Most important, though, is the failure of Lovecraft to develop anything of the internal life and motivations of Marceline. She is presented as a kind of femme fatale, an occultist, but why she does anything in the story is utterly absent. If she has any deeper plan beyond marrying Denis de Russy and posing nude for a portrait, it is never revealed. Likewise, her backstory and that of her great hair are left utterly mysterious.

From the perspective in which the story seed was first presented to Lovecraft, and the perspectives with which he told it—white man telling the tale to another white man—the absence of Marceline’s side of the story is perhaps understandable. Yet the absence is still present; the reader only gets one side of the tale.

So Gemma Files fills in the gap, providing something of Marceline’s side of the story, her motivations and background, and perhaps more importantly, what happens next.

It’s kind of odd to say that this is almost a familiar approach. So many stories in weird fiction of this era were written from a white male perspective and centering around the death of some supposedly-evil woman that the revisiting of these stories from the woman’s perspective is almost a mode unto itself. Stories in this mode include Helen’s Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz, “The Head of T’la-yub” (2015) by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, and Lavinia Rising (2022) by Farah Rose Smith.

In comparison with those works, it has to be said that Gemma Files’ “Hairwork” stands up well. She does not directly work to contradict Lovecraft’s story, but works around the facts by providing a motivation and tying it into the background she supplies, one that works very well. References to the wider Mythos are still fairly thin: Lovecraft didn’t leave much to work with, and unlike Victor LaValle in “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) who chose to re-center the story around the Cthulhu-cult, Files appears content to have left it on the periphery of the Mythos.

The most substantial change is the vague suggestion that painter Frank Marsh may have familiar connections with the Marshes of Innsmouth—and who knows but that someone may pick up that thread someday? And probably the most radical change in the story is the suggestion of what the hair itself might be:

And then there’s the tradition of Orthodox Jewish women, Observants, Lubavitchers in particular—they cover their hair with a wig, too, a sheitel, so no one but their husband gets to see it. Now, Marceline was in no way Observant, but I can see perhaps an added benefit to her courtesenerie from allowing no one who was not un amant, her intimate, to see her uncovered. The wig’s hair might look much the same as her own, only longer; it would save her having to … relax it? Ça ira?

“Yeah, back then, they’d’ve used lye, I guess. Nasty. Burn you, you leave it on too long.”
Gemma Files, “Hairwork” in She Walks in Shadows 100

Black hair is tied up in so many aspects of history, culture, fashion, and racial discrimination that it is a difficult to know where to start. The focus on hair as a defining trait of Marceline Bedard, given her biracial or multiracial heritage, is something that is rarely examined by critics and scholars. Lovecraft was vaguely aware of some of the efforts that went into hair straightening from his time in Harlem, but like a lot of aspects of Marceline’s life, he doesn’t focus on it. A blank spot on the canvas for some worthy writer like Files to fill in.

In keeping with the overall plot of “Medusa’s Coil,” “Hairwork” gives Marceline Bedard means, motive, and depth—but she is still the villain of the story if not necessarily the antagonist. Lovecraft’s tale casts Marceline as a victim, essentially blameless except for the one-drop rule, but Files gives her animus, and the deliberation in what she does makes her something other than an unfortunate woman trapped between two men. In many ways, that makes her both more terrible and more interesting than Lovecraft’s original portrait of the Paris priestess.

It is, overall, a very skillful take on what might be one of the most difficult Mythos stories to revisit, and the success of it is reflected in its publishing history: since first appearing in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and its paperback edition Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016), “Hairwork” has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2016 Edition, The Dark Magazine (Aug 2016), and Best New Horror #27 (2017).

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

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

“The Head of T’la-yub” (2015) by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

We came to the Mictlán, the place of the dead, which the ancient people called Xinaián […]
—”The Head of T’la-yub” by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, trans. Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Most of “The Mound” is given as a story-within-a-story: the English translation of the Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545. Few of the Aztec codices have survived the flames and floods, the mold and wear of centuries of hands; we today often read about the peoples and places they encountered through accounts like Zamacona’s…who being their own skewed, flawed interpretation of what they see and witnessed of ways of life and belief of which they knew little, and could only understand through the lens of their own religion, politics, philosophy, and experience.

Which is a long way to say: no one has tried to tell the story from T’la-yub’s point of view.

In Lovecraft’s narrative via Zamacona, T’la-yub is a tragic figure. She dared to love, dared to dream of a monogamous union, and the subject of her affections determined only to put her aside as soon as convenient. For her transgressions in the name of romance, she is doomed to mutilation, death, and then undeath. T’la-yub is one of the ghosts of the mound, the dead woman who holds her head, facing eternal punishment for a momentary infraction.

There’s something very Christian about that interpretation, isn’t there? Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas flips the script. What if Zamacona didn’t understand what was happening? What if he misconstrued his place and importance in the sequence of events?

As with her other stories “Tloque Nahuaque” (2011), “Ahuizotl” (2011), and “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” (2014), “The Head of T’la-yub” mixes elements of the Mythos was Aztec mythology. Instead of the more Pellucidar-esque elements of Lovecraft’s alien civilization beneath the earth, the focus is on T’la-yub’s personal spiritual and physical journey, here modeled on the descent of the dead to Mictlán, the growth of her understanding as to what she has become and what her role is. The result is brief, but novel: a new way to look at this aspect of the “Mesoamerican Mythos,” taking Lovecraft not at face value, but as one interpretation of events told through a very European lens.

Which doesn’t mean that Lovecraft was wrong and García-Rosas is right; the point of the story is not to disprove Lovecraft or point out sources of error, but to provide a new viewpoint that suggests that the picture is much more richly complex than Lovecraft himself gives it. Where works like Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys takes “The Mound” at more or less face value, or The Queen of K’n-yan (2008) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) that takes the basic ideas but moves in its own direction, “The Head of T’la-yub” is essentially an alternative narrative of “The Mound”—and readers can put on their scholar’s caps, read up on Aztec mythology, and decide for themselves where the balance of truth lies.

“The Head of T’la-yub” by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas was translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and was first published in She Walks in Shadows (2015); it was republished in the paperback edition Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016).

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

“The Opera Singer” (2015) by Priya J. Sridhar

Strictly speaking, “The Opera Singer” is not a Mythos story. Mythos by association only. No invocation of strange and terrible and familiar names, nary a tentacle to be seen. Yet it is a Lovecraftian story; those who are initiated into the Mythos, who have read Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” can draw their own connections, their own conclusions.

Nor is it entirely unprecedented.

Brian Lumley’s “Big ‘C'” (1990) is a brother-from-another-mother-with-a-thousand-young to Sridhar’s story. The two have parallels, similar ideas but carried out very differently. A combination of adult fears and something alien, intrusive, other. For “Big ‘C'” it is cancer; for “The Opera Singer” it’s the stroke that landed the protagonist Circe in a wheelchair. That terrible biological betrayal, body turned against itself. Sridhar does a better job than Lumley in showcasing a woman with a disability; living with the body as a cage. Lumley is focused on a bigger picture, fewer emotional attachments. Different takes on the idea.

Readers might also compare “The Opera Singer” with “While The Black Stars Burn” (2015) by Lucy A. Snyder; both involve a glimpse into the life of the trained musician, talent toned with tragedy. Even exceptional musicians rarely rise to rock-star fame; they take gigs, pour their heart into operas and rehearsals, watch the money go to other people. Musicians are like athletes, their bodies a part of the performance, and as they get older bits wear out. Singers can no longer hit the same notes. Snyder and Sridhar touch on some of the same points there as well, although they are going in different directions; while readers might suspect more than cosmic accident to what happens to the protagonist in “The Opera Singer,” Sridhar gives no hint of actual conspiracy.

Sridhar gives a Lovecraftian frame to the story as well; the revelation unfolds, a bit at a time, and at the beginning of the story it isn’t even clear that there are things to reveal. Call it Chekov’s wheelchair: if you show the protagonist struggling in a wheelchair in the first act, you have to show how they got there by the end of it—but even that might be too simple. To understand how the protagonist lives, it isn’t just important to show how she got in the wheelchair, but what she lost in the process.

There are names involved too—Circe, the protagonist, lives under the shadow of the Circe from Greek myth, has odd connections with 34 Circe. Significant? Hard to say. The human talent for pattern recognition comes into play; what seems like a pattern could be random chance. The Mythos is dependent on pattern recognition, of readers recognizing associations between names, places, critters, ideas.

What else is this review but an effort to place this story within the wider framework of Lovecraftian fiction, finding the points that seem to fit?

There is always that danger with labeling something Lovecraftian fiction: a false positive. Maybe Priya J. Sridhar never meant a Lovecraftian connection at all when she wrote the piece, and it just happened to find a home in a Mythos anthology. It is always possible to read meaning and intent in a piece, especially if the net of comparable fiction is cast wide enough. Still, it is in a Mythos anthology now. The association is set.

Priya J. Sridhar’s “The Opera Singer” was first published in She Walks In Shadows (2015) and its paperback American edition Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016); it was also published in Nightmare Magazine (Dec 2016), where it may be read online for free.

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

“Cthulhu of the Dead Sea” (2015) by Inkeri Kontro

The organism appears unrelated to previously discovered species, therefore we named it Halofractal cthulhu.
—Inkeri Kontro, “Cthulhu of the Dead Sea” in She Walks In Shadows (2015) 205

In 1994, a species of spider was dubbed Pimoa cthulhu; in 2005 a moth was given the scientific name Speiredonia cthulhui. A pair of microorganisms in wood termites were named Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque in 2013, and just recently in 2019, an extinct echinoderm was declared Sollasina cthulhu.

Scientists are horror fans too.

While the impetus of Inkeri Kontro’s “Cthulhu of the Dead Sea” is a tongue-in-cheek rip from the headlines, the story as it develops is much more serious. Hardcore science fiction, all the Lovecraftian jokes slowly disappearing against a much more monstrously plausible reality.

Fans used to pastiche and supernatural explanations might be a little put-off by the lack of Necronomicons and old familiar names, but that is the essential appeal of the story: this isn’t about “What if Cthulhu was real?” in the traditional sense of “What if Lovecraft’s fiction were real history?”

Instead, we are left to contemplate simpler facts and their implications. Halofractal cthulhu is a microorganism, not a mountain that walked or stumbled. Yet the conclusions are mountainous, and monstrous….even as the outcome is tragic. It is a rare story that attempts something like that, much less succeeds. Yet “Cthulhu of the Dead Sea” certainly achieves everything it aims for.

Inkeri Kontro is a postdoctoral researcher in material physics at the University of Helsinki. Every character and detail of the story reflects true; even the muttered perkele when the Finnish Anna, visiting with her Danish colleagues in Copenhagen, feels honest. These are the people you meet at these conferences, this is how these honest Scandinavian nerds would feel and react to such a person, to such a discovery.

In another writer’s hands, more attention might be placed on Anna. We don’t get her full background, even her full name. Hints of a personality—parents watching her cat back home, trouble sleeping in this foreign country where everyone speaks Danish and has to remember to speak English when she appears—but the lack of detail works here. Ambiguity remains, long into the story, especially with Anna’s dreams. The initiated reader is left always wondering when the turn is going to come, when is Cthulhu, the big C, going to step on the page…

They won’t be disappointed when cthulhu finally makes its big splash instead.

“Cthulhu and the Dead Sea” was first published in She Walks In Shadows (2015) and its American paperback release Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016). It has not been reprinted.

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

Editor Spotlight: Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles

Q: Describe what you do in 25 characters or less.

A: Lovecraft, Mythos, horror.

—Paula R. Stiles, Editor Interview: Innsmouth Free Press (5 Sep 2011)

Innsmouth Free Press was founded by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, with Paula R. Stiles as her editor-in-chief. The initial website ran from 2009-2011, and as the founder describes it:

Innsmouth came to be because of a conversation I was having with Paula R.Stiles, who is our editor-in-chief. I told her I wished there was a TV series set in Innsmouth, with weird stuff happening every week. We convinced each other we should launch a zine and it should be horror-themed. We would publish Lovecraftian fiction three times a year and daily non-fiction. We’d also have sporadic meta-fiction masquerading as “news” items from Innsmouth.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Interview—Silvia Moreno-Garcia (4 Oct 2010)

This graduated into a full-fledged micropress with a schedule of both print and electronic publications: the anthologies edited by Moreno-Garcia & Stiles and published through Innsmouth Free Press are Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Terror Through Time (2011), Future Lovecraft (2011), Sword & Mythos (2014), and She Walks in Shadows (2015) which won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology; an American edition of the latter was published as Cthulhu’s Daughters: Stories of Lovecraftian Horror (2016). Their other publications include Innsmouth Magazine, which ran for 15 issues from 2012-2014, a series of anthologies co-edited by Moreno-Garcia & Stiles, and publications including the anthology Fungi (2012), Nick Mamatas’ collection The Nickronomicon (2014) and Jazz Age Cthulhu (2014).

What set Moreno-Garcia & Stiles apart from the beginning is both initiative and a focus on diversity. While Ellen Datlow and Paula Garan‘s editorial voices and choices were focused primarily on publishing the best of contemporary Mythos fiction, name authors, and non-pastiche works, the Innsmouth Free Press anthologies are dominated by fresh voices, many of whom have never published Mythos fiction before, although many of them like Molly Tanzer and Orrin Grey have since become much more well-known in fiction circles—including a surprising number of women and non-American writers as well, with some stories being translated from French and Spanish into English.

Their first two anthologies Historical Lovecraft and Future Lovecraft deserve to be considered together. They are in a sense the most “typical” titles, collections of Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction united by a simple theme, in the same vein as Chaosium’s numerous “Cycles” and the innumerable small press efforts, which proliferated in the late 2000s as desktop publishing became ever more accessible to editors on a budget. Moreno-Garcia & Stiles’ Historical & Future Lovecraft are both competent examples of this work and complementary, showcasing their willingness to think outside the Lovecraftian box both in terms of contents and authors.

Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?

A: We are separate from other Lovecraft/Mythos publications in two important ways. First, for our zine and micropress anthologies, we intentionally look for fiction from all over the world, featuring a variety of cultures. Lovecraft, for all his fears and xenophobia, frequently referenced other cultures and set his stories in other countries. You’d be surprised how many non-Americans are writing Mythos. We also like to foster women writers and we look for a variety of protagonists–including women, people of colour, and members of the LGBT community.

—Paula R. Stiles, Editor Interview: Innsmouth Free Press (5 Sep 2011)

More than that, these anthologies showcase a personal interest in the subject—in history, science fiction, and H. P. Lovecraft—and how they combine. Historical & Future Lovecraft are more than an effort to make some money, and this too sets a trend for Moreno-Garcia & Stiles’ later editorial work.

We might have titled this anthology When Lovecraft Met Howard and Moore. But we didn’t. Because we didn’t think that sounded too sophisticated. But that is the impetus of this book—to united two pulp sub-genres. Not that they haven’t been united before.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles, introduction to Sword & Mythos (2014) 7

Sword & Mythos showcases further initiative on the part of Innsmouth Free Press. While individual authors had worked to bring together elements of Lovecraftian horror and sword & sorcery, going all the way back to H. P. Lovecraft’s contemporaries Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Catherine Lucille Moore, Sword & Mythos might be the first dedicated anthology to look at pushing that meeting of the genres—as opposed to individual Sword & Sorcery anthologies like Flashing Swords! or collections like Richard Tierney’s Scroll of Thoth.

In working this genreblending Moreno-Garcia & Stiles were also very aware of the historical racism present in some of the work of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc. and chose to address this directly:

Lovecraft and Howard’s views of people of color are well known and there is no denying their visions can be highly problematic in this regard. […] The question then becomes: Can we and should we continue to access these pulp visions? The answer, we think, is yes. Though that does not mean that our visions have to be the same as the ones prevalent in Lovecraft and Howard’s era. Wile hardly a woman might have made it into Lovecraft’s short stories, and while Howard might not have featured many a person of color in a lead role, we are not the same writers they were. […] our speculative fiction is changing and will continue to change. The boundaries and heroes of yore are different, as are the stories.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles, introduction to Sword & Mythos (2014) 9

This determination to not just reflect on the issue of race in Lovecraftian/Howardian fiction but to do something about it is, really, no more or less courageous than their publication of Mythos fiction from African authors like Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso or Mexican writers like Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas–and this ability to not just perceive a gap in Mythos voices but work to do something about it led directly to their award-winning anthology She Walks In Shadows:

There was a Facebook discussion where someone asked “Do girls just not like to play with squids?” By squids the person meant Lovecraftian stories, there was the assumption there are no women writing it because it doesn’t interest them. There was a long discussion about this on several spaces. At some point someone said women were incapable of writing Lovecraftiana and at another point someone said if you want something different, why don’t you do it yourself. So we did. Of course then some people got mad that we actually were action-oriented and not just talk, but that’s another story.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, An Interview With Silvia Moreno-Garcia (16 Oct 2015)

In their introduction to She Walks In Shadows, Moreno-Garcia and Stiles sketch a brief outline of women in Lovecraft’s fiction—and of women writing Mythos fiction, taking part in the adaptation and spread of the Mythos in art, film, etc. And they add:

Yet, the perception that women are not inclined towards Weird or Lovecraftian fiction seems to persist. We hope this anthology will help to dispel such notions. We also hope it will provide fresh takes on a number of characters and creatures from Lovecraft’s stories, and add some completely new element to the Mythos. Most of all, we hope it will inspire new creations and inspire more women to write Weird and Lovecraftian tales.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles, She Walks in Shadows (2015) 10

If the editors had set out to do nothing more than prove women could write Mythos fiction, they have done that—and more than that. She Walks in Shadows a solid Mythos anthology by any measure, one that follows through on a single theme, exploring not just the role of female authors in writing Mythos fiction, but of women in the Mythos: the stories interrogate, expand upon, and re-imagine the female characters in Lovecraft’s body of work…and that has never been done before, not on this scale or addressed this directly.

The lack of women in the Mythos is an issue worth addressing.

It is not a problem solved by a single book, although it may be no surprise that She Walks in Shadows is definitely a step forward in raising the profile of both female Mythos authors and female characters in the Mythos—and the editors are aware that this is the beginning of recognition, not the end:

In the horror genre, and that includes Weird fiction, women don’t seem to get much attention. Whenever there are lists of Top Ten Horror Writers people remember to include folks like King, Lovecraft, yet even figures as crucial as Jackson can slip through the cracks and be ignored. Some anthologies routinely used to include only all men in their TOCs, I’m thinking of several Lovecraftian books which did this not even five years ago. So, there’s a complex problem. Yes, there are less women horror writers than men. But the ones we have can have a hard time drawing attention. And how do we get more women interested in the genre? In creating and consuming and being part of it, that’s not an easy thing to do but part of it must be visibility. Anthologies can help highlight the work of women which we don’t see, but I should say it’s not the only way this should be done, nor is it an instant solution to get more women interested in the field.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia” (16 Oct 2015)

The publication of She Walks in Shadows also carried with it a degree of backlash from the fan community, proof if any was required that gender discrimination is alive and out for blood in the field of fantastic fiction. Silvia Moreno-Garcia mentioned a bit of the feedback from the book’s publication and what followed:

Well, when io9 did an article on She Walks in Shadows I got some angry comments and a memorable e-mail saying we were menstruating all over Lovecraft and tainting his legacy.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Women in Horror Month – Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia (3 Feb 2016)

Some white supremacists seemed upset when they viewed a panel on racism and Lovecraft I was in, which was posted on YouTube. Some people are upset we did an all woman anthology. But ultimately Lovecraft does not belong to me or you or anyone. Writers can respond to him in their own way and that’s the beauty of it. We have more than half a dozen POC writers in this anthology writing their version of cosmic horror, of Lovecraft’s Mythos, of Weird fiction. I think that’s awesome.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Women Write Lovecraft: An Interview With Editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles (6 Oct 2015)

While Moreno-Garcia & Stiles were resourceful and intrepid to get She Walks in Shadows edited and published, they were also on the front lines to receive all the negativity that came from readers upset at the all the often-unspoken issues that underlay why their publication of a diverse set of writers was so important in the first place. That kind of hate understandably takes its toll:

I’m not very comfortable in the Lovecraft community right now. There are things that are said that rub me like a little grain of sand. Only I’m not an oyster so I don’t produce a pearl as a result. It just rubs and rubs and leaves you raw.

I have abandoned most of the Lovecraft groups and communities I used to be a member of. I was just too tired.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, It’s Your Birthday H. P. Lovecraft (20 Aug 2014)

Paula R. Stiles & Silvia Moreno-Garcia have not completely abandoned all things Lovecraftian; Moreno-Garcia’s masters thesis was Magna Mater: Women and Eugenic Thought in the work of H. P. Lovecraft (2016) and Paula R. Stiles continues to publish Mythos fiction such as “Light a Candle, Curse the Darkness” (2017)—but Innsmouth Free Press is at the moment in abeyance. No more Innsmouth Magazine. No more anthologies, at least for right now.

It is important to emphasize the chances taken by Moreno-Garcia & Stiles. With every unknown writer, with translating work from French and Spanish for an English-speaking audience, in choosing to address issues of historical racism & contemporary misogyny—in not just giving voice to their principles but actually publishing books that show to the world “We are here, right now, writing in the tradition of H. Lovecraft”—they show their quality to the world. Because they could have gone on publishing themed anthologies, or stuck to “safe” material by known writers…and instead, they chose to take a shot at doing something new. Despite the jeers of the world. That’s courage.

Women have emerged from the shadows to claim the night. We welcome them gladly.
—Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles, introduction to She Walks in Shadows 10

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

“Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes

One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious.
—H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Brown-Reed Bishop, “The Mound”

Valerie Valdes is not the first Mythos writer to invoke the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of those peculiarly American outgrowths of Christianity that emerged from the Third Great Awakening (mid-1800s to early 1900s), and best known today for door-to-door evangelism and recruitment. That earlier effort, Robert M. Price’s “Behold, I Stand At the Door and Knock” (1994) focuses on a similar theme, though with a less pronounced element of satire: why don’t the cults of the Cthulhu Mythos proselytize?

The religious aspect of the Mythos have been the focus of many writers; Lovecraft and his contemporaries were generally vague and sometimes contradictory on specifics of theology and cosmology, dogma and sectarian strife. The views of these native or syncretic religions was almost always presented from the skewed perspective of an outsider—someone who had not been raised or initiated into the mysteries—and bound about with much occultism, overtones of Theosophy and other new religions, or anthropological theories and reconstructions of old religion; the main exception being “The Call of Cthulhu,” where the aged mestizo Castro spilled some secrets for the benefit of the audience. Yet the fundamental question always was: why worship the Great Old Ones? Why venerate Shub-Niggurath?

It is indicative of the nature of the short piece as a whole, that while the tone is light and darkly comic, there is real meat in the concepts, and sometimes the questions raised cut to the bone:

“Sister,” I said. “Why did you not tell her that Shub-Niggurath grants immortality to her chosen?”
—Valeria Valdes, “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses”

Valdes has a good answer for this, with a reference to Ramsey Campbell’s classic tale of Shub-Niggurath “The Moon-Lens” (1964) for any Mythos lorekeepers among the reading audience. For the most part, “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” emphasizes the surreal contrast of the secretive, monstrous cultists of Shub-Niggurath going door-to-door, pamphleting the neighborhood (there’s a website on the back), striving to stay on script—and it is an interesting script:

Are there mysteries in your life that do not have satisfying answers?

Have you ever felt that no benevolent god watches over you?

Do you feel your life is insignificant?

That you are a tiny ant in a vast, uncaring universe?

…and if you answer yes to the above, “Then you will be happy to know there are answers to your questions, if you dare to look.”

The target of this pitch is Yourladies Benitez, a young hispanic woman. There’s an implicit frisson to that combination of age, ethnicity, and gender when it comes to religion; Benitez embodies the conflict between the heavy Catholic cultural influence of the older generation and the more agnostic or atheistic youth, and the stereotypes of women as more prone to spirituality. On the front of the pamphlet she is handed, is “a young woman very like Yourladies[.]” To the cult of Shub-Niggurath, Benitez is a likely mark—the very things that would set her apart from more traditional stereotypes of Hispanic women as devout Catholics are exactly what Shub-Niggurath’s witnesses are looking for.

The setup and execution of Benitez’ targeting for initiation riffs off the comment from Lovecraft and Bishop’s “The Mound”: the deliberate contrast of socio-cultural norms between the older and younger generation. Yourladies Benitez (female, Hispanic, agnostic?) offers a contrast to Lovecraft & Bishop’s conquistador Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez (male, Spanish, Catholic), and the different perspectives of the two characters is reflected in their reaction to the worship of Shub-Niggurath: Pánfilo’s disgust and Yourladies’ grudging acceptance.

The glimpses Valdes offers of the theology of Shub-Niggurath in the story are few, but quintessential and nihilistic: “There is no point to anything. No point at all.” Yet that basic tenet proves ultimately freeing to Benitez—freedom from her supervisor, her job with the pin-stripe uniform, eventually even her clothes. As the Cthulhu cultist Castro put it, she became:

[…] as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy […]
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

“Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” appeared in She Walks in Shadows (2015). Valeria Valdes’ first novel Chilling Effect is due out in 2019.

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