Tag Archives: H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s War Memoirs

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afghanpostcoverI made a strange discovery recently. Reading the Delta Green Call of Cthulhu RPG sourcebooks for a different perspective on the H.P. Lovecraft narrative (as well as to interact with and enjoy one of my favorite literary worlds), it occurred to me that a great deal of the current literature coming out of the forever war in Afghanistan and the Middle East are basically horror stories.

Much of the current literature on war comes to us in the form of memoir. Many of these accounts focus on special operations soldiers such as SEALs, Rangers, Delta, CIA, or mercenaries formerly employed by one of these groups. The bulk of the remainder of the memoirs are firsthand accounts produced by combat veterans from regular units. My own memoir, Afghan Post, is an epistolary account drawn from journal entries and letters to others during my time deployed. LTC Peter Molin, who reviewed Afghan Post for his blog Time Now (detailing war-themed literature) said that it reads like bildungsroman – a coming of age story.

Meditating on Lovecraft, though, I realized that my memoir makes a lot more sense as horror, and I suspect that this holds true for a great many of the war memoirs we’re used to encountering as non-fiction essay.

For those unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft it’s probably worth making a wild overgeneralization and claiming, briefly, that he was responsible for establishing the genre of modern horror as we know it. In Lovecraft’s stories, a protagonist who operates on the fringes of society (private detective, university researcher, scientist, a relative to some obscure and eccentric person) is presented with a mystery about the nature of the universe. The solution to the mystery is either some horrifying revelation about the nature of the universe that drives the protagonist mad, or a monster that kills the protagonist.

Given the frame of a universe wherein people are killed or driven mad by what they see and do, it’s not difficult to see how war memoirs or any trauma story could lend themselves to comparison and analysis. Most contemporary participants in war (who are, in America at least, all volunteers), elect to take part in state sanctioned violence. Whether they are shooting at enemies or being shot at, the emotional progressions moves in most cases quite naturally and predictably from some form of idealism to realism and, ultimately, to pessimism (and, frequently, to suicide as well).

I first encountered H.P. Lovecraft in a Borders in Evanston, in winter of 1996. A classmate of mine, Scott Richardson, introduced me to the author when I expressed an interest in reading short horror fiction, and fatigue with Stephen King (who has also produced an incredible body of short horror fiction, for which he should be always and best remembered). Lovecraft made effective use of the epistolary device in his horror stories –At the Mountains of Madness, for example, is a novella told through the journal of an explorer and scientist in Antarctica who makes a horrible discovery. Used appropriately, the frame allows readers to experience, firsthand, the dissolution of a mind, and undergo in hours what would otherwise transpire over a course of days, weeks, or more.

When people have asked me what my inspiration was for framing Afghan Post as an epistolary memoir, I’ve told them the truth: I’ve always enjoyed writing letters and journal entries, and I found the writing of difficult personal material to be easier if it were addressed to the friends and family with whom I’d actually corresponded during my deployments to Afghanistan. A friend had sent me a copy of Les Liasions Dangereuses shortly before I began writing my memoir, so that book – told through a series of letters between two French aristocrats – was also very prominent in my mind. It did not occur to me that, in telling the story of my psychological fracturing, and splitting, I was evoking Lovecraft.

That connection works both ways, broadly speaking – Lovecraft’s stories are filled with references to war, and especially World War I. Oftentimes a character will be revealed to have been a veteran of that conflict –not surprisingly, given the time during which Lovecraft was writing, but not often remarked upon in literary studies. And nowhere moreso than in his short story The Rats in the Walls, where the narrator’s son dies from a wound inflicted in World War I, and another World War I veteran is murdered under suitably terrible circumstances – in the earth, among the scurrying of rats, which were a powerful symbol of trench life, as well as life in the hellish, muddy wasteland between trenches.

The book I wrote is the story of an intellectual and artistically inclined young man, who encounters the terrifying reality of life outside the safe confines of the developed world, and endures the emotional consequences. Reading Afghan Post now, ten months after its release and nearly a year and a half since I last edited the text, I must admit that my journey concluded with a descent into madness, from which I have only partially recovered.

While it’s irresponsible to make generalizations about something as wide and all-encompassing as war literature, which runs the gamut from fiction masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five to first-person memoirs like the controversial American Sniper, my own sense of the war narrative is this: there’s something to the process of going to war that undermines the confidence we veterans have in a naturally or passively just world. I’m surprised it took me this long to realize that I wrote a story that could honestly be described as “Memoir – Epistolary – Horror.”

The Shadow Done Gone

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Wind-Done-Gone-RandallAlice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone” is superior to the Margaret Mitchell novel it is based on in many respects. Though Mitchell’s prose is quite good, Randall’s is better , earthier and more poetic at once (“It’s a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price.”) Randall’s economical, short book also avoids Mitchell’s tendency to ramble. But perhaps most surprising in a sequel/parody, Randall’s book makes more sense.

It’s a staple of fan fiction to fill in the blank spaces and plot holes. Still, Randall manages to do so with unusual grace. Much of Mitchell’s drawn out plot and her surprise twists are built on her characters lack of self-knowledge. Rhett is so afraid of giving power to Scarlett that he won’t tell her he loves her, even after they marry — and then, finally, he falls out of love with her, thump. Scarlett, for her part, thinks she loves Ashley and hates Mellie, until Mellie dies and she realizes, no that was all a mistake. Ashley has a similar storyline; he loves Scarlett until he realizes he doesn’t and never did. Mellie thinks Scarlett is her best friend even though Scarlett spends most of her life loathing her. Everyone seems utterly severed from their own emotional life. It strains credulity that one character could be this gob-smackingly dumb; but two? three? four? It starts to seem like carelessness.

In Randall’s book the source of the stupidity isn’t carelessness. It’s racism. The main characters in Gone With the Wind can’t know themselves, because if they knew themselves, they’d have to know about black people, and then their world would collapse. Mitchell’s characters, as seen by Randall, aren’t dumb; they live in a society of secrets and lies, in which not knowing is the basis of their existence. So Rhett doesn’t just fall out of love with Scarlett; rather, he always was in love with her half-sister, Mammy’s daughter Cynara, and his vacillations in love are the result of his painful uncertainty about marrying, or loving, a black woman. Ashley, for his part, never declares for Scarlett not because he’s a dishmop, but because he’s gay; Mellie has his black lover whipped to death at one point. And Scarlett, so set on not knowing herself, is not just stubborn, but has a real secret or two — a lifetime spent refusing to think about the fact that her beloved maid and surrogate mother slept with her father, and a lifetime spent refusing to think about her sister.

You’d think that looking unflinchingly at the racism in Gone With the Wind would make the white characters unsympathetic. In fact, though, Randall’s Scarlett, and Rhett,and Ashley are all significantly less awful than Mitchell’s. In Mitchell’s version, they’re all just horrible people, indecisive, whining, opaque to themselves, and fighting ceaselessly on behalf of slavery because they suck. Randall, in contrast, grants them the context that has deformed them. Rhett’s decision to become a Confederate soldier at the last minute, for example, is seen in GWTW as a triumph, and is therefore unforgivable. In Wind Done Gone, it’s portrayed as a painful lapse; a mark of how much racism touches even a man who, in many respects, has been able and willing to get beyond the prejudices of his society. (“R. fought and tried to die in a Confederate uniform to save this place,” Cynara thinks of her lover, and later husband. “I have tried to forget this, but I remember.”) Scarlett’s blank self-centeredness becomes more understandable when we see her parents’ marriage as loveless, and lack of self-knowledge seems more understandable when we learn her life was in no small part a lie. Her mother was partially black,and concealed her past and her own emotional investments from family, and especially from her daughter. GWTW famously (and counter-intuitively for a romance) concludes in bitterness and the break-up of a marriage; Randall’s is the book with the not exactly traditional, but still happy ending. The Wind Done Gone can manage forgiveness because it is able to talk about what needs to be forgiven; GWTW is filled with too much hate to arrive at love.

___________

Ruthanna Emrys’ novella “The Litany of Earth is version of “The Wind Done Gone” for evil fish-creatures. Where Randall presents GWTW from the perspective of the slaves and freed blacks, Emrys looks at H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, particularly his Innsmouth stories, from the perspective of the monsters — and from the perspective of Lovecraft’s own vile racism. The main character, Aphra Marsh, has had much of her family hunted down and killed by the authorities, who also subjected them to brutal medical testing. Innsmouth people are still regularly policed by government spies; the parallels to the U.S. Japanese concentration camps, and to Hitler’s genocide, are drawn explicitly.

In discussions of Lovecraft, I’ve often seen fans argue that the horror in his stories is not linked directly to the racism. Instead, they say, the terror is tied to his atheism — to the apprehension of an infinite, indifferent cosmos, which was not built for humans and does not care about them.

Emrys keeps the cosmic emptiness in her story. Marsh’s people repeat a litany, in which they number the people of earth, from the distant past to the distant future, who have lived and will live and will all pass away. ““After the last race leaves, there will be fire and unremembering emptiness. Where the stories of Earth will survive, none have told us.” But the emptiness and meaninglessness don’t lead to horror. Instead, “In times of hardship or joy, when a child sickened or a fisherman drowned too young for metamorphosis, at the new year and every solstice, the Litany gave us comfort and humility.”

I think that’s right; knowing the universe is alien isn’t a horrible or fearful thing unless you first believe, as Lovecraft did, that the other and the alien are terrifying. The cosmic horror is horror not because the cosmos is intrinsically horrible, but because Lovecraft was racist. The indescribable gibbering darkness, the unnameable monstrosities; they’re indescribable and unnameable for the same reason that Scarlett and Rhett are irritatingly dense — because racism means you’re not allowed to know those other people, over there, which means you also can’t know yourself. Racism poisons Gone With the Wind, and it poisons Lovecraft’s world too. In Lovecraft and Mitchell that’s the shadow that can’t be named, and that neither wind nor war can blow away.

50 Tentacles of Unspeakable Hue: Complete and Unabridged

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unspeakable cover

As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote this 50 Shades/Cthulhu mash-up in the hopes people would buy it on Amazon. But no one did. So I thought I’d put it over here instead. If you enjoy it and want to throw me a buck, you can buy the kindle version here. Otherwise, you can just shamelessly freeload.

Oh yeah; NSFW, if you couldn’t figure that out.
_______________
(This is a parody. Don’t sue me, please.)

Oh, my. Even the elevator was intimidating and impressive. I gulped and bit my lip and tried not to be too overly stimulated as the shining glass tube shot upwards through the slick, vertical passageway. On one side, a magnificent view of the Pacific. On the other, the inner workings of Mauve Enterprises, stacked floor on floor, shining in transparent glass. I could see people bustling here and there. Impressive looking people in suits. You could almost see the money steaming off those impressive suits. It was…impressive. I looked away to the Pacific again. Also impressive…but not as unsettlingly stirring as that money moving through corridors, directed by an enticing, directing will.

I struggled to get ahold of myself. I breathed deeply, causing the smooth, luxurious skin of my cleavage to rise enticingly — though, of course, I was completely unaware of my own considerable personal beauty. Would Sebastian Mauve be unaware as well? Did I want him to be? I was here on professional business — to interview the wealthy mystery man whose incredible power, wealth, and mystery probed into every rarefied orifice of finance. He was…mysterious. And it was up to me, Alisa Irons, reporter for the spunky internet startup Power and Money, to plumb that mystery.

Or, suggested my traitorous inner lady bits with an involuntary flutter, to be plumbed by it.

The elevator slid to an immaculate stop redolent of good taste, and the doors hissed open. I gasped, once more unconsciously agitating my bosom, as I beheld the massive antechamber beyond. Holy crap. The décor was sumptuous and subtle…but also, subtly, disturbing. The thick carpet was covered with swirls and patterns, almost seeming to form a script or an alphabet throbbing with unspeakable meanings. Directly in front of the elevator was a pedestal, upon which a nude bronze sculpture of a shockingly well-formed and realistic woman (somewhat resembling myself!) struggled with what looked like an octopus. I looked closer, and realized it was not exactly an octopus — there were too many tentacles, and the central head was not really a head, but itself a mass of writhing limbs. My broad reading led me to conclude, therefore that it was some sort of mythological thingee. Not an octopus, anyway. Also it was not struggling with the woman, but…holy crap. I turned my eyes modestly away to the wall hangings, which were also covered with swirls, swirls, swirly swirls. They dipped and slid and criss-crossed not unlike those not-octopus limbs. They coiled around and up, sliding smoothly into my eager, pouting brain the way they slid right up into the statue’s….

“Miss Irons?”

I started. Oh, my. I was looking into the eyes of a very beautiful woman. Her dark eyes were limpid pools, her white bosom strained against the fabric of her blue dress. Around her neck was an odd piece of jewelry…a kind of octopus, but not really an octopus, like the one on the statue. Its tentacles seemed to be exploring her cleavage, which was more amply visible than I would usually expect in a business setting. But perhaps cleavage amply displayed was what Sebastian Mauve demanded. I imagined Sebastian Mauve perusing the cleavage. My inner lady bits sat up and did some complicated writhing at the thought. What sort of man was he, who would so boldly, so shamelessly, peruse both staff cleavage and octopus statue rape? Skeevy, perhaps. But it was the skeeviness of power.

“Yes,” I breathed, perhaps too enthusiastically. “I’m Alisa Irons.”

The woman looked me up and down frankly. “I’m Virginia, Sebastian Mauve’s personal assistant. Come right this way, please.” She turned briskly, whisking the cleavage away, and replacing it with a stellar bottom. Oh my. I felt a flash of some indefinable emotion as I thought of Sebastian Mauve’s relationship with that roundness. Had he watched it swivel above this very carpet with these very oddly affecting swirls? The speculation and the gyrations and the contemplation were all making me feel a little dizzy.

And then the door was open, and he turned and holy crap. His eyes smouldered; his tailored suit hung just so on his well-muscled frame, his pants hung just so on his, oh my.

“Hello, Miss Irons,” he said, his voice cultured and bristling manfully with manliness.

“Hello,” I said vaguely. Everything tilted, and I pitched forward helplessly. Two of the three grapes I had eaten for lunch came rushing up, and out.

He had caught me. His eyes smouldered into mine. An ironic smile played over his lips. His mouth opened enticingly.

“You vomited on my jacket,” he said, wittily.

“I know,” I volleyed back.

“It takes a strong woman to have the courage to vomit on the jacket of a man as quietly powerful as I am,” he volleyed back back. I could smell his scent — aftershave and cleanliness, with just a hint of brine. My inner lady bits did back flips. The lone remaining grape in my intestine told them testily to stop it.

Sebastian smiled smoulderingly, as if he could see my thoughts, and the thoughts of the lady bits, and also perhaps of the grape. “Ostentatious incapacity intrigues me, Miss Irons,” he said. “It speaks to an unusual truthiness of character.” With a single motion, he settled me in a sumptuous chair and tore his shirt asunder. Buttons popped off, abs popped out. His chest was smooth and chiseled. I bit my lip. He tossed the shirt into a corner with a casual abruptness. Oh my.

He leaned towards me, smouldering black eyes smouldering, muscles tensed across his bare arms. “Are you…feeling better?” he said, with a low intensity that ensured a final, decisive route of remaining grape by ladybits.

Before I could answer, his cell phone rang. The ringtone was something classical and impressive, showing his refinement and taste, as classical music will. Though I did not recognize it, I responded intuitively and with all my heart and refinement and taste.

“How beautiful!” I said, as the tinny phrase repeated.

I saw his eyes open wider as he realized we shared a common love for whatever his ringtone was. It was a bond that would never be broken.

He answered the phone decisively, our eyes still locked. Then his jaw clenched and he turned away. I watched the muscles of his back as he uttered brief, staccato commands and answers. He was probably moving almost unimaginable amounts of money with every monosyllable. The back muscles moved, the commands staccatoed, the money whizzed. I didn’t care about material things at all — if I did, how could I have responded so forcefully to the spiritual beauty of the ringtone? Still, watching him command money and stuff with his shirt off was pretty hot.

He slammed the phone shut. He turned back to me. His dark eyes were full of anger…but when he spoke it was with a surprising gentleness.

“Miss Irons,” he said quietly. “Are you a virgin?”

I caught my breath. I bit my lip. I flushed. My inner ladybits cheered. The grape was so stunned it shriveled to a raisin.

“That is none of your business,” I said. “How dare you? I…I am not merely a sum of money you can move about on the phone, no matter how sexily.”

He crossed his arms on his magnificent chest. “Please,” he said. “I know we are all sensitive people, and that we have so much to give. But this is an emergency. Your safety is in peril.” He came around the desk. I caught my breath. My bosom heaved without my knowing it. “Your hymen,” he said. “I need to know its status. Now.”

Something in his tone, something in his assurances, assured me. “Yes. I…I’m a virgin,” I admitted. “My hymen is intact.” I lowered my eyes. “It’s probably because I am so unconscious of my extreme beauty that things have come to this pass,” I said apologetically.

His jaw, which I was sure had tightened as much as it was possible for a jaw to tighten, tightened further. “I would curse your demure and improbable lack of self-knowledge,” he said, “if it were not so endearing. And even then, perhaps, if we had time. But we’ve got to get you out of here!”

He grabbed me roughly and lifted me from the chair, propelling me towards the door with strong, strong, knowing hands.

“Mr. Mauve,” I said. “What…?”

We stepped through the office door and my half-formed thought choked and died and ceased to form.

Virginia was braced against her desk, her arms rigid. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist. Her spectacular ass bucked and thrust rhythmically, in time to the thrusts of…oh my.

It was man-like, to some degree. Two arms, two legs. At first I thought it was a guy in a costume, which clearly would not have been appropriate for the office, anyway, but still. After a couple seconds, though, I saw the proportions were not quite right. It looked sort of like that black lagoon creature; it was obviously aquatic. Its webbed, green-black hands were wrapped around her hips; the frills at its neck quivered in eagerness or satisfaction or anger, or just to quiver, who knew? Though a virgin, I was not utterly without experience, and so I could tell that its penis was thoroughly unlikely, if not actually impossible. It was green and huge, with ribs all down the side, and some sort of twist or hook at the end. It didn’t look like there was any way it could go in, despite Virginia’s obvious and extreme lubrication. But in it went. Holy crap.

Virginia screamed.

The creature, apparently encouraged, thrust again. Its tongue, a long ropy strand, came out of its toothy mouth and dexterously performed an evaluation of Virginia’s interior assets in preparation for a sensitive merger. She screamed again. The creature made a wet growl.

I felt shock, and horror, and a confused but intense communication from the inner lady things. But all those emotions were overwhelmed by pity. I put my hand on Sebastian’s bare shoulder as he pulled me across the room.

“This…this sort of thing happening in your lobby,” I whispered. “Mr. Mauve — Sebastian — I never guessed. How it must hurt you!”

He turned his dark eyes to me. They still smouldered, but in a vulnerable, wounded way.

“You look like my mother,” he said. “Here, now…with all this….the giant ribbed penis…the anal tongue sex….”

He tried to go on, but I shook my head, touched that this tragic moment of fish-sex which we had lived through together had uncovered in him unexpected depths. “No,” I said. “You don’t need to say anything else. I understand.”

I knew the moment was real. My inner lady bits, the grape, me myself — we were all in agreement. Even the fish-thing seemed to recognize the importance of what we had; it pulled out of Virginia’s various apertures, and turned towards us. Some viscous, greenish fluid was dripping from it where it was difficult to ignore. Virginia sat up too, her tits declaring her an independent woman who could make her own decisions about fish sex. Also, she made a little noise as the fish creature stepped away from her, towards us. Its thing quivered. Oh my.

Sebastian grabbed me and jammed me into the open elevator. The doors closed just in time. We were safe.

Or…I thought I was safe. Until I turned to Sebastian.

“You!” he said. “What do you think you were doing!”

Though I felt that after the ringtone and the fish-sex in the lobby I knew him better than anyone else did, or could, still his character was more complex than many other complex things, and this was obviously one of those complexities. I cast about helplessly, trying to imagine what I had done to offend. “You mean…coming here while virgin?” I asked tentatively.

“Hah!” he said. He loomed over me, his smouldery eyes flashing and smouldering. “A virgin! Are you telling me you were not looking at that giant green penis?”

I flushed, and bit my lip for good measure. “It was right there,” I said. “I could hardly have helped looking at it…and besides!” I rallied, “I bet you were looking at Virginia’s huge tits, weren’t you?”

He seemed taken aback…then grinned. “Don’t you know that no man is going to look at anyone else’s tits when you’re in the room?” he said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t know because I am completely unconscious of my own personal…” I didn’t get any more out. He had taken me in his arms; the clean scent, with a hint of brine, was all around me as his lips pressed against me. I could feel his erection hard and unashamed. It did not feel as big as the fish-man penis, but it was plenty big enough.

He pushed me up against the elevator wall that I couldn’t help realizing that he owned. It was like being kissed on the front by him and on the back by his stuff, which was almost more him than him since there was more of it. His tongue moved skillfully, his stuff was hard… oh my.

Outside the glass walls of the elevator was a scene of excessive debauchery. Fish-men-things, like money, were everywhere…and, it seemed, in everyone, of whatever gender. As we descended one level, I saw a well-preserved women in her 60s joining a young blonde in performing enthusiastic fellatio on one of those ribbed monstrosities; on another, a well-endowed man was stroking himself while the creature entered him from behind. I could even see a few of the things climbing the outer walls, their erections dragging against the windows, leaving little trails of cum, or slime, or whatever it was.

As a lover of great literature from Pride and Prejudice to Twilight to 50 Shades of Goo:Bred by the Billionaire Tentacle (available as a digital e-book), I sensed that there were narrative complications that had not yet been fully explained.

“Sebastian,” I said determinedly as he bit my nipple in passing, and kept moving down. “Sebastian…oh my! Sebastian…ooooh…if you are not careful, I am going to orgasm while watching a giant green penis sodomize one of your colleagues!”

Sebastian’s ministrations stopped abruptly. His face appeared, his mouth somewhat damp, his brow furrowed, his dark eyes doing that thing they did. Which was smouldering.

“What?” he said.

“You heard my independent and spunky repartee,” I said firmly. “Green penises. Wit!”

Sebastian looked around. I could see the heavy burden of having his office sacked by fish sex monsters descend upon him.

“Sebastian,” I said. “Tell me. Virginity. Abominations from the deep. Mauve enterprises. Your mother and the wounded little boy inside you. Explain it all, darling. I won’t judge you.” I reached out to smooth his face, but missed and grabbed his impressive erection instead. He seemed to find it comforting, so I left my hand there. He gazed into my eyes, pumping subtly below the waist.

“You are an extraordinary woman, Anna,” he breathed. “Despite everything, I’m glad you fell into my office and vomited copiously on my shoulder.”

“My name’s Alisa,” I said, tracing lightly up his shaft.

“Right,” he agreed. The elevator doors slid open. The corridor outside seemed fish monster free. He grabbed my arm and pulled me swiftly after him.

“I will tell you everything, Alisa,” he said. “You deserve that much. But first we need to make sure you’re safe.” He flipped his cell phone open with a masterful air of command. “Alfred,” he said. “The Batcopter!”

Holy crap.
_____
“So,” I said. “You’re Batman.”

Sebastian nodded distractedly, still distractingly shirtless, as a trusty minion piloted the famous crime-fighting copter out over the Pacific.

“It’s a way of giving back,” he said. “When you make your billions as quickly and obscurely as I did, you feel, of course, entirely justified in your own improbable brilliance, but also grateful to the average schmucks who got out of the way. The least you can do, really, is don a costume a few nights a week to become a dark avenger of crime. ” He shrugged. “The adrenalin rush is fun, too. Nice change of pace from the other extreme sports I’ve tried, like cliff diving, prole tossing….” He trailed off. “But that isn’t what you want to talk about, is it, Arabella?”

“Alisa.”

“Right.”

His eyes brooded.

I wanted to brush the hair from his eyes. I missed again and stroked him down there. He made a cute little sound. Oh my.

“Your mother,” I breathed. “Fish sex invasion. Virginity. Why?”

He nodded, once; the crisp, harsh nod that struck fear in the cowardly hearts of criminals and sent funds scurrying like green fish with penises through the glistening tubes of extreme philanthropy.

“My mother was a whore,” he said, raising his eyes to my face. “She looked just like you.”

My heart melted. His member twitched at the profound sorrow of his words. I jerked gently, knowing that what he needed now, more than ever, was tenderness.

“She was on drugs,” he continued, as I slid down to better facilitate the truth rising in his wounded manliness, like truth sap in a truth tree. “And she was also involved in obscene and unspeakable rites. She summoned things from outside of time; horrible twisted abominations that should not have been! Can you imagine what it was like, Alexandra, to lie there every night beside her, terrified, and watch the tentacled beasts crawl up through the rotten boards of our decayed hovel to satisfy their depraved lusts?”

I shook my head in horror, running my tongue back and forth across the hard knot of his shattered youth, which was extremely hard. I fondled the backstory lightly with my fingers. Holy crap, and also oh my. This was incredibly hot — and also, no doubt, therapeutic, especially since I reminded him of his mom.

“Let it all out,” I said, but my mouth was full so it came out as “Lepphalt.” An appreciative throb assured me that he understood the sentiment.

“She would step naked into the bathtub,” he continued, his voice rising. I was concerned for a moment, but then I figured the minion had heard it all before. “Her firm white breasts rising in anticipation, the exploitive Oedipal content hard and red with depraved lust. The thing that waited rose up, its head a writhing mass, its long tentacles thrashing.”

He touched my head as I bobbed, and his voice took on new urgency.

“That’s…uhh..that’s why I…want you to let me sacrifice you to Cthulhu. It’s what I do with all my girlfriends. I…oh…find someone who looks just like Mommy, seduce her, and then throw her to the unspeakable eldritch fiend so it can rut in all her orifices and drive her utterly mad! Oh!” he exclaimed in a final spasm of sincere vulnerability and also semen. I looked up thoughtfully, watching his sexy concerns detumesce. I was glad to have helped him so much…but could I possibly help him so much more?

“So,” I said, biting my lip in a manner which was unconsciously fetching, “you want to watch me be violated by a hideous atrocity from outside of time and space?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And this is what you do with all your girlfriends? This is what it means to have a relationship with you?”

“Yes,” he said again, with a hint of impatience.

“And…the virginity? The fish-sex invasion?”

He shrugged. “Cthulhu likes virgins. Private elder god reasons. And the fish monsters come every Thursday. It’s a team building exercise.”

“It’s Wednesday.” I pointed out.

He nodded. “Right.”

I sat back on my haunches, which were so similar to Sebastian’s mother’s haunches, and which, therefore, Sebastian found appealing even outside of their innate attractiveness. I basked in the aura of Sebastian; the custom crime-fighting helicopter, the silent minion up front who had seen so much and was yet so cheerfully bland and faceless, the shirtlessness, the flaccid but stimulating penis. Did I want to be sacrificed to an unnameable horror? My inner lady bits were perhaps somewhat interested; Sebastian’s description of his mother’s ravishment was certainly impassioned. On the other hand, my grape pointed out that there was maybe something mildly disturbing about Sebastian’s intense dedication to his noble war on crime. And what about all those other girls?

“Did you throw Virginia and her big tits to Cthulhu?” I asked him.

He snorted. “Virginia! She looks nothing like my mother! Besides, do you know how hard it is to find a good secretary? Those who Cthulhu uses are shattered in body and mind and their souls devoured. You can’t take good dictation after your soul is devoured. Even filing suffers.” He stood up, his penis dangling, his biceps bicepping. He clasped me tightly against him. “Andrea, I don’t just throw every attractive, bosomy girl I come across to my unholy master. Only the truly special may be meat puppets for Cthulhu. And you…you are the most special meat puppet I have ever encountered!”

He looked at me with those dark Sebastian eyes that had looked at so many possessions, so much money, so many bosoms, and so many tentacles. I felt my inner value skyrocket as I realized all the luxury items that he was ignoring, all the other things he could consume to salve his trauma rather than utterly destroying me in a bizarre sex ritual. Yet it was the utter destruction that he wanted; the utter destruction he needed. How could I not feel flattered? How could I not feel safe as he lifted me in his arms and flung me, despite my screams and protests, out of the helicopter and into the Pacific far below?

“Afterwards I’ll buy you a Volvo!” he shouted in parting.

The wind whipped about me as I fell, Sebastian’s wounded expression of anticipation and his again-rigid consumption pattern receding above me, the unique, incredibly expensive Bat-copter piloted by the well-paid minion falling away. The wind howled, but that was quickly drowned in the mighty roar from below. I caught a glimpse of Cyclopean tendrils falling from unnameable perspectives, and then the terrible maw engulfed me, and my dress was torn away like one of those things that gets torn off in one of the many, many novels I have read about tearing. I imagined Sebastian looking at me through very expensive Bat-binoculars, made just for the viewing of distant tentacle-rape, and felt the grape retreat in a huff as my inner lady bits moistened. Oh my.

The smell of brine was everywhere, reminding me of Sebastian’s scent. For an inhuman unspeakable demon, it was remarkably gentle, as if it was instinctively tamed by the curve of my thighs and my appreciation of the Impressionists and designer watches. Delicate, independently writhing cilia played across my incessant self-questioning. Was it right to accept a Volvo? I tried to call Sebastian’s name, but all that came out was ” ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Perhaps this sort of translation problem was why Sebastian had had such problems with former sacrifices and dictation.

I saw the great tentacle rise before me, huge, grey-green, and ribbed, like a gigantic version of the fish-men penises that Sebastian had not wanted me to look at. A giant lidless eye opened, the swirling geometries causing me to drool and gibber, even as I understood intuitively that it had its own sorrows, and its own tragic reasons for manifesting as a monstrosity whose foul, slimy, hideous and mountainous flesh concealed a heart desperately in need of love. It stroked various things leisurely, then moved down, down, down…and suddenly thrust. Holy crap.
 

Adapting Lovecraft

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Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

– Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft

Comics and its continuities have long been happy receptacles for H. P. Lovecraft and his machinations. Noah’s appreciation of the author’s “ham-fisted” charms can be found in the archives of this site together with a review of a predictably mediocre adaptation, the Eureka Graphic Classics production of H. P. Lovecraft.

The adaptation of The Dunwich Horror by Norberti Buscaglia and Alberto Breccia is a more distinguished example which found its and first and only translation in the pages of the October 1979 issue of Heavy Metal. For the uninitiated or forgetful, the story concerns the mysterious and possibly inbred Whatley family; in particular the newly born, preternaturally intelligent child of unknown paternity, Wilbur Whatley, a veritable Baphomet. Ugly, wicked, and inhuman in anatomy, he is slain mid way through the narrative allowing investigations to begin under a certain Dr. Henry Armitage. Occult books are consulted and cryptograms decoded even as a mysterious force lays waste to the small town, slaying whole families in the thick of night. A final confrontation occurs on the hills of Dunwich where Wilbur’s monstrous twin brother is defeated and  unmasked.

The presentation in the English language Heavy Metal is more than aptly named considering the debasements inflicted on it over the course of the production process.

[Spanish and English editions of The Dunwich Horror]

Yet even in the original, this seems to be a job approached with proficiency by Breccia rather than the excitement and innovation one finds in a work such as Rapport sur les aveugles (Breccia with Ernesto Sábato). Lovecraft’s slow meanderings (the delays, forebodings, and suspicions) don’t lend themselves well to the narrative ease found in comics adhering to classical forms. It must be said though this adaptation was probably never meant as a substitute for the original but as a sort of primer and graphic aide. It may be that even a moderately long short story of this ilk would probably need twice as many pages to achieve its desired effect. Examples of this watering down may be seen on every page. The secret rites practiced by mother and child seem strangely innocuous and are not followed by the ambiguity of a witness’ testimony that the child had:

“…some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on” and that “Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement of which…always seemed to fill him anger and alarm.”

The occult sharings between grandfather and child found in the original are also omitted, these moments and their closeness suggesting not merely some demon spawn but unspoken incest and a deformed offspring (vehemently denied by Lovecraft as being too innocuous through his proxy Dr. Armitage), a parasite drawing knowledge and lifeforce from his grandfather who eventually dies by the child’s tenth year. Gone is that accumulation of fanciful and misanthropic detail: the cattle paid for in “gold pieces of extremely ancient date” which disappear (presumably consumed or sacrificed) at a prodigious rate; the town consumed by the ordinary rites of All-Hallow’s eve and Walpurgis Night; or the suggestion that “in 1917 [when] the war came…the local draft board….had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to development camp” and were “alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence.” There are exceptions of course. The page and sequence showing the final dispostion of Wilbur Whatley is particularly excellent with its rough cut rabid cur and disintegrating form.

It occurs to me that almost all comic adaptations of Lovecraft seem to function best when seen more distinctly as illustration. The central panel on the third page of Buscaglia and Breccia’s adaptation works better than all three panels which follow it at showing Wilbur contempt for his mother, his overbearing presence like some evil Christ; the hills of Dunwich replacing that wedding at Cana and the messiah’s tarrying in the Temple in Jerusalem, an anti-Christ with altars on the high places. What better place to find a depiction of…

“…something almost goatish or animalistic”, “thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears”

….or the corpse of Wilbur Whatley with skin “thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply” —

…or that final epiphany on the hills of Dunwich.

a “grey cloud – a cloud about the size of a moderately large building…Bigger’n a barn… all made o’ squirmin’ ropes… hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step… nothin’ solid abaout it – all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together… great bulgin’ eyes all over it… ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin’ an openin’ an’ shuttin’… all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings… an’ Gawd it Heaven – that haff face on top…’

Artful homage remains Lovecraft greatest legacy to comics, its practitioners like the aesthetes in The Call of Cthulhu, dreaming dreams and drawing monsters conceived of decades before. From that point of view, the Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal was only making a point explicit for images from Lovecraft have ever been the center of one of the founders of that magazine, namely Philippe Druillet.

The 6 Voyages of Lone Sloane is an adaptation by any other name but here transferred to the vast emptiness of space and incalculable eons, not unlike his space faring version of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The stories are largely nonsensical but intermittently involve forgotten fairways, secret words of power, cultic allegiances, and old dark gods—not just a testament to Druillet’s limitations as a writer, but also his singular focus on the sense of wonder and awe one finds in Lovecraft’s stories. As China Miéville writes in his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness:

“H. P. Lovecraft is the towering genius among those writers of fantastic fiction for whom plot is simply not the point.”

The imagery here is redolent of the third part of The Call of Cthulhu (“The Madness from the Sea”) in which the crew of the Emma lands on an unknown island, the “nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh” and encounter Cthulhu himself. In not quite the same words and at various points in Druillet’s anthology of tales, we see the pirate ship Alert with its “queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes”…

[Images from Lone Sloane by Druillet and Watchmen by Joe Orlando]

…and then 

“a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror — the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars” …where ” the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters.”

…before apprehending the very image of Cthulhu himself—mechanical, rampaging, and yet curiously driven away by music.

No other cartooning acolyte of Lovecraft has delineated the author’s Cyclopean landscapes quite as effectively as Druillet, an artist who has yet to show any devotion to moderation, logic or good sense to this day.

[Gail, Philippe Druillet]

Beyond this point, there is the total assimilation of Lovecraft’s innards by Alan Moore, a comic literary criticism not unlike Martin Rowson’s adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Lovecraft’s madness is resolved to science in Watchmen, the stories distilled to a metaphor for creation itself. Ozymandias’ monster is the product of literature, art, and sound, a psychic wave from the future if not an alternate dimension; driving “sensitives” to distraction or outright insanity; its god-curators slaughtered and forgotten; perhaps an “origin story” for Lovecraft himself.

 

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes…These responses from esthetes told disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last.” (The Call of Cthulhu)

Scattered throughout are the pirates beckoning from penny comics, the surfeit of voyages by ship, the mysterious island of genesis, the incipient insanity and death.

At other times, Moore’s concept of worship becomes less rational and reverts to the high places.

[From Hell, Eddie Campbell]

This literary dissection of Lovecraft is played out in earnest in both The Courtyard and Neonomicon, the latter’s title hinting at Moore’s own penchant to see beneath the surface to the genital horror, the unspoken orgies, and the seasoned racism of Lovecraft. Concerning the latter and the members of a New Orleans cult (shot like dogs in The Call of Cthulhu the better to control them) Lovecraft writes:

“…the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.”

[from The Call of Cthulhu by John Coulthart]

These words finds their counterpart in the works of Herge and the Inca mummy in The Seven Crystal Balls of which Noah Berlatsky once wrote:

“This, then, is really a case where I don’t like the sequence despite its racism and imperialism. As far as I can tell, I like it because of them. The fascination/repulsion Herge feels towards the strange gods of colonized cultures generates real creative frisson. Which makes me wonder if maybe that’s true of racism and stereotypes in general. It seems like, beyond their other uses, they sometimes have an appeal which might be called aesthetic. A certain amount of cultural creativity goes into shaping the person in front of you into a phantom monstrosity, and that creativity can itself be exciting and fascinating. The dream’s appeal is its vividly imagined ugliness; the exhilaration of imposing on the world the gothic products of one’s skull.”

Moore’s reversal of Lovecraft’s xenophobia is patent in Neonomicon, a Lovecraft homage so thick with references that it probably demands a companion book (see The Courtyard Companion and an extensive discussion at Comics Comics). Like the tales which inspired it, the plot is all investigation, exposition, and interrogation. The art by Jacen Burrows is strangely cartoonish like a point and click video game adventure or a Saturday morning cartoon; which may seem strangely serendipitous to some, that coyness being a subset of Lovecraft’s own dread of sexual description.

The main protagonists are two FBI agents named Merril Brears (white, female sex addict) and Gordon Lamper (black male, conspicuously “normal”), the object of their investigation a cult invested in the Old Ones. The Dagon worshippers might as well be gentrified East Village baby boomers, almost everyone white as a sheet and sagging with years of excess, the new Satanism, an antidote to the privileged old biddies lacing Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Where Lovecraft frequently took care to situate his cultists in distant habitations  in deference to their paganism (from the Latin paganus meaning villager or country-dweller), Moore opts for the new heathens in their old squats. The only African Americans in Moore’s comic are investigating officers, a reversal of their position in Lovecraft’s stories where they are invariably abominations.

In chapter 2 of the comic (“The Shadow Out of America”), Merril strips and literally dresses like a whore in front of her black partner, all this without the slightest sexual arousal on both their parts, a counterpoint to a conversation about the “asexual” nature of H.P. Lovecraft. Gordon is duly shot and necrophilically abused once he is brought into the orgone-filled sanctum of the nearly racially exemplary cultists (the group includes an Oriental couple; a nod to the Chinamen and “unclassified slant-eyed folk” so beloved of Lovecraft ). Moore has never been shy about heavy-handed symbolism.

It is of course, stressed repeatedly that Merril is a recovering sex addict. Yet she resists her partner in a kind of temperance aided by racial purity; a chastity which repudiates miscegenation and hides from the conception of “foreign mongrels” (see The Call of Cthulhu). Far better to be coupled to a demon god for that is exactly what happens at the close of that chapter where Merril is raped repeatedly by Dagon—thus a latter day Lavinia Whatley of Dunwich who will bear the incarnation or avatar of Cthulhu.  The protagonist of The Shadow over Innsmouth is of course repulsed both visually and olfactorily by the presence of innumerable half-breeds in that town; his fear of contamination realized in full at the tale’s denouement when he discovers his own mixed heritage (he is of the Deep Ones). [1]

*          *          *

“It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

If genre is a multi-tentacled monster with a gaping vaginal maw then no one should be surprised at the mucoid sheen of Alan Moore’s countenance. These comics are concentrated deconstructions of everything treading gently on the surface of Lovecraft’s stories, far more interested in evil than mirth; a fact which separates them from metatextural films like Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

That film has been self-described as a loving hate letter to horror movies and a rejection of the torture porn industry. The saviors in Cabin are the classics of the genre—werewolves, zombies, marionettes, the works of Clive Barker and Stephen King et al.—once locked in a labyrinthine glass walled prison like the Minotaur but then loosed upon benighted entertainment industry moguls to the violent cathartic delight of most of the audience. Beneath that cabin and entertainment complex lies an old god destined to destroy the world and the human race. Strange then that this jocular criticism fails so completely in conveying (perhaps intentionally) any of the unease and trepidation which those idolized exemplars so hoped to challenge their audiences with. Horror for Goddard and Whedon would appear to be a place of solace and entertainment not fear, dread, and revulsion. They remain quite unconvinced by that which they write. Not for them is Lovecraft’s suggestion that:

“The one test of the really weird is simply this — whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”

Moore on the other hand is eager to translate this knowledge of depravity to us, to initiate his readers into the mysteries of authorship and creation. Together with John Coulthart [2], he imagines the Old Ones in a Kabbalistic structure where Dagon is Netzach (astringent kindness, the union of the human and divine) and Cthulhu is Yesod. The Aklo is a drug, the “Ur Syntax”, the transforming proto-human language of theophoric words, allowing us to look within to the sexual revulsion and the racial hatred; the fear of contagion and Syphilitic dementia; the horror of “cosmic sin”. His comics a mirror for the evil within our souls.

Notes

[1]  Michel Houellebecq’s essay titled H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is quoted by both China Miéville and Tim Hodler at Comics Comics. Houellebecq denies any latent sexual symbolism in Lovecraft’s stories quoting a letter in which he writes, “I do no think that any realism is beautiful.”  Here are some excerpts from the essay:

“Paradoxically, Lovecraft’s character is fascinating in part because his values were so entirely opposite to ours. He was fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorified puritanical inhibitions, and evident found all ‘direct erotic manifestations’ repulsive.”

“Absolute hatred of the world in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in particular. This summarizes Lovecraft’s attitude fairly accurately….if he refused all sexual allusions in his work, it was first and foremost because he felt such allusions had no place in his aesthetic universe.”

“…it was in New York that his racist opinions turned into a full-fledged racist neurosis. Being poor, he was forced to live in the same neighborhoods as the ‘obscene, repulsive, nightmarish’ immigrants…But what race could possibly have provoked this outburst [a racist diatribe describing Lower East Side immigrants]. He himself no longer knew…The ethnic realities at play had long been wiped out; what is certain is that he hated them all…His descriptions of the nightmare entities that populate the Cthulhu cycle spring directly from this hallucinatory vision.  It is racial hatred that provokes in Lovecraft the trancelike poetic state in which he outdoes himself by the mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences; this is the source of the hideous and cataclysmic light that illuminates his final works.”

[2]  Presumably a natural extension of the wild utterances of Robert Suydam in The Horror at Red Hook:

“Malone did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory…When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as ‘Sephiroth’, ‘Ashmodai’, and ‘Samaël’.”

Further reading

(i) The French edition of Les mythes de Cthulhu (drawn by Alberto Breccia) – The gold standard for comic adaptations of Lovecraft. One of the greatest artists to grace the comics form. I suspect Breccia’s adaptation of The Dunwich Horror was chosen for translation by Heavy Metal magazine because it is also the most “conventionally” drawn. The rest of the stories in this collection are more experimental in technique. Breccia’s depiction of Cthulhu and the Deep Ones is also typically unusual.

(ii) The Lovecraft Anthology Volume 1 (SelfMadeHero) – This is the PG-rated version of Lovecraft by a host of British artists. Low on evil, mystery, racism, and violence, this is for the Scooby-Doo set.  Give this one to your kids.

(iii) Haunter of the Dark – John Coulthart is the way to go if you’re an adult.

(iv) Yuggoth Cultures – a smattering of Lovecraft ephemera from Alan Moore. Antony Johnston’s Yuggoth Creatures demonstrates what a mediocre pastiche of The Shadow over Innsmouth (and others) would look like.

Xoth — The Intro

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Stefan Dinter, the man behind German comics company Zwerchfell Verlags, got me to write an intro for Xoth –The Unspeakable City, a new Lovecraft pasticheby Anna-Maria Jung. Here’s a bit of press info about author and book:

On ANNA-MARIA JUNG:

Anna-Maria Jung was born in Graz, Austria, where she started to draw comics during her teens. She started to study Multi-Media Arts, then went on to work at Bill Plympton‘s animation studio in NYC (for the short film
»Shut Eye«). Returning to Austria, she began to to write her master‘s thesis in Multi-Media Arts at the Fachhochschule Salzburg on the theme of »The Creation of a fantastic world, based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth«. The Thesis deals with, amongst others, »background information on the author, the cthulhu myth and the meaning behind the stories, as well as examples of lovecraft-inspired media and a discussion of how these different kinds of work deal with Lovecraft‘s stories«. During the work on the thesis, Anna-Maria started to work on conceptional artwork for a fictional city named XOTH and its inhabitants, inspired by Lovecraft‘s creations. From this grew the idea for a comic book – XOTH, The unspeakable city.

On XOTH:

On one of his many uneventful, boring evenings, Jacop O‘Damsel, freelance nerd, drunkenly decides to fall asleep in a back alley. Bad timing, since an intergalactic Dimensional Shambler apears right there and then. And before Jacop gets the faintest chance to even be hung-over, the thing whisks him away.

Jacop awakens in XOTH, a strange world full of weird creatures – or are they unutterably blasphemous? Anyway, there are also the »Humanists«, a gang of stinky fisheads whor worship Humans and need Jacop for a certain – if unspecified – mission. And if that wasn‘t madness enough, Mayor Cthulhu orders his best killers, Nub and Shang to rub Jacop out of existence. Thanks be to the Old Ones, because Jacop finds Yen Niggurath,a nice goat-girl, who decides to help the hapless human. Together with
her, Jacop will get to the bottom of the »Ordus Humanus« affair, since – Cthulhu‘s fat ass! – he‘s in no mood to run for his life forever.

Set against the background of H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth, Anna-Maria Jung tells a tall tale full of monsters, nerds, monstrous nerds and nerdy monsters. And the man from Angell Street is in there, too.

XOTH! Die unaussprechliche Stadt, an 80 page hardcover with a foreword by ill-tempered critic Noah Berlatsky is published by Zwerchfell Verlag. more on http://www.xoth-comic.net/ and http://zettgeist.blogspot.com/

——

…and because I’m a lame-ass American monoglot, and can’t read German, you now know about as much about Xoth as I do. Luckily, Stefan wanted the intro to be an intro to Lovecraft rather than to the comic per se. So anyway, the intro is below…and if you buy the book, you can see it in German too! (Which I think may be my first translated work!)

—–

Horrid Replication

H.P. Lovecraft loathed and feared degeneration with an intensity hardly distinguishable from lust. With obsessive, leering repetitiveness, his stories imagine man as a kind of vulnerable waxwork, constantly in danger of melting into a suggestively amorphous travesty of itself. In Lovecraft, there are no sexual references, no women, and virtually no dialogue. Every man is trapped in his own skull, quivering with impotent emotion as gaping atavisms engulf him, swallow him, have their way with him and discard him, leaving behind as progeny an animalistic cannibal, an undead zombie, a croaking brachian, a friable gray powder, or a slithering mass of protoplasm. Lovecraft in his actual life had very unpleasant racial views, and the spectre of miscegenation, of impure violation and alien congress, slithers through every page he wrote. Behind his constant use of adjectives like “nameless”; “unspeakable”; “inexpressible”; “indescribable” it is hard not to see a massive, leaden repression. Like the devolving narrator of “A Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft’s horror shades ominously into fascination — a desire to slough off humanity altogether, and bathe in defilement for all eternity.

Whether Lovecraft actually desired such a fate, he’s certainly achieved it. Perhaps more than any other twentieth century writer, his work has inspired, not reverence or criticism, but twisted doppelgangers. All art tends to propagate itself, of course, whether in homoerotic Star Trek fan fiction or Jane Austen movie adaptations. But even by these standards, Lovecraft is something else. Whether you’re Stephen King, Alan Moore, or …well, me, in some of my earliest and most benighted prose efforts, the allure of Lovecraft is infinitely irresistible. Cthulhu pops up incongruously in comics, books, movies — for that matter, I’ve even got a plush Lovecraft monster doll (it’s starfish shaped, with too many eyes, and it kind of scares my four-year old.) To merely glance through one of the man’s unholy books, it seems, is to want to create a blasphemous imitation.

There are lots of reasons why it’s fun to steal from Lovecraft. His unwieldy vocabulary is addictive. Once you’ve been introduced to “Cyclopean,” “opalescent”, “bizarrerie”;” and “Archaen,” — all on one page, no less — you’re bound to start using them yourself. Similarly, his invented, unpronounceable neologisms — Cthulhu, Yog-Shothoth, Necronomicon — are both so instantly recognizeable and so ill-defined that you can’t help but want to make them your own.

Indeed, even in Lovecraft’s own stories, the names of these creatures are dropped with such forced emphasis that they seem borrowed — as, indeed, does most of the prose and plot. His tales are a glutted agglomeration of incoherent genres; faux anthropological treatises, swipes from Poe, shock-twist endings more hoarily ancient than his own Elder Gods; all tied together with looping strings of polysyllables, leaden pacing, and a keen disregard for characterization, narrative tension, or consistency. Original Lovecraft feels remarkably like pastiche, and the most perfect Lovecraft parody is simply Lovecraft — which is what makes Lovecraft parody so hard to resist.

And yet, despite their silliness, the best Lovecraft stories have a submerged emotional coherence — a deep pool of hysteria and anxiety which, at moments, overpowers the clumsy, plodding structure which seems designed more to contain than to explicate it. The narratives are filled with horrors unspoken, revelations half-revealed. In “At the Mountains of Madness”, Danforth looks back from the plane and sees something — we aren’t told what — which causes him to shriek aloud “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” This is a decidedly goofy reference to Poe. And yet, at the same time, there is something meaningful and affecting in the glance backwards that causes madness. The nonsense noise and the literary reference almost seem designed to bury the core effect — the evocation of a mythical primal scene, that turns men to weeping children.

Or look at the following passage, in which, Lovecraft describes one of his patented monsters; a shoggoth.

Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes — viscous agllutinations of bubbling cells — rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile — slaves of suggestion and builders of cities — more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative —Great God!

There just isn’t anything especially frightening about a rubbery fifteen-foot spheroid — I mean, what is it, a gigantic football? But preposterous as the start of the quote is, the end has an evil lyrical force in its nightmare vision of slave uprisings, of rightful rulers overthrown by indistinguishable, ungrateful, utterly unhuman underlings. It’s like a more repressed, more foaming version of Carlyle’s French Revolution.

Lovecraft (suggestively) hated Freud. But what is most compelling about his narratives is the sense that they are unavoidably Freudian — that the story’s thin, precarious consciousness is stretched above an unexplored abyss. Like Lovecraft’s characters, his readers and imitators are drawn on by the allure of undiscovered truths, unexplored passages, unnamed horrors. The stories resolutely refuse to explore their own implications; their meanings don’t reveal themselves easily or naturally, but rather slither out, half-formed, oozing a foetid miasma, before lurching back, half-seen, into the blackness which spawned them. Did you really see that? Did Lovecraft?

Perhaps…or perhaps not. Certainly, few writers have written so obsessively about the desirability of ignorance — and, especially, of self-ignorance. Anna-Maria Jung hits on something profound in Xoth when she switches the brains of Lovecraft and a Yithian. Not that Lovecraft’s work is especially alien, but it does sometimes seems written as if it’s author had deliberately asked his brain to leave the room. The stories seems disavowed by their creator — which is why so many other people have tried to claim them.

The result is invariably, to quote the master out of context, “degenerate work…coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail.” But, as Lovecraft knew ( or, perhaps, tried not to know) degeneration has its own perverse attractions. So prepare to enjoy the debasement that is Xoth — and I hope it inspires you to explore the debasement that is Lovecraft as well.

——–

If you want to read more of me on Lovecraft, you can check out my review of the Eureka’s Graphics Classic comics adaptation of some of his stories. (I believe Stefan read this review, which is why he asked me to do the intro for Xoth.)

And if you’re unholy yearning is still not sated, you can see some of the art I did for an exhibit based on quotes from Lovecraft’s Commonplace book which is still shuttling around Europe as we speak:

More here and here and here. Oh, and also here.

Hideously Inexpressible

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Canonical writers of popular fiction — Stevenson, Wells, Conan Doyle, Poe— are usually renowned for lucid prose, deft allegory, vivid description, and, most of all, a mastery of pacing. H.P. Lovecraft is a titanic — or as he would say, a Cyclopean — exception. His prose is a clotted, lumbering mush, as if a septuagenarian academician had decided to rewrite “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an anthropological treatise. His use of allegory and myth is so preposterously labored it makes Joseph Campbell look coherent and insightful. His descriptions have all the obfuscatory imprecision of a Hillary Clinton stump speech. His pacing is, um, inutterably amorphous. His plots grind out with audible squeals and protests — standard suspense tropes slowed down till they become first laughable, then abstract. Foreshadowings don’t so much slither up as they thump to earth like pratfalls; surprise twists leap out like barbituate-stunned glaciars; even climactic chase scenes are methodically borified with extraneous matter and irrelevant observations. Lovecraft makes the mystical mundane and the exciting dull — he is Golden Age pulps’master pedant.

He’s also one of my favorite writers. Lovecraft had an enormously individual imagination and a supergeek’s fascinated enthusiasm with the minutia of self-contained systems. Jammed into a popular framework, his somnolent ineptitude and undeniable creativity combined with a whole closet-full of neurosis to produce a body of work which is charmingly ludicrous, poetically prosaic, and shot through with a quivering, submerged anxiety. Despite the genre trappings that group him with Stephen King, or Poe, he’s really much closer to someone like Henry Darger — an outsider artist transforming Dungeons-and-Dragons-style world-building into art.

Lovecraft’s ham-fisted style and predictable thematic concerns seems like they should be easy to reproduce, and he’s spawned a slew of imitators — from his close friend August Derleth down to, well, me, in some of my more benighted adolescent writing endeavors. But while the outward, abominable trappings are easy to mimic, Lovecraft’s unspeakable core is almost impossible to reproduce without lapsing into self-parody, empty genre exercises, or both.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that the Lovecraft volume of Eureka’s Graphic Classics series fails for the most part to capture the man’s special charms. In fact, the act of turning Lovecraft into comics has so many obvious pitfalls that the attempt seems almost Quixotic. At the most basic level, Lovecraft simply isn’t a visual writer — you can see some beleagured Creative Writing instructor being driven inexorably mad by a young H.P.’s insistence on telling, not showing. If Lovecraft’s hideous creeping nightmares aren’t “unnamable,” they are “indescribable,”,or possibly productive of “visions so extravagant that I cannot even relate them.” When Lovecraft does explain more clearly what he’s talking about, the results generally are…well, see for yourself. Here’s his description of one of the “Great Race,” a group of monstrous aliens in “Shadow Out of Time”

“They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves.”

It sounds like he’s describing a giant muppet.

Buried in Lovecraft’s copious prose, descriptions like this can register as kind of silly, but don’t necessarily attract enough attention to undermine the whole. Once you start illustrating them, though, you’re in trouble. Matt Howarth, for example, faithfully draws “The Great Race” as Disneyesque cuddlies — and once you’re forced to actually look at them, the story’s delicate balance between cosmic preposterousness and (in critic Lin Carter’s words) “cosmic immensitude” is destroyed. Howarth tries to compensate by veering towards straight mockery; the protagonist rushes around at the end mouthing wry speech bubbles like “(incoherent shriek)” and “(mindless panic).” I love Lovecraft humor (the shoggoth plush-toys are great), and Howarth’s schtick definitely made me chuckle. But it does seem a little too easy — as if Howarth-the-adapter is using his smart-guy irony to avoid having to actually sweat as Howarth-the-artist.

Even more disappointing are Pedro Lopez’s illustrations for The Dreams in the Witch-House.” A story about the unholy powers of mystically disjointed angles, Lovecraft’s narrative is filled with bizarre vistas and frankly incomprehensible images. As just one example:

“Two of the less irrelevantly moving things — a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colors and rapidly shifting surface angles — seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings….”

Faced with the admittedly fiendish task of rendering this in comics form, Lopez punts – his extra-dimensional landscapes are mostly just a basic black, shoehorned into an uninspired layout of standard panel borders. When he does try for more exciting page organization, it ends up looking like bottom drawer Marvel knock-offs. An image of Gilman, the protagonist, hurtling through space towards some tentacles, a disembodied bridge and a group of bald guys, with close-up insets of the main villains, could almost be a page from Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange — in an alternate reality where Steve Ditko sucks. This is quickly followed by a sequence in which the evil witch’s arms telescope like Mr. Fantastic — to what narrative or aesthetic purpose, I couldn’t tell you. In any case, with its central spatial themes abandoned, the story is crippled. Perhaps Lopez’s collaborator sensed as much — Rich Rainey truncates the end of the story in such a desultory fashion that the final revelations will be incomprehensible to those who haven’t read the original.

Visualization is the most obvious problem facing a comic-book Lovecraft, but it’s not the only one. For example, there’s the difficulty raised by dialogue — or rather, by its absence. Lovecraft’s stories are told almost entirely through narration; there are long expository block of text, and occasionally long expository monologues from one character to another, but there’s little interaction. In a comic, the urge to switch some of the exposition into speech bubbles is nearly irresistible, but it comes at a cost. Lovecraft’s stories are obsessively inward-focused; the fact that you only ever “hear” one person speak at a time contributes to their cloistered, dream-like stuffiness. Having a bad guy shout, “There he is! Get him! He knows too much!”— as adapter Alex Burrows does in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” — certainly makes the story more dramatic (or at least melodramatic). But drama isn’t what Lovecraft is about, and adding it diminishes him.

Another challenge has to do with length. Lovecraft’s best and most characteristic stories are his longest ones. In short form, he starts to look just like any other mediocre horror writer — it’s only when the pages mount that he can indulge his gloriously leaden penchant for irrelevant detail and narrative stasis. Obviously, for an adapter, this presents serious problems. On the one hand, you can reprint — largely unchanged— his shorter, inferior works. Or you can adapt the longer classics, tightening them, focusing them — and turning them into shorter, inferior works.

The Graphic Classics volume does include “The Terrible Old Man” — a very brief, very mundane twist-ending shocker, with equally predictable alterna-art by Onsmith Jeremi. But for the most part the volume tries to cope with the more ambitious pieces: the long “Witch House”, the really long “Herbert West” Reanimator”, the stupefyingly long “Innsmouth” and the even longer “Shadow Out of Time.” Inevitably, the result is to conventionalize them, changing them from lumbering monstrosities into (more or less) competent pulp. Robbed of much of its backstory, “The Shadow Out of Time” seems particularly irrelevant. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” has problems too — Alex Burrows’radically shortens the beginning and middle, and as a result the bulk of the story feels rushed rather than ponderously inevitable. Still, the angled shapes and overwhelming grays of Simon Bane’s art do manage to recapture some of the tales’ muffled claustrophobia. This works especially well at the conclusion, where Burrows slows down, and wisely reprints Lovecraft’s last two paragraphs — among the best things he wrote — virtually in their entirety. The second-to-last panel is particularly striking: we stare directly into the preposterously large, unblinking, and pupilless eyes of a monstrous fish-frog as he drives a bus, — beside him another creature sits in the passenger seat, fanged mouth hanging open, as if in speech. Both wear coats, and the driver seems to have some sort of seaweed comb-over, but the humorous incongruity only adds to the disjointed feeling of alienation — an awareness of an unknowable, monstrous and perhaps Lacanian Other, whose very existence, for Lovecraft, corrupts both the world and the self.

The story that suffers most from excision, is probably “Herbert West: Reanimator.” This is a shame, because the art here is much more effective — zombies are a lot more easy to deal with than alternate dimensions or giant cone creatures. J.B. Bonivert’s sketchy cartoons in Chapter Three looks ugly and cluttered, but Mark A. Nelson’s cross-hatched, boldly composed illustrations in Chapter Four hit the spot, and the mottled flesh on Richard Corben’s corpses — inanimate and otherwise — has a skilled and grisly weight. And, to be fair, from a narrative perspective,“West” isn’t really all that good a story to begin with. Lovecraft disliked it himself —it was written in serialized form, which meant that each chapter had to end with an unLovecraftian bang. In addition, Lovecraft had to review “the story so far” at the beginning of each chapter. And, to top it off, the plot is simply a clunky Frankenstein riff — mad scientist raises the dead — which Lovecraft apparently intended partly as parody. Even as farce, though, it doesn’t come off. It lacks both Shelley’s moral power and Lovecraft’s pseudo-mythological scope, and the gore which was supposed to be over-the-top at the time comes across, in the age of splatter-films, as helplessly quaint.

Still, the original story does have a couple of things going for it. Perhaps the high point is West’s efforts to reanimate the corpse of Buck Robinson, a Harlem boxer. Lovecraft’s racial views were unpleasant, even for his time, and fear of miscegenation and impurity were at the emotional core of much of his work. Sure enough, the vision of a black man from beyond the grave inspired one of his most visceral images of ravenous, animalistic degeneration.

“Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares — a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.”

The story’s other point of interest is a little more subtle, but perhaps more important overall. It involves the relationship between Herbert West and the unnamed narrator. This relationship is never discussed at length, but we do learn that the narrator is West’s “enthralled assistant” in his efforts to raise the dead, that the two set up a practice and even live together, and that, impelled by his search for fresh corpses, West “sometimes glanced witha kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique.” Moreover, West starts to look at the narrator with this same unholy lust. The narrator begins to fear his companion, and there is some suggestion that, rather than being dragged away by hideous legions from beyond the grave, West may have been killed by his life-long companion in a semi-allegorical homosexual panic.

There’s no proof that Lovecraft was gay, though there’s certainly been a lot of speculation. There is , however, a lot of evidence that he had, shall we say, issues with intimacy. Certainly, the sublimated anxiety surrounding close relationships of indefinite category, bodies, and the creation of life give “Herbert West” its flashes of emotional coherence and resonance. Yet, in the comics version both these and the story’s racial elements are excised.

It’s possible that this is in part due to concerns about political correctness. But probably it has more to do with the logistics of condensation. The implications of the relationship between the narrator and West are spread out over the course of the entire story; it would have taken extraordinary care on the part of adapter Tom Pomplun to have retained them while chopping much of the context. As it is, there are hints — the quote about West’s fascination with living bodies is still present in the final version, for instance. But the narrator’s role in the story is deemphasized throughout, and as he becomes more of a non-entity the question of why on earth he is mucking about with West becomes less pressing. So we’re left with a mildly gory shocker and some nice art, without any of the tale’s half-realized, but much more interesting, depths.

All of these translation problems can be summed up by saying that the Graphic Classics approach is too faithful to the original — which in Lovecraft’s case, ends up meaning not faithful enough. The adapters here dutifully keep to Lovecraft’s words and try to follow his plots and imagery as closely as they can given the differences between straight text and comic forms. I suspect this works well in their volumes devoted to Arthur Conan Doyle or even Stevenson — writers for whom plot and surface are pretty much the point. In Lovecraft, though, it’s all about atmosphere and repressed meaning, and a straight retelling of the story just doesn’t cut it. Instead, you need to completely reimagine the work in order to translate its effects for a new medium — the way David Cronenberg did for William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” as just one example. It would have been great to have seen what Bill Sienkiewitz or Gary Panter or Paper Rad, or a visual artist like Paul Nudd or Masami Teraoka would have made of this material.

Alas, Graphics Classics is too tied to the illustrational approach to embrace surrealism. As a result, many of the best moments in this anthology are the filler drawings, unconnected to any particular story. Giorgio Comolo’s cover is probably what most people think of when they think: “Cthulhu art”: writhing tentacles, disembodied eyeballs, hideously carved masonry, and a big, bad monster who veritably screams “trashy album art!” Jim Nelson’s frontispiece, showing a carving of Cthulhu and attendant monstrosities on a piece of presumably ancient pottery, is less bombastic, but comes broadly from the same “cool shit!” perspective. Though neither of these is overwhelming in conception or execution, they do have an enthusiasm and energy missing from much of the rest of the book — since they don’t have to worry about bashing Lovecraft’s vision into an incongenial form, they’re able to stretch out and enjoy themselves. This is even more true of Maxon Crumb’s odd, semi-abstract illustration of man, window, and vaguely animate conglomeration. On its face, the drawing seems to have as much to do with Bauhaus as it does with H.P. — yet, in its suggestion of menacingly dissolved boundaries, it’s probably the piece of art here that gets closest to Lovecraft’s spirit.

There are a two longer stories that are effective as well — and both are notable for being very uncharacteristic Lovecraft productions. “The Cats of Ulthar” is a short, light, adorably gruesome fable in which virtue (or at least felines) triumph over evil. Tom Pomplun organizes the text so that it essentially works as a children’s book, with cute goth greeting card illustrations rendered by Lisa K. Weber in an appealingly witty style somewhere between Edward Gorey, manga, and Saturday morning cartoons. “Sweet Ermengarde” is even less Lovecraftian — it’s a satiric melodrama which suggests, against all other evidence, that Lovecraft not only had a sense of humor, but was actually witty. The story is presented by adapter Rod Lott and Kevin Atkinson as a stage drama at Miskatonic U and the semi-virtuous heroine with the “beautiful but inexpensive complexion,’ the dastardly villain (who enters riding a hobby horse), the male lead (named Jack Manly) and similar stock characters enthusiastically and amorally betray each other in front of an audience full of shoggoths, sea horrors, mad scientists, and other assorted Lovecraftian monsters.

Both “Ulthar” and “Ermengarde” are a hoot, and the straightforward translation to comics form works seamlessly — which suggests once more that the central problem here is that most Lovecraft stories are a bad fit for the literal approach with which the Graphics Classics crew seems comfortable. Still, the enterprise deserves props for finding any Lovecraft stories that fit their aesthetic. And whatever this volume’s shortcomings, it did encourage me to go back and check out the original stories again. If only for that, I’m grateful to have had the chance to read it.

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This was originally published in the Comics Journal in July 2007. If you’re interested in more of my writing on horror, I have a long essay on the Carpenter’s The Thing, Cronenberg’s Shiver, and Tabico’s Adaptation here.