Tag Archives: cosmic-horror

The Cthulhu Centenary (sorta)

The annual Wow-it’s-finally-Livable-in-Austin-again turning of the seasons has happened here – gone are 100+ October days, replaced with crisp mid-80s and frosty overnight lows in the 60s, and for me it’s just in the nick of time! The lingering heat is extremely destructive to one’s health and sanity, so it’s kind of a big deal that we can finally have windows open and don’t immediately wilt upon stepping outside. And, with Texan autumn comes a marked increase in my personal sense of Halloweenishness, so I wanted to do something fun and muse upon about what is probably the single most important horror story of the 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, which is (from a certain perspective) 100 years old this year!

Now, I say it’s “sorta” the centenary of this story because of course it wasn’t actually PUBLISHED until 1928 (we’ll do this again in a couple of years maybe!), which is of perhaps greater technical importance – after all, its influence on people couldn’t start until it was available to be read! That said, we do know, based on his letters, that Lovecraft finished the story in 1926, probably in the summertime, after leaving New York City and returning home to his burrow in Providence. In an October ’26 letter to his buddy, Clark Ashton Smith, he mentions that he’d just wrapped up a couple of tales, including a “sunken-land thing” that he’d described “last year.”

Its route to eventual publication in 1928 is a little arduous; Farnsworth Wright rejected it when it was first submitted (presumably in late ’26 or early ’27) and we know that Lovecraft had earned another rejection for it from a Mystery pulp too; that’s an interesting point, because Lovecraft had wracked up another rejection from a Crime pulp for his story “The Horror at Red Hook,” and later on he’d write a version (sadly lost) of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” that had been much more in the vein of a pulp detective story. There’s an interesting history, one I’ve never seen explored, in Lovecraft’s rejections, a kind of counter-factual Lovecraft oeuvre that’s fun to imagine.

But, of course, “The Call of Cthulhu” was eventually published in Weird Tales. Famously, Donald Wandrei, writer and Lovecraft Circle member, claimed that he was responsible for its acceptance by Wright in late ’27. According to Wandrei, he went into the offices of Weird Tales and, in the course of gossiping with Farnsworth, dropped the juicy bit of news that HE’D heard that HPL had been sending his stories out to other magazines (which was true), and in particular that he had a great one that he was shopping around, and Wandrei just *couldn’t* understand why Lovecraft was looking to move beyond the august pages of Weird Tales, which *really* was the perfect place for his work. In other words, he made it seem like HPL was on the verge of slipping out of Wright’s grasp. Now, this account comes from the 50s, in a retrospective essay Wandrei wrote that was published in the Peter Cannon edited volume Lovecraft Remembered, but it’s a good story and regardless, Wright did accept “The Call of Cthulhu” when it was resubmitted in ’27.

I’m not going to do a full read through of this story – this ain’t a pulp strainer entry after all – but I do want to highlight some bits and pieces that I find interesting, and then we’ll talk about what I, a humble weird fiction writer and reader, think is important about the story.

The very first thing that stands out right away is the a little note appended to the story stating that the document you’re about to read was “found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” You can see it In the original manuscript, right between the title and HPL’s name, added as a parenthetical:

That little parenthetical is doing some heavy conceptual lifting, and is a hugely important part of both this story as well as more broadly within Lovecraft’s broadly defined “mythos!”

First off, within the context of the story and as a mechanism of the plot, it’s absolute gold. It immediately gives the story a very clear narratorial voice, one that lets Lovecraft give background and editorialize as needed without any clumsy expository shoe-horning. It’s a perfect frame for a weird story too – this is the result of a very specific investigation, by a specific guy, into a specific thing, which means again that background and asides and explanations can appear diegetically within the story. That’s important, because it preserves the verisimilitude of the story, letting the reader really immerse themselves fully within the tale. It’s also a nice weird touch that the document we’re about to read is positioned as being the posthumous work of this Thurston fella – we know that the narrator of this story has died, and we’re immediately put into a kind of tense paranoia about how he died, and why.

It’s not anything Lovecraft had control over, but I actually think the presentation of this parenthetical in the pages of Weird Tales is pretty great and really adds to the story. Like you see above in the manuscript, Lovecraft just stuck it in there between the title and his name, which is the way it’s often displayed in collections. For example, here it is in the Penguin Classics The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:

Likewise, here it is in the Joyce Carol Oates’ edited Tales of H.P. Lovecraft:

Both of these examples follow Lovecraft’s lead in the original manuscript. But take a look at how it appeared in Weird Tales in 1926:

Here, this clever little framing device is put as a footnote on the first page. This feels VERY different – if that same statement is placed up near the title, it’s immediately apprehended as part of the story. But as a footnote, it’s now a different thing – the frame of the story is somehow realer, since it’s borrowing the greater authority of a footnote. And compare it to another footnote from a different story in this same issue, Gautier’s “Clairmonde:”

Here, the very real translator’s footnote, identifying the original French title and the fact that it was translated by Lafcadio Hearn, is in the exact same position as the fictional provenance given for “The Call of Cthulhu.” That’s actually a really fun bit of blurring! Certainly no one is being tricked by this – it’s very clear that Lovecraft’s footnote is part of the fiction, whereas the translator’s note is not. But again, the placement as a footnote makes it that much more fun and conspiratorial and somehow more real than the same framing statement presented as a kind of subtitle.

(As an aside, if you’re interested in the history of these translations in Weird Tales, then buddy, have I got a book for you! And a paper too!)

Anyway, all of this is a great example of Lovecraft’s “hoax” approach to weird fiction, which he articulated in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith in October of 1930:

My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax. The author must forget all about “short story technique,” & build up a stark, simple account, full of homely corroborative details, just as if he were actually trying to “put across” a deception in real life – a deception clever enough to make adults believe it. My own attitude in writing is always that of the hoax-weaver.

You can see that Lovecraft had been working on this idea in pursuit a similar effect for a while in his previous work. “The Statement of Randolph Carter” is basically a transcript of a police statement, and similarly “Pickman’s Model” is entirely a one-sided conversation between the narrator and a second silent friend; superficially these are similar to “The Call of Cthulhu,” in that they’re not merely first person accounts (like in “The Music of Erich Zann,” for example) – rather, they’re presented as kinds of metafictive “documents” within the world of that weird story. However, in both “Carter” and “Pickman,” there’s no formatting to formalize the stories as documents – Carter is just talking to the cops, for instance, and there’s no time stamp or institutional affiliation (“Gainesville PD Official Witness Statement” or something like that) to give the story that specific hoax-like quality that Lovecraft was talking about.

Lovecraft does have “found document” stories that predate “Cthulhu” of course: “Dagon” is a suicide note, though a reader is only informed of that within the story. More explicitly, the tale of submarine madness in “The Temple” is stated as having been found in a bottle “off the coast of the Yucatan.” It’s interesting that another “sunken land thing” story is likewise being presented as a found document, isn’t it? The “found” framing of “The Temple” is an important antecedent for “The Call of Cthulhu,” just as much as the themes of the lost, sunken world of eldritch horror – Lovecraft uses a distinct voice to present us with lots of (potentially) verifiable details (the names of ships and dates of u-boat action, details of shipping routes, etc), loading this fictive message in a bottle with real verisimilitudinous weight.

But “The Call of Cthulhu” is a different beast. For one thing, it’s more than just a single, continuous statement from one solitary character. Structurally, it’s Lovecraft’s Dracula: an epistolary tale about an investigation, organized retrospectively by a character within the story and preserved as a document for posterity. It includes not just a single narrator’s account of their experience, but also newspaper clippings and excerpts from ANOTHER character’s personal retrospective diary, alongside summaries of nested stories told to other characters. It’s really incredibly immersive, and you’re hard pressed not to get sucked into the weird, conspiratorial fun of the whole thing!

The nesting structure of the story is really pretty sophisticated, and works like a trap to ensnare the reader. The story starts with Thurston examining his Uncles’ papers, finding the locked box that Thurston implies holds material that would have been destroyed if his uncle hadn’t died mysteriously. Then we enter into the account of the Horror in Clay, a modern bas-relief that, for some reason, got his uncle quite excited and sent him chasing after more mysteries. Thurston doesn’t understand why the bas-relief and the dreams of the weird artist were so interesting to his uncle until *he* reads further into the account, where there’s an EARLIER story of a conference his uncle attended where another mysterious piece of art was presented, accompanied by TWO separate but corroborating stories from two different people! In other words, we’ve been reading Thruston’s story about his uncle’s story about Wilcox’s dreams which are important in the context of a different story from Thurston’s uncle about a conference where he saw a weird statue that would later remind him of the bas-relief AND where he heard strange tales of a horrific cult in Greenland that seem to be the same cult that a New Orleans policeman encountered much later. It’s pretty dizzying, but utterly seamless. And we’re not even half-way through the story!

I really think this kind of knotty, convoluted, intercalating narrative does something to the reader, or maybe it’s just that it forces the reader to really focus and sink themselves into the text. It’s just more fun to read, kind of like the concept of elegance in mathematics – there’s pleasure in seeing the puzzle come together, and the more complex the pieces (and picture), the more fun it is. What’s really remarkable to me is that the other examples of this kind of convolved text are all much, much longer works; Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Stoker’s Dracula (which, famously, has a part where the characters in the novel all stop to read the novel up to the point where you, the reader, are at, so that everyone is on the same page!), or Machen’s The Three Imposters. But all of these are novels, and they take advantage of the novel’s more languorous pace and spacious form to engage in their self-referential hijinks or, in the case of Dracula, to insert the disparate materials for consideration. But “The Call of Cthulhu” is like 11,000 words long, a very lean story for all the complex tricks and nested stories it’s doing!

This is all to say that, structurally, I think this is Lovecraft’s most complex and ambitious work. That’s worth considering on it’s own, but likewise I think that Lovecraft is using this complex structure to reinforce a similarly complex and ambitious concept here, and one very important to the genre of weird horror.

First off all, there’s that famous beginning, as nice a summation of Lovecraftian cosmicism as you could ever want. “The most merciful thing in the world,” writes Thurston, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” That’s the heart of Lovecraftian fiction and one of the major legacies of his work, this idea that we’re just steeped in horror, the world brimful of awful realities that we, luckily, are just too stupid or distracted or plain incapable of apprehending in their annihilating totality. This is something Lovecraft has played with in previous stories; he’s written (but not published yet) “From Beyond,” where this is the central conceit of the tale, and similarly both “The Temple” and “The Horror at Red Hook” are both about hidden realities beneath our own, but this is the first published story of his to really lay down what will become a cornerstone of weird fiction in the 20th century.

While this idea of secret occult forces bubbling beneath the placid surface of everyday life is not unique to Lovecraft (Machen in particular plumbed those depths, and indeed the whole history of Western Esoterism is predicated on that worldview), I do think you can see HPL doing something new and different with it in this story. While Machen and others had already articulated a vision of hidden preternatural forces at work in the world, Lovecraft develops a true paranoid style in weird fiction in “The Call of Cthulhu.” Take, for contrast, Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” Superficially, this is very similar to “The Call of Cthulhu;” the cosmic horror of the entity termed “Pan,” whatever it is, is pretty firmly “naturalized” or “scientized” in the story, a kind of force that exists outside our normal sphere of engagement and is approachable only through a fairly drastic bit of brain surgery. Compare this to the way Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones can communicate with certain members of the human race who possess hypersensitive brains. Also, the corrupting influence of Pan, like the Great Old Ones, is fundamental to their nature as entities beyond humanity – for Machen, Pan harkens back to a time of bestial barbarism in human history, while the Great Old Ones wait for a time when humanity will be like them (“beyond good and evil”).

But the difference, and it’s a major one, between Machen’s Pan and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is that the former is *simply* a kind of force that we rarely perceive, like radiation, whereas the latter is an *active* force with a definite plan and agency and directive, seeking to impose its will on reality. We share the world with Pan, or with Machen’s monstrous “little people,” but we’re actually at war with Cthulhu (even if we by and large don’t know it). That’s a huge difference! Pan or Machen’s little people are just out there, and if *we* impinge on them we’re in danger of being destroyed, but they’re not actively trying to infiltrate our world. This is the difference between encountering the vampire in his castle versus seeing him transplanted to London; Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones *are* actively pursuing a conquest of a reality that we have accidently and temporarily misidentified as our own.

What I’m calling the paranoid style in weird fiction extends beyond the broad theme embedded in monsters to the actions (and reactions) of the characters as well. Machen’s “The Great God Pan” has a correlating of contents that sees two characters, Clarke and Austen, eventually realizing the hideous truth about Helen Vaughn. This knowledge, however, is empowering – it lets them DO something about the monster among them. Likewise, in Dracula, Mina’s correlating of the data collected by her Husband, Seward, Van Helsing, etc, is what lets them attack and ultimately defeat the vampire. This is totally antithetical to Thurston’s experience in “The Call of Cthulhu” where, in fact, the correlating of a mind’s contents, the piecing together of disparate and seemingly unrelated data, results in madness and destruction. This is a revolutionary difference between Lovecraft’s writing and that of his antecedents, and it’s something that would come to underpin modern weird fiction. And here it is, being introduced largely for the first time, a hundred years ago (well, 98 years ago…)

This implicit paranoia is, or at least has been, the dominant mode of weird fiction (and its related genres of sci-fi, sword & sorcery, etc) ever since, and in fact is so dominant that it can feel a little trite to point it out. But I think that speaks to the foundational importance of Lovecraft – his work is in the DNA of Bradbury, of Harlan Ellison, of Philip K. Dick, of Robert E. Howard, of Michael Moorcock, of William S. Burroughs and Joyce Carol Oates and Borges! Cthulhu is the dominant model of transcosmic monstrosity, not merely in horror fiction but in comic books, sci-fi, and pop culture. Cthulhu, like Dracula, is a character that people recognize and understand, even if they haven’t read the source material – what other character in 20th century horror can that be said of? (The nearest I can think of is Pennywise, but that’s down to Tim Curry more than the book he’s from). The reason for this cultural dominance is because Lovecraft united all his interests and ideas together in one superlative package: “The Call of Cthulhu.” It’s a story with everything you can think of in terms of Lovecraft: ancient god-like aliens, reality warping architecture, ancient books, secret cults. But it’s more than the sum of its parts, because Lovecraft welded them to this paranoid literary style and organized it like a hoax.

It’s important to pause here and acknowledge some ugly truths, too – a key part of Lovecraft’s paranoid style in his weird fiction comes from his time spent in New York City, where his racism and xenophobia were both sharpened and ossified. When you look at his “New York” stories, particularly “The Horror at Red Hook” (which is, in parts, a sort of rough draft for “The Call of Cthulhu”), you see Lovecraft modernizing the model of occult influences that he had been writing about. The kind of quaint, traditionalist, almost folksy worm-that-walk cultists in “The Festival” for instance are gone, replaced by hordes of foreigners speaking unintelligible languages and working furiously to destroy Anglo-Saxondom. Lovecraft was just as much a “clash of civilizations” guy as his pal Robert E. Howard, explicitly stating in several letters well into the 30s that he does not believe cultures (which he racializes) can survive mixing – this is a foundational part of not merely this story, but of the whole mythos. That’s why it’s ALSO important to recognize the centrality of Lovecraft and “The Call of Cthulhu” in literature and culture. These kinds of prejudices are baked into it, and it’s important to trace out who, for instance, is being portrayed as the corrupting and corrupted “other” in the stories being written in Cthulhu’s shadow.

But, taking the ugliness for what it is, this is still a remarkable story that I really think you should read (a clean version, not a scan from Weird Tales, can be found here). I didn’t even get to talk about how neat R’lyeh is, or how crazy Legrasse’s tale gets! There’s a lot of richness in the text, and it’s also just a fun, snaky, wriggly story that really perfectly builds dread and paranoia, AND it changed fiction (not just weird fic!) forever. It is, as I said at the beginning of this rambling essay, easily the most important horror story of the 20th century, and even if we’ve maybe moved beyond it here in the dismal 21st, there’s still a lot to learn from (and about) it. It’s really a perfect read for Halloween, and even if you’ve already read it, there’s fun in re-engaging with it. It really is one of the key texts of the genre!

Cthulhu, quo vadis? Cosmic Horror and the 21st century

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Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

H.P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, July 5 1927

Only at a dread of dark

Quaver, and they quit their form:

Thousand eyeballs under hoods

Have you by the hair.

Enter these enchanted woods,

You who dare.

“The Woods of Westermaine” by George Meredith (1883)

H.P. Lovecraft inaugurated a revolution in modern imaginative fiction when he articulated, in stories, essays, and letters, the philosophical underpinning of his cosmic approach to horror. In perhaps his most autobiographically informed story, “The Silver Key,” Lovecraft wrote that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.[1]” This was indeed the key to Lovecraft’s concept of weird fiction, where the horror of a tale arises not from rank supernaturalism or mere physical danger, but from the revelation that the anthropocentric view of the world, with human beings crowned in the center of creation, is not merely mistaken, but actively delusional.

This radical decentering of humanity was a favored “punchline” in many of his stories: humans are revealed to be merely the accidental byproduct of Elder Thing bioengineering in “The Mountains of Madness;” the vanity of human supremacy is punctured by the reproductive machinations of the Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth;” the presumed permanence of human civilization is shown to be a mere footnote in the vast sweep of the biological history of Earth in “The Shadow Out of Time;” even our ability to physically comprehend the universe is questioned in “The Colour Out of Space.” In these and other stories, Lovecraft uses the abjectification of humans as the shocking denouement of his weird fiction.

Part and parcel with this is Lovecraft’s twisting of the very idea of the ineffable march of progress. Crawford Tillinghast in “From Beyond” has created a machine that exposes the deeper but otherwise invisible reality of nature, revealing a maddening world of alien existences beyond the ability of our paltry senses to perceive. More to the point, in the famous opening to “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft completely inverts the positivist narrative of early 20^th century science and technology; rather than advancing human knowledge and prosperity,

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.[2]

In fact, Lovecraft’s “cosmic indifference” relies on the idea that an increasing knowledge base, whether individually or socially, inevitably overturns the comfortable fiction of the primacy and permanence of humanity.

These two concepts, an indifferent universe in which humanity is menaced by vast forces beyond their comprehension and a world in which the inevitable progress of human knowledge is an existential threat to humanity, represent the major aesthetic and thematic development in horror literature in the early 20^th century. Lovecraft’s articulation of them is not entirely sui generis of course (he himself acknowledged his debt to his literary antecedents), but his work is unique in its almost single-minded exploration of what has come to be called “cosmicism.” More to the point, Lovecraft’s popularity, initially as a beloved cult writer but, more recently, as an important figure that has influenced both literary[3] and popular culture[4], has ensured that cosmic horror has become a part of the zeitgeist.

From the perspective of early 20^th century America, the aesthetic pleasure and transgressive appeal of cosmicism as a philosophy of horror is evident; it toyed nicely with the very real fear that the grand American experiment was not as unassailable and inevitable as it seemed. It titillated readers by undermining the placidly bourgeois status quo with the threat of displacement by the alien Other, with miscegenation, and with the possibility that the universe was not as neatly Panglossian as all that. In this way, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror simply (though extremely) extrapolated from the conclusions of contemporary science. The realization of the depths of Deep Time in Earth’s history, the identification of extinction as a biological possibility for any species, the Darwinian revolution, and finally the discovery of a whole world of invisible energy and effects in the form of radiation – all of these things factually decentered humanity, making them subject to nature rather than its overlord and highlighting our smallness and fragility.

For cosmic horror’s decentering to be shocking and transgressive, however, it requires first that humans be assumed to be at the center – this is how the revelation of cosmic indifference can function as the frightful climax of a story. In Lovecraft’s milieu of the early 20^th century this was indeed the case, with a popular status quo best be described as broadly anthropocentric and positivist.

But in the 21^st Century, do these same assumptions exist? And if not, if the wider cultural understanding of humans now is that they have already been decentered, what does that mean for our concept of cosmic horror?

After all, it’s not much of a dark epiphany to state that human beings are small animals in an uncaring world – that’s the lived experience of the 21^st century, reinforced daily. Humanity is existentially threatened by maddeningly complex forces that operate on scales we can scarcely conceive. Climate change, pandemics, capitalism; all of these threats represent as profound a reordering of humanity’s relationship to the world around them as anything Lovecraft ever wrote. The primary revelation of cosmicism, that humans are not special and that the universe will not shepherd them safely through danger, is simply the fundamental background noise of day-to-day life. Any real person believing otherwise strikes us as delusional, and it’s laughable to imagine a horror protagonist beginning from a place of such naivety, such that the shattering of that illusion is merely corrective, rather than shocking or transgressive.

Similarly, cosmic horror’s “piecing together” of knowledge into a starkly and bleakly apocalyptic whole seems quaint and ridiculously optimistic in a world of commodified corporatized science, slashed funding for research, a “post-fact” media landscape, and the hallucinogenic world of venture capitalist A.I. schemes. The popular median view of technological “progress” is purely declensionist now[5], with information technology in particular subject to decay, collapse, and abuse. “Reality” is popularly understood to be illusory and malleable, subject to the whims of unknowable and inscrutable forces; similarly, the conspiracism inherent in cosmic horror, with cultists and cabals manipulating events from the shadows, has taken on a very different valence in the 21^st century.

Additionally, the very idea of scholarly inquiry into the bleeding edge of human knowledge has been made laughable by recent history. Cosmic horror is built on a world of expertise and specialist knowledge, something under attack in the 21^st century. The High Energy Physics Lab at Miskatonic would undoubtably have shut down due to federal funding cuts, while the college administration would probably be investigating the Forbidden Books Department of the Henry Armitage Memorial Library for “radical leftist” DEI practices.

From a thematic perspective, therefore, it is difficult to see what “cosmic horror” in the 21^st could even mean. What cosmic revelation is there left to make about humanity, after all? That said, the aesthetics of cosmic horror are definitely going strong – tentacular horrors from other dimensions and cults communing with alien intelligences abound in the literature and have escaped into other genres, like science fiction, fantasy (where secondary worlds may still need decentering), and even literary fiction (see, for example, Thomas Pynchon’s brief but memorable evocation of an alien horror in the tunnels under Montauk in Bleeding Edge).

Within the larger horror genre, the interest in “folk horror” can be seen as partaking of cosmic aesthetics; the countryside is a liminal territory, the folkways of the natives are transformed into ancient rites, animals and plants are twisted and altered. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels are an interesting example of the new ends to which cosmic horror aesthetics can be put – the skewed and altered reality within Area X is as strange as the alien architecture of R’lyeh. Interestingly, the radical decentering of humans (to the point of excision) from Area X suggests a sort of “optimistic” cosmicism, a kind of reading only possible under anthropogenic climate derangement; the removal of humans and the restoration of a (new and alien) “natural” order becomes a comforting corrective to human-caused ecological degradation.

This subversion of cosmicism, where very human evils are countered by the restoration of a natural (or more natural) order is an interesting development in 21^st century horror. Many works use the aesthetics of cosmic horror while inverting its themes. For example, P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout uses classic cosmic horror concepts (extradimensional horrors that feed and infect humans and are served by a cult) to explore themes of marginalized identities and resistance. N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became was written, as per the author, to explicitly explore the history and influence of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror (and his racism) on the genre. In it, an embodied avatar of the extradimensional city of R’lyeh wages a war of gentrification on the communities of New York; tentacles, fungal corruption, and skittering things make numerous appearances. What unifies these (and other) works of modern cosmic horror is that, contrary to the older traditions of the genre, they actually radically recenter humanity, not in a solipsistic way, but rather restoratively, affirming the importance of identity and community in the face of hegemonic cosmic hate.

This is an interesting development, and one that is, actually, anticipated (albeit obliquely) by Lovecraft. In an often overlooked section of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the cultist Castro explains that the time for Cthulhu’s return will be patently evident, for then humans “would have become 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.”[6] Lovecraft here leaves open the way a narrative can enfold human activity within cosmic horror, as Clark or Jemisin have ably done.

Another commonly encountered aspect of modern cosmic horror is the aesthetic deployment of surreality and uncertainty within a work. John Langan, Brian Evenson, and Laird Barron are exemplars of this, making excellent use of the vast and suggestive unknowable in their work, something Lovecraft himself often did to great effect. What differs in the 21^st century is, again, the fact that there is no need to decenter the human via incomprehensible and indifferent cosmic weirdness; that is the understood precondition of the modern-day human being. Rather, for these contemporary cosmicists, it is the aesthetic of unknowing that becomes centered, the way people (either as characters or readers) cannot confront meaningfully the alien logic at work. While this is certainly allied to the older expression of cosmic horror, it actually recenters the human and their faculties of apprehension as the site of the uncanny. In other words, it is fundamentally about the trauma of experiencing cosmic horror, rather than the cosmic horror of knowing your experiences don’t fundamentally matter; there is actually very little uncertainty in Lovecraft, for example, where the clarity of the horrific revelation is clear and hard as a diamond for both characters and readers.

The question to ask then is: does the strict, “classic” flavor of cosmic horror still have any relevance or power to startle today? For example, actually existing A.I. has rendered robo-centric science fiction suspect, at least for now; have our constant confrontations with existential crises done the same for cosmic horror? With apologies to Adorno, is it barbaric to write cosmic horror in the 21^st century?

I personally hope not. Cosmic horror is an explicitly epistemological literature, a particularly worthy approach these days, it seems to me. Horror as a genre often tries to justify itself as a literature with particular power to comment on the world around us, and the origins of cosmic horror surely illustrate that. But the nature of our epistemologies have, perhaps, changed – if the cosmicism of the early 20^th century found horror in the decentering of humanity, where does that leave those of us ontologically decentered in the 21^st century? What is the epistemic horror inherent in a modern cosmicism?

An approach centered around the horror of uncertainty is a dead end, I think – perfectly pleasurable, but hardly revelatory. After all, Heisenbergian indeterminacy has been a potent metaphor in cosmic horror since Lovecraft’s day, where it underlined the breakdown of the comfortably quotidian Newtonian mechanics that underpins our illusion of a stable, “real” world. There is nothing horrific about uncertainty today, if only because it’s become so banal; there’s nothing new or startling in our confronting it. Actually, the breakdown of concrete reality can be seen now as a kind of consolatory epiphany, the revolt of messy and vital organicism against mechanistic and dehumanizing systems, a cri de Coeur that history (and therefore life) has not ended. Uncertainty and unsettlement can be read as an almost heroic epistemology (something common in the New Weird, for example). This is laudable and makes for good literature, but it is the antithesis of horror.

If, as I’ve argued, the baseline understanding of the human condition is one of tininess and powerlessness in the face of vast, incomprehensible forces beyond our understanding, is there horror to be mined from embracing it? In other words, rather than being frightened by the vast indifference of the universe, perhaps modern cosmicism reflects the horror of people becoming like the Great Old Ones, living only to kill and take pleasure? That’s certainly one of the true horrors of our times now, the gleefulness with which some people embrace the degradation of humanity for capitalism and oppression. That’s a subtle but important difference, I think – in other words, it’s not the indifference of the cosmos that’s behind the horror, it’s the way a human can wholeheartedly cast off their own humanity to become a part of that indifference[7]. Cthulhu, then, isn’t the problem – it’s his cultists, human beings who have made a decision, that are the real source of cosmic horror today. But, as I write that, I’m confronted by the fact again that this seems to be recentering humanity, making human agency the source of horror, something totally antithetical to cosmicism.

Maybe, then, the cosmic horror moment has passed? There was a brief time where the positivist anthropocentrism of western culture and the scientific materialist worldview were both equally strong enough to create a kind of horrific frisson, but now that’s long gone, with no hope of ever really recapturing it. We can play with the elements of cosmicism, the nostalgic fun of tentacles from beyond and all that, but it will never have the immediacy or excitement or vitality that it did in the early 20^th century. Horror is, simply, different now, dealing with different things in different ways, and maybe it’s time we made that break with the past explicit?

[1] “The Silver Key” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v. 13, no. 1, 1929, p. 42.

[2] “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.11, n.2, 1928, p. 159.

[3] Borges dedicated his story “There Are More Things” to Lovecraft, for instance, and Joyce Carol Oates has edited a collection of his fiction; similarly, critical appraisals of his work have become something of a minor academic industry.

[4] The existence of plush “Cthulhus” would be enough to make this point, but Lovecraft’s influence on science fiction, fantasy, comics, movies, cartoons, and games is well documented. See, for example, Mark Jones’s 2013 essay “Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture.”

[5] Merriam-Webster enshrining “enshittification” in the official English lexicon, for example.

[6] “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.11, n.2, 1928, p. 170.

[7] A great recent example of this kind of horror, of humans making themselves like the cruelly indifferent cosmos, is Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (tr. Megan McDowell, 2023).

ACAB Includes Strained Pulp #37: “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, Weird Tales v 34 n 1, 1939

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Trying to do these little free writing essay/dissections a bit more frequently because a) it is Hallowe’en season, after all, and b) it seems like we’re in another round of “social media death throes.” This time it’s over on Bluesky where the CEO appears to be following the Elon Musk playbook of going insane to protect the rights of fascists and TERF scum. It’s not like anyone reads blogs either (I know, I’ve got the stats for this little project right here), but we shan’t let that discourage us! So, with our hearts blazing and our eyes open, let us once again enter the mysterious, pathless wilderness that is the Pulps! And for today we have a fun (and interesting!) story: Robert Barbour Johnson’s homage to Lovecraft, “Far Below” from the 1939 June-July megaissue of Weird Tales!

Ol’ Bob Barbour Johnson seems to have been a bit of an odd duck. While a fairly prolific writer, particularly of circus tales later in life, his footprint in Weird Tales is small but deep, if that makes sense; I mean he didn’t actually write a lot for the magazine, publishing I think only six stories between ’35 – ’41, with a couple more weird stories published in other magazines later. But, despite that, readers apparently thought fairly highly of his writing, particularly of today’s story, “Far Below.” Depending on where you’re getting your info, it was either voted by the readers as the single best story published in Weird Tales OR editor Dorothy McIllwraith said it was the best story the magazine ever published.

Both statements are incorrect, although this is a good and fairly interesting story. But that kind of odd indeterminacy around Johnson seems to be fairly typical. For instance, he’s clearly a fan of Lovecraft (as we’ll see when we dive into the story today) but, with great grandiosity, Johnson says that Lovecraft wrote HIM a fan letter after reading Johnson’s 1935 story “Lead Soldiers.” It’s possible that this is true; Lovecraft was both a voluminous letter writer and the sort of person who would certainly praise work he thought good and interesting…but it just doesn’t feel correct, particularly because the story this “fan letter” is supposedly about doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Lovecraft would’ve liked! “Lead Soldiers” is about a tinpot fascist dictator whose delusions of grandeur are leading the world towards another World War, but he ends up getting killed by a bunch of toy soldiers. It’s VERY timely (then and now, sadly), EXTREMELY didactic, and BLUDGEONINGLY allegorical – not really the sort of work Lovecraft generally praised! It seems like this claim of a fan letter from Lovecraft comes out of some memoir/reminiscences type essays Johnson wrote later in life, and while I haven’t chased them down to read them in full, I gather that there’s a general Derlethian tone to them with respect to Johnson’s view of himself.

(As an aside, it appears there was a Joshi-edited-and-introduced collection of Johnson’s work that, in addition to the weird fiction, also included a few of these biographical essays. It was titled Far Below and Other Weird Stories and was published in 2021 by Weird House Press, though it’s out of print and seems like it must’ve been an extremely small run, since I can’t find a copy for sale anywhere. If you know about it or have one, hit me up!)

What is certainly true, however, is that Johnson thought a great deal of Lovecraft, and the story we’re going to be looking at today is, basically, an homage to the Old Gent and a spiritual sequel to his (great) story “Pickman’s Model,” as well as maybe the earliest example of the metafictional appearance of Lovecraft as a Lovecraftian character! But, before we can get to all that, let’s check out the cover and ToC of this big ass issue of Weird Tales!

An incredible cover by the inimitable Virgil Finlay, representing a cavalier of some sort exploring a mysterious and ghoul-ridden cavern. Absolute perfection, just a blast all around. No idea what story it’s supposed to be illustrative of, and it’s entirely possible Finlay only had the broadest of scenic outlines provided to him. But who cares! Let Finlay paint up whatever weird shit he wants, he’s one of the best to ever have graced the covers of the pulps with his talents!

ToC-wise, it’s a heavy-hitter, lots of Lovecraft and Howard on here, some CAS. We’re VERY late in the Farnsworth Wright run here, and the magazine is facing some challenges, but you can see they’re still putting up the good fight here, and there’s some fun weirdness in this big ol’ issue. Also, it’s always worthy pointing out the magazine’s commitment to poetry – it’s such a huge part of weird fiction’s history and lineage, and it’s nice that the premier magazine (that, I would argue, actually created the genre by doing the necessary boundary definition work) both recognized and encouraged poetical weirdness within its pages!

Now, on to the story!

Absolutely incredible art from the great Harold DeLay here – those old school NYPD uniforms, on a weird little rail cart, emptying a machine gun into a horde of hellish C.H.U.D.s…truly a classic! Excellent little atmospheric touches here too; the smoke, the beam of light, the expressions, and the way the horrible ghoulish horde recedes into the background of the tunnel. Just incredible, action-packed stuff, immediately eye-catching and exactly the sort of thing that gets people to actually sit down and read the story! DeLay was a great artist, and it shows. He did some excellent Conan illustrations for Weird Tales, including some for “Red Nails,” and would go on to a career in comics, something he’s obviously well suited for, given the compact and propulsive nature of his artwork.

The little italicized summary under the title is evocative and tells you everything you know, nice and succinct without giving anything away from the story. That, and the spoiler-free art, is a nice surprise!

A great, powerful start to the story; the reader is immediately drawn into whatever the hell is happening, and the quick transition from the “roar and the howl” into the revelation that the “thing” is a subway train is really nicely executed. Johnson is a good writer, and there’s some real craft in this story!

It is also, of course, a story of its time, which is why the next part has some eye-rolling White Nonsense™ in it:

Johnson wants to highlight the big, heterogeneous nature of New York with a tableau of society, specifically calling out the presence of the minorities in the subway car to give us a kind of population sample that is (unknowingly) under threat in this story. It’s cringe-worthy language, of course, and the description of the two black people as “grinning” is particularly unpleasant, an image straight out of minstrel show. It’s something you have to confront in these older stories, but I think a modern reader, acknowledging the racism, can then focus on the narrative function of the scene like we just discussed: the way Johnson is giving us a thumbnail sketch of the civilian population of NYC, dull businessmen, smoochin’ folks, and a substantial proportion of non-WASPs. Very urban and very modern subway commuters!

The medias res beginning opens up and we realize we’re in some kind of little room, where our narrator is hanging out with someone who, apparently, knows the subway system in detail. We learn that the room is actually some kind of command center, with state-of-the-art ultra-modern technology that lets them monitor the passage of the subway cars:

The Mayor Walker here is a real person, good ol’ Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York City from 1926 to his resignation in disgrace (and at the behest of FDR) in ’36. He had been a Tammany Hall boy, and become a sort of poster child for bribery and corruption at the time; Weird Tales readers, even those not from NYC, would absolutely have recognized the name, as well as the context of his getting this super expensive and super complex monitoring system installed in the subway as he was resigning. It’s an interesting historical, but it functions in the story to really GROUND us in a very specific time and place – this is no Lovecraft country invented landscape, or even a quasi-mythic NYC. This is New York City, 1939, exactly as you know it; it’s an important part of the power of the story, this very precise, very real grounding.

It also offers a convenient date for the Subway Expert to use to explode the ridiculous conception of just how long whatever it is they’re talking about has been going on:

So we get a sense that there’s something old and frightful going on, and that there’s a concerted, directed conspiracy to keep it under wraps because the truth is so terrible, so horrible, that it would destroy civilization (or at least NYC) to know what was happening. The evocation of Chateau-Thierry and Verdun, famously bloody battlefields in WWI, is interesting; this story is a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft’s own “Pickman’s Model,” and in it the narrator mentions how he’d seen some rough stuff in France, but even that hadn’t been enough to prepare him for the horror he encountered (in the story). Here’s Johnson making sure to hit that exact same point – the horrors of modern, mechanized warfare are nothing to the horror down in these tunnels, AND it’s something with a long, deep history.

An interesting meditation from the Subway Expert on what it means to be in contact with Horror, day in and day out, and the ways the mind shifts and adapts to survive.

The story shifts into a multiple-page long monolog from the Subway Expert, another stylistic choice in imitation (or homage) of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” which is entirely told as the first person dialog of a character. It’s a very effective narrative trick because in addition to letting the writer give a LOT of exposition very naturally, it also anchors the reader in the very personal, very visceral experiences of the view point character, something that can only help a horror story.

We learn that the Horrible Things that our Subway Expert has been tasked with fighting are seemingly restricted to a very small segment of the subway system, for reasons unknown. This is lucky, because its evident that successful containment of this threat is costly and complicated – there’re a bunch of militarized police stationed down here, with multiple command-and-control centers spaced along the line, and lots of careful, attentive monitoring for signs of “Them!” And it takes it’s toll on these members of the NYPD’s “Special Detail:”

Grim stuff indeed, both from the perspective of people in danger of being transformed by the work of combatting these horrors, as well as from the obvious extrajudiciality of the whole apparatus! We learn that these subway-patrollin’ Special Detail Boys are paid handsomely for their work, and that why they are *technically* part of the NYPD, and wear the uniform, they are outside of the hierarchy, free from usual discipline, and apparently answerable only to themselves. Wild, fascist shit! We also get a little bit more about out interlocuter here:

So our guy used to be a Professor who worked at the AMNH, a specialist in gorillas. He mentions that he’d been on Carl Akeley’s first African expedition when he was recruited for this subway hell job. Incidentally, although the “Akeley” name would seem to be another example of Lovecraftian hat-tipping (Henry Akeley was the rural hermit menaced by the Mi-Go in “The Whisperer in Darkness”), Carl Akeley was a real guy, a hugely important figure in museum display technology and taxidermy, perfecting and advocating a method of “life-like” presentation of specimens for museums; the Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH is named after him. Akeley’s first professional visit to Africa was in 1896, but since the NYC subway didn’t open until 1904, I reckon Craig here is referring to Akeley’s first expedition for the AMNH, which would be around 1921 or so. Incidentally, that trip was a turning point for Akeley, who had undertaken it as part of an attempt to learn more about LIVING gorillas and determine whether it was “okay” to kill and stuff them for museums back home – he came to the conclusion that it was not, and was instrumental in starting one of the first Gorilla preserves in Africa.

ANYWAY our guy Craig gets recruited by ~~Delta Green~~ the NYPD Special Detail because he’s an expert in comparative anatomy. He dissects a specimen of the Things (losing 1d10 SAN, presumably), and submits a report detailing the mad truth of the thing:

It turns out that much of what he’d discovered was already known, or at least suspected, by the shadowy cabal of the NYC Transit Authority or whoever it is; they had extensive reports about the subway accident, showing that it was a deliberate, planned attack by horrible anthropophagus mole-men…which sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

That’s from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” from 1927, and yeah, sure, it’s a subway PLATFORM in Boston, but it’s very clearly the inspiring image for this story!

The “accident” as described by Craig is pretty gruesome – men, women, children, all getting munched on in the dark. It’s some grisly shit! Seems like something that’d be difficult to cover up, doesn’t it?

More brutal authoritarian actions by the Special Detail of the NYPD! It’s wild stuff!

Craig goes into the history of their anti-ghoul actions, and how hard the work was at first, before all the modern technology and approaches had been figured out. There’s some great, spooky writing in this section; Craig remembrances of hunting the Things through the dark tunnels, of glinting eyes in the dark, half-seen white forms flitting into the shadows, tittering mirthless laughter…it’s phenomenal, really atmospheric and legitimately unsettling.

Then we get a long section about the historical and geographical distribution of the ghouls – they’ve been here for a long time, there’s evidence that the Indians knew about them and had taken steps to nullify their danger, and there’s even a kind of funny (if tasteless) retconning of the reason for the cheap price the Dutch got for Manhattan. It’s honestly some very good Lovecraftian history, suggestive fictions woven through history and folklore and things like references to darker meanings behind certain passages in the real book “History of the City of New York” by Mary Booth; it’s not easy to do, and you’ll often run across clumsy attempts in the pastiches of Lovecraft, but here it’s pretty adroitly handled, I’d say! And then we get to a real fun bit:

I mean, c’mon – that’s just good plain fun, isn’t it? Lovecraft, presumably while living in the city, took Craig’s Grand Tour of NYC’s Subway from Hell, and much like Pickman’s practice of painting from life, those experiences are what gave Lovecraft’s story a certain hellish “authenticity.” A delightful bit of metafiction, I think!

Craig goes into the details of their work a bit; the Things seem restricted to a certain stretch of the subway, perhaps for some underlying geological reason, he muses. They also seem to restrict their activity to night-time, even though it’s always dark under the earth, which seems to make the NYPD’s Special Detail’s job a whole lot easier, at least. Craig even seems to let slip a hint of bloodlust here:

“We run them down howling with terror” is a bit grim, isn’t it, and then of course there’s Craig admission that they sometimes CAPTURE the things, imprisoning them in some kind of insane Hell Zoo. These specimens are used to illustrate the seriousness of the horrors and the need for a ruthless extrajudicial police force to recalcitrate officials, but of course they are stored in Craig’s laboratory…what’s he doin’ in there, you have to wonder. There’s a very unpleasant suggestion of experimentation, vivisections and such like. And, of course, they can’t keep any individual Thing around for very long – they’re too horrible, too alien, so they end up exterminating them eventually. It’s dark stuff:

Craig’s discourse on the Things is interrupted by a buzzing from The Big Board – there’s activity in the tunnels, movement and sounds picked up by the vast subterranean panopticon that they’ve built up down in the subway tunnel. Our narrator sees something whirr by the window, and Craig proudly explains that it’s a souped-up electric hand cart, chock full o’ cops w/ heavy artillery, dispatched to take care of the Things in the tunnel. Another one is also coming from the opposite direction; they’ll pin the Things between ’em and gun ’em down.

Because there’re microphones all over the tunnels, Craig and the narrator can hear everything that’s happening:

And then we get to the real meat of the story – in a brilliant bit of writing, Johnson has the characters (and us) overhear the action, narrated by Craig, which builds great tension and forces us to confront what, exactly, Craig has become, down here in the dark, hunting monsters:

Just in case you don’t get it, Johnson spells it out in the next section:

Craig is becoming a ghoul; in fact, all the NYPD Special Detail officers are becoming ghoulish, to a greater or lesser extent, but it’s worse and more pronounced for Craig because he’s been down here the longest. And it’s not just a physical transformation, either!

Even in the midst of his horrible decline, Craig can’t help but be scientifically intrigued by the transformation, however. He muses that perhaps the transformation is the explanation for the origins of the Things, and also why they’ll never be able to exterminate Them fully. He suggests that, while there’s some suggestion of cosmic horror chicanery going on, the transformation is simply atavistic retrogradation, something about being driven underground, being made abject in the dark.

We’re nearing the end of the story; Johnson recapitulates his opening line, the “roar and a howl” bit, as another commuter subway train comes roaring by:

And that’s the end of “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson!

It’s not a long story, and it’s pretty simple structurally, built around a long expository monologue and relying on the neat trick of a character’s second-hand exposure to horror and weirdness. But there’s a lot to unpack, I think!

First off, in our current times (Oct ’25, as of this writing) it’s hard not to read this story as having something to say about both the long history of policing and prisons as well as our very current fascist U.S. government’s use of a militarized, extrajudicial police force to terrorize those it has deemed undesirable. The NYPD Special Detail’s powers are unchecked, their funding unlimited, their remit unrestricted; they are heavily armed, are capable of apparently ignoring any and all oversight, and consider themselves absolutely essential to the continuity of human civilization. And, more importantly, they are completely dehumanized by their task, transforming into literal monsters because of the work they do. It’s pretty on the nose!

Of course, that reading is a little undercut by the fact that, within the text, the Things are ontogenically capital-E Evil, right? They sabotage a subway train and devour the survivors alive, fer chrissake. That complicates the Nietzschean “Beware lest ye become monsters” reading, because these are of course literal monsters; in this way, the horrible degradation Craig and his brave Mole Cops are facing is actually heroically tragic, a sad but necessary sacrifice that must be made for the good of all.

I kind of suspect that, for Johnson, it’s the second one, about brave men sacrificing body and souls, that he wanted us to take away from it. Of course, Johnson was politically-minded; his story “Lead Soldiers,” for all it being a Moral Fable, shows that he was aware of current events and Had Opinions about them, so it is possible that he was thinking about, say, WWI era interment camps or even the crisis in protests and violent police actions post-WWI, and wanted to talk about that. But the way this story is written, and the climax that it’s building to, suggests that he wants us mostly to focus on the horror these cops are facing, and not trying to get us to think about how dehumanizing the Other dehumanizes Us, you know what I mean? That doesn’t mean we have to adhere to that reading, of course; death of the author and all that (literally, in this case; Johnson died in ’87).

As a piece of weird fiction, I think it’s awfully successful. It’s probably in my mind one of the most successful “inspired by Lovecraft” stories I’ve ever written, right up there with Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” or anything by Michael Shea, for example. Obviously based on that little bit of “Pickman’s Model” I excerpted above (which is super evocative, very brief but very striking in the original story), and I think Johnson does it justice, captures the fun and weirdness and horror of a subway being attacked by monsters.

It’s also neat to see Johnson really taking the conspiracy-ball and running with it. Lovecraft creates what is probably the first “widespread gov’t paranormal conspiracy” in his story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (written in ’31 and published in ’36) – there, the u.s. gov’t comes in (off screen) and raids the town, blows up devil’s reef, sends a submarine against the Deep One’s city, and then sets up concertation camps for the fish-human hybrid survivors. There’s even a mention that the gov’t brings in “liberal activists” and shows them the horrors they’ve imprisoned, which makes the various civil rights organizations shut up about the camps, something echoed in this story by Johnson. It’s a very striking part of Innsmouth, and Johnson does it honor here, establishing a plausible and powerful conspiracy built around directly combatting the mythos menaces out there! Has anybody ever done anything with the story in the Delta Green (a cthulhu ttrpg) setting, I wonder? Craig is even a Call of Cthulhu character, in the way he had an expertise that got him plugged into the darker mythos world (and that he’s going insane and will inevitably die horribly).

Anyway, it’s a fun and interesting story, two things that you can’t always say about work with such clear (and acknowledged) connection to Lovecraft. It’s probably the best thing Johnson ever wrote, at least for Weird Tales, and I think it deserves to be read and remembered for more than just “the sequel to Pickman” that it sometimes seems to be cast as. It’s an inventive story with some good, scary imagery, it uses its source material well, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into the immediate post-HPL world of weird fiction!

Pulp Beyond the Strainer #27: “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.31 n.2, February 1938

The Audient Void #2: HPL OTR Edition

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While we’re waiting on poor ol’ archive.org to get back up and running, I thought I’d do a follow up to the previous post about classic old time radio horror shows. Hope ya’ll had a chance to listen to ’em, they’re some of my favorites, but this week’s audient void holds a special place in my heart, because they’re largely the reason why I got into H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Fiction in the first place.

Growin’ up, I was a pretty voracious reader, but my preference was always sci-fi and fantasy. This was due, mostly, to a extremely nice collection of vintage paperbacks that had been my dad’s back when he was a kid in 60s…Heinlein, PKD, Harlan Ellison, Le Guin, really a phenomenal collection that was very important to little Eric’s reading development. With a solid underpinning in the classics, I’d often make a bee-line for the SF and Fantasy section of the bookstore where, more often then not, I’d have a glance at the generally smaller HORROR section that neighbored them.

NOW, I liked spooky shit as a kid – in elementary school I’d been a big fan of John Bellairs, for instance, and I loved a collection of ghost stories or werewolf “histories,” stuff like that, but I’d never been a big reader of horror fiction – I remember trying King and deciding it wasn’t really my cup o’ tea. This opinion was further bolstered by the horror section in the bookstore, and IN PARTICULAR those very gruesome Del Ray Lovecraft paperback covers. You know the one’s I mean, with like flayed torsos hanging on hooks, shit like that? For me, they were simply too disgusting. You gotta remember, at that time, my favorite monster movies were absolutely classic Universal movies, right? Yer Mummies and yer Draculas, nothing to intense and certainly nothing gory, and those Del Ray covers made it seem like this Lovecraft clown’s stories must’ve been nonstop chop-em-ups!

Anyway, skip forward to college, I’m in Gainesville FL listening to the UF public radio station while I’m doing fossil prep work (I was assembling an Aphelops jaw bone). It’s late Oct, they’re doing special Halloween programming, and one night they put on a special Old Time Radio horror block that STARTS with some Lovecraft adaptations, including “The Dunwich Horror” from the 40s, the “Rats in the Walls” and “The Outsider” from the 60s. And I’ll be damned if they’re not an absolute blast, fun and interesting and spooky, nothing at all like what I imagined what they were like based on those ol’ Del Ray covers! After that I spent a lot of time in the library’s Special Collections, reading a bunch of old original Weird Tales that they had.

So, anyway, these three Lovecraft adaptations hold a special place in my heart, and I hope you’ll give ’em a chance!

The Dunwich Horror – Suspense, 1945 – a true classic that takes a fairly long Lovecraft tale and somehow smoothly gets it down to under 30 minutes. Great voice acting in this one, particularly in the case of Wilbur Whatley’s strange horrible voice. Well done, and it’s fun to think about people in the 40s hearing someone shouting “Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!” on their radios!

The Rats in the Walls – Black Mass, 1964 – this is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories of all time (terrible racist name of the cat notwithstanding), and this is a great radio adaptation, extremely faithful and with a real sense of building dread. The final descent into madness is really well done, too; not too surprising, but the secret to good audio horror is good voice work, and I feel like this show has some talent in that regard!

The Outsider – Black Mass, 1964 – one of Lovecraft’s lesser stories, but this is still a good, atmospheric adaptation that is a lot of fun. Ganked this one off an old time radio website years ago, so it’s got a modern intro, just fyi.

Anyway, it’s fun stuff, and if you, like me, enjoy Lovecraft, these are some real treats. Enough for now, happy listening!