or Where Next for Lovecraftian Fiction? In which my writing, H P Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, women and other strange phenomena crash into each other, and everyone goes home in tears. Or something like that. Never give a man his own website, he’ll only spoil things. Even worse, I’m on my own today. Editor-in-chief is at the gym; technical support crew and longdogs are otherwise engaged, and Twiglet, for some reason, is chewing a box of three-inch screws.

I therefore head to the trenches without tactical support. Obviously I have no actual answer to the “where next” question. This really ought to be a drunken panel at a convention hosted by a cool Jamaican woman in an armoured exoskeleton with her own cattle-prod. That would be more fun. Much of my own work is Edwardian period occult, and owes more to William Hope Hodgson and J B Priestley than it does to H P Lovecraft. But I do have a few thoughts. Oh dear…

In the past few months since the Great Re-Emergence, I’ve been monitoring anthology calls fairly keenly. After all, I might have a story on an old gum wrapper which could be swiftly adapted to current needs. You know the drill. Cross out “Kevin the Plumber”, replace with “crazed scholar” and add more eldritch bits. There’s nothing worse than a shoggoth stuck in your Non-Euclidean u-bend.

During this time I’ve seen calls for LGBT Cthulhu, Inclusive Cthulhu, Turn HPL on His Head, Post-Lovecraft Weird, Historical Mythos and a number of others. Which is fine. And I’ve read many interviews with contemporary authors (even conducted a few), interviews which considered different aspects of writing in or beyond this area, such as:

• representation of women as protagonists and significant antagonists in Lovecraftian works;
• countering the bleed of racism from HPL’s personal views into his fiction;
• the need to re-explore his basic tropes and themes in non-Mythosian ways;
• the abandonment of Lovecraftian themes altogether as having served its time, or being restrictive as a framework for modern weird fiction.

I was pondering on this lot when I accidentally came across a couple of pieces which interested me. I’m not going to comment on them as such, but I do think that both are useful to the discussion.

Sean Eaton writes a blog called The R’Lyeh Tribune, which is invariably worth a browse (see link at end). He recently interviewed Ross Smeltzer, author of The Mark of the Shadow Grove, a collection published in January 2016. I haven’t read the collection yet, but the interview dwells considerably on the influence of Lovecraft. In particular I noted Smeltzer’s comment:

“In each of the novellas in The Mark of the Shadow Grove I wanted to tell stories in the weird and Lovecraftian mold that also included compelling characters, particularly female characters. Their absence in so much classic horror fiction—and their virtual nonexistence in Lovecraft’s canon—speaks to the truncated perspective of many weird fiction writers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Lovecraft ignored women in his fiction because his understanding of who could constitute a protagonist in a story was limited to bookish white men like himself.

“I wanted to incorporate women into a Lovecraftian framework and to do so in a way that upset gendered representations of femininity. I strove for ambiguity. I don’t think I wholly succeeded, but it’s an artistic agenda I plan on pursuing further.”

The very same day (honestly, not one of my usual lies) I found a book down the back of a shelf, a book about which I’d completely forgotten. It was Douglas E Winter’s 1985 collection of interviews with horror authors, Faces of Fear. It contained an interview with Ramsey Campbell, in which the Great Man said:

“What appealed to me about Lovecraft was that sense of enormous cosmic awe… It certainly worked for me then – not so much now, I’m afraid, although I do still like Lovecraft; I find him fascinating for various reasons.”

He then went on to add, concerning his own collection of Lovecraftian fiction, Cold Print (also 1985):

“I was attempting, very clumsily, to get at that sense of awe. But at the same time, it was also very much a means of not dealing with my own fears. It was actually a means of writing about quite different things, and probably rather comforting in some way, being able to achieve something that had nothing directly, personally, psychologically, to do with me… Only when I became impatient with the Lovecraftian structure… did I begin to get on to dealing with things that were a good deal more personal.

“Lovecraft is the most widely imitated American horror writer; M R James is the most imitated British writer; Hitchcock is the most imitated director. The reason is precisely that their technique is part of their surface – you can actually see their technique. It is in the foreground of their stories, to the extent that you can actually see it working and take it as a model.

“So Lovecraft was very much about the style being literally appropriate to the material, but I felt that there were other ways of doing it.”

Of course, Ramsey Campbell was speaking thirty years ago, and I can’t pretend to know what his views would be now, but I like what he says – excepting the suggestion that Cold Print is clumsy in any way. I still love that collection. The rest of his interview is well worth reading, by the way, as are those of the other contributors.

I wanted to present these two fragments for anyone who might have missed them, but naturally I have my own opinions. In fact, I have opinions like Twiglet has dandruff, impossible to eradicate and going all over the place.

I grew up steeped in Lovecraft, forty years ago, and given the weight of all those tentacles at the back of my mind, there is no way I can ignore HPL’s influence. So I did get tempted recently into writing a few Mythos stories. Having done so, I have no excuse for keeping silent, so what was my take?

Of least importance, my first move was with the Sandra’s First Pony series. These stories are Mythos in their roots but very non-Lovecraftian in structure and tone. Enid Blyton and the Chalet School, with a touch of folk-horror and a lot of ill-judged humour. The main protagonists are a cheerful schoolgirl with a shotgun and a violent, slightly psychotic talking pony. Sandra and Mr Bubbles do at least challenge HPL’s short-sighted stereotypes, and if there’s any agenda it’s a feminist one, so I feel reasonably good about that.

But they are only for fun, and I’ve written two serious stories in the last few months. The first, Messages*, is a deeply Mythos tale in which the protagonists are a mother and her daughter, operating beyond normal constraints and barriers. They’re sane, they’re not stereotypical cold-hearted killers or anything like that, and the tale isn’t about sex. It’s about parenting, belief and responsibility. You may or may not enjoy it, but the point was to move forward in a way which might be Mythos but new as well.

The other one is With the Dark and the Storm, which is doing the rounds at the moment, a story seen from the point of view of a small Igbo village in British colonial Africa. I worried about this one, because you don’t counter racism by having old white Yorkshiremen writing about indigenous African beliefs. At the same time, I wanted to see if a good story could be told from a viewpoint other than that of Lovecraft, Edgar Wallace and other writers of the time. The structure itself is quite traditional, the angle not. If that works, or if I should even have tried it, we shall see.

And I can understand why writers such as Ted E Grau (see  a voice from the nameless dark ) and others, having contributed powerfully to the Mythos field, seek to move forward rather than dig the same fields over again and again. I sort of feel the same way myself, and yet I constantly get tempted to play among the roots.

So I thought that it might be a good idea to read Dreams from the Witch House – Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror**, and that’s my current bedside book. This collection (edited by Lynne Jamneck) contains some cracking women writers of today, and maybe they might help me decide. Will something new still grow in this strange, slightly tainted soil?

I’ll leave that with you, while I go look up the price of ammunition for a Hopkins and Allen .32 in 1908. Boys, eh?

####

Whilst we’re on – or off – Cthulhu’s dad, it seemed appropriate to mention a work-in-progress by writer and editor Sam Gafford, who has graced these airwaves a number of times. Normally we touch base with him over William Hope Hodgson, but Sam kindly sent us some artwork by Jason Eckhardt, and we wanted to show it off.

He and Jason are in the process of producing a biographical graphic novel called Some Notes on a Non-Entity: The Life of H P Lovecraft. The title is from an essay by Lovecraft which formed part of Arkham House’s second HPL publication, Beyond the Walls of Sleep, 1943.

This collection is mostly minor pieces, and Some Notes was later released by Arkham in a limited edition (500 copies) twenty years later in 1963. The essay’s most recent outing was in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy; Autobiography & Miscellany edited by S. T. Joshi (2006)

It’s hoped that the graphic novel will be out by the end of 2016. If you want to keep up with progress, you can wander over to the Facebook page, where more artwork and commentary are added as the great work continues.

some notes on a non-entity facebook page

####

*Messages, by me, will be available in Martian Migraine’s new anthology Cthulhusattva, coming 23 May 2016.

**Dreams from the Witch House will be available on Kindle from 12 April 2016 (we were fortunate to get a bundled special offer copy), and we may yet say more about that one.

The full article for Lovecraft, Diversity, and the Occult: An Interview with Ross Smeltzer, can be found here:

the r’lyeh tribune

Out of space, rather than outer space.  Keep your wireless set on, because in a couple of days we have our super brilliant Easter special, an interview with actor Dan Starkey, the new audio Carnacki (and also, for Dr Who fans, Strax the Sontaran, of course)…