Or… The Trials Of A Sort of Mythos Author. The jobbing writer knows no fear; accepts no shame. Literary purity is not for the likes of us, beggin’ yer pardon, guv’nor. Run off a young adult horror story? Index a quick textbook? Draft a missing cat advert? Write a Lovecraft Mythos story? Well, why not, given that you’re trying to earn a living? Was it not St Catherine of Alexandria who said “Better a sold Nyarlathotep story and a new gas cooker, than snobbery and half a box of matches.”? No, it wasn’t, but still…
If it comes from anywhere, my writing probably springs most deeply from British stock – William Hope Hodgson, the Brontes, Blackwood, James (M R), Wells, Austen, H H Munro (Saki) and Jerome K Jerome. Not that I grew up unfamiliar with the US Weird Tales gang. I read almost every H P Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith story I could find in the seventies and eighties. And I could find a lot, because I worked in a bookshop.
Howard was crammed with rumbustious adventure, albeit I could only take so many exploits of pseudo-Celt/Norse/Gael barbarians at a time. Ashton Smith was far more appealing, partly because he went so well with one of my favourites, Jack Vance. Those opulent and richly word sentences, strewn with words like jewels (and strewn with jewels, for that matter); those glorious described ancient cities with their deranged sorcerers and screaming spires… and Averoigne. Always Averoigne.
True fear, however, and real disquiet, lay elsewhere in classic weird or supernatural fiction. Primarily in Hope Hodgson; secondarily in the best tales of Robert W Chambers, and in Charlotte Gilman – The House on the Borderland; The King in Yellow; The Yellow Wallpaper. Only thirdarily came H P Lovecraft, though ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ fascinated me, more than any of his other works.
But I never had any intention of writing like Lovecraft, Howard or Smith – or writing anything related to their subject matter. Hope Hodgson was closer to my ambitions – though you might not want to ape some of Hope Hodgson’s extravagant and occasionally miscalculated styles. A dash of Gilman wouldn’t go amiss, either. But not Lovecraft.
It’s not unknown for emerging writers to go Lovecraft early, and then abandon ship later on. Having interviewed many other writers of weird fiction, we occasionally talk about how many authors slide away from the Mythos zone as they develop – maybe a few Lovecraft pastiches and homages in the formative years, a deeper or more critical work or two, and then the Dwindling, as the habit recedes. Reasons cited? They vary:
- Finding a unique literary identity
- Stylistic constraints
- Overuse of Mythosian themes in the market
- Discomfort with Lovecraft’s expressed personal views
- Never really liked the stuff anyway
- Done it; bored now (as Mr Bubbles would say)
Some move on; others decide in the end to settle in a generally Mythosian area and develop its roots and ramifications – or subvert it. I never went through that sort of emergent phase, having already settled on my own approach to what I called strange fictions – and being a cheerful old cynic anyway. I remember that Ted E Grau, whose latest work I am the River (Lethe, 2018) is very much a book with its own unique style and sense of the weird, said to us in 2015:
“I think the (Mythos) market will become saturated, or actually already has, so one would assume that most of the targeted readership will get bored with reading the same stuff reheated over and over again. But, it doesn’t seem to be abating at all, so what do I know?
“The Lovecraftian omniverse is a fun zip code in which to live, so I get why it has remained popular all these years. Stories with a cosmic horror element that Lovecraft helped build up and codify for easier digestion will always have an appeal for curious stargazers and devoted heretics…”
It’s odd to think that Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror has become, for some, almost a comfort zone. Neatly defined, populated with known monstrosities and themes.
Ted, a most erudite and thoughtful writer, also noted the troubling side of Lovecraft and his work “…even with all its dysfunction and shame.” My partner (the Editor-in-Chief) finds Lovecraft boring; some of my black friends won’t read him for the undoubted elements of racism; certain female friends find him too male-oriented to get enough out of it. So a valid question for me is why I still write in the zone – occasionally – and what it means.
It’s possible to answer that by going back to being a jobbing writer, if you want to look at an easy way out. You take the work as it’s offered, and do your best. Then you get paid. And I could go with that, except that it’s not quite right – there’s more to it.
It’s almost three years since I muttered about this topic, in ‘Cthulhu for Girls’, and yet I’ve just written and sold another Mythosian story, which brings me up to six ‘commercial’ stories so far, I think:
- Messages (Cthulhusattva, Martian Migraine)
- With the Dark and the Storm (Equal Opportunities Madness, Otter Libris)
- Songs of the Burning Men (The Chromatic Court, coming from 18thWall)
- Where All is Night, and Starless (Chthonic, Martian Migraine)
- The Yuggoth Club (Innsmouthbreathers, coming from Martian Migraine)
- Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun (to be announced)
(Two others, ‘Exit Lines’ and ‘Their Wings Like Whips’ are out in the void somewhere, though the first is odd, and the second is only loosely related to Mythosian ideas)
Even if you go for eight, in context that’s only about twelve percent of my short story output in three years. However, considering the factors listed earlier above, in each case I wondered: do I really want to do this? There had to be something I wanted to say that could wear the Mythos cloak and still come over, or be actively enhanced by employing/exploring aspects of cosmic horror. Which inevitably reminded me of what I felt most of the original body of work lacked (to one degree or another):
- Humanity, or humane-ness – the ability to write about people facing cosmic horror without obscuring the small tendernesses and aspects of being human. Just being horrified or going mad isn’t enough (‘The Outsider’ is one of the only Lovecraft stories in which I feel he captured genuine humanity, perversely enough).
- Universality – the recognition that if there is a terrible threat, coldly indifferent to our tiny species and even tinier lives, it is to all people and all peoples, regardless of skin colour, religion or nationality, not just to white college professors, students and artists etc. (‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is still, well, fairly horrible).
- Gender inclusivity – it always amuses me that Asenath Waite (from ‘The Thing On the Doorstep’) is taken as a (rare) example of a leading female character in Lovecraft, even though she was possessed by her father, Ephraim. Ephraim, as a guiding force, is not the best female role model I’ve encountered in fiction.
I hope that all of the eight ‘Lovecraft’ stories I’ve written present individuals, with a certain human reality of their own. As it happens, five of them have female protagonists, and four have black protagonists and/or key characters (for reference, given that we’re covering a lot of LGBTQ+ issues this month, key characters’ sexual identities include lesbian and asexual).
Before someone shrieks out, this process wasn’t forced, as if I were on some holy PC mission. It was done by looking at my own character and plot ideas, at elements of the Mythos, wanting to write a good story, and coming out with something that felt natural to me.
I can’t see me writing more than one or two such tales a year, if that. I haven’t moved beyond Lovecraft, really – I was heading somewhere else anyway. But I’m not going to be dismissive. A couple of those eight stories are some of the most satisfying pieces I’ve written. All the editors have been very generous, and three of the tales gave me a chance to work with Martian Migraine Press, which was very stimulating.
Most relevant of all, given my long affair with ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, it was a personal pleasure to write ‘Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun’, which caps over forty years of wondering about the Old Ones, lost in a bleak, comfortless world…
If some did become richer through examination of stories from a century ago, none became wiser. Most of poor Lovecraft’s writing is invented nonsense, a blur of horror and science fiction which, if unusually imaginative, is yet of very limited value. Only that one tale matched reality, though the City’s emergence did encourage a mad hunt for other locations, even deep-water submarine explorations for sunken cities which house dreaming gods. Not a single Cyclopean block, not one non-Euclidean ruin, was found elsewhere, above or below the oceans.
‘Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun’ John Linwood Grant
But I cannot ever EVER see me writing a Cthulhu story.
Another aspect of my attitude to the Mythos might be embodied in the many Sandra’s First Pony vignettes and short stories I write – where the disturbed village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds crouches in the lee of Whateley Wood, and most of the whip-poor-wills have bronchitis:
MR BUBBLES AND THE SPAWN FROM SPACE
A thrilling weird fiction story by J Linseed Grant
They came in a rustle of membranous wings, a touch of insanity on the autumn air, and their scent was that of metals yet to be known, fluids which could not be. Their form was that of too many things – of the sea-bed and the dank, fungal vault; of barren, lightless rock that spun in silence.
Mi-Go, it was said by some, from the edge of sanity and the systems of Sol. Their morality was unknown; their ethics a void which humanity could never fathom.
And they descended on the bleak moors, on the pitted crags above a forgotten land…
“What were they, then?” asked Sandra, reloading her Remington repeat-action after everything had gone quiet.
“No idea,” said Mr Bubbles, her faithful if somewhat psychotic pony, and he spat out a chunk of carapace. “Tasted like chicken, though.”
That earlier article, including quotes from Ramsey Campbell and Ross Smeltzer, is here:
http://greydogtales.com/blog/cthulhu-for-girls/
We hope to be interviewing Ted E Grau again soon – meanwhile, his fascinating new novel is available right now (this link ought to take you to a preview):
More interviews with LGBTQ+ authors in a couple of days, and then something different…