What are post-Lovecraftian stories? What is their purpose, and what are they doing in our living-room? This weekend we’ll be mentioning two new anthologies which might be described as post-Lovecraftian. We’ve always said that greydogtales is a ‘signpost’ site, which spends more time pointing out interesting stuff than it does analysing it. A signpost does not have to have been to the places it names.

Despite that, we try never to put anything up without some cogitation behind the scenes. So before we hand over to others, we’re throwing in a few thoughts that came up while editing the features.

We at greydogtales are at heart Edwardians more than we are worshippers of the era of Weird Tales. Followers of William Hope Hodgson, Conan Doyle and Wells more than H P Lovecraft, Ashton Smith and Howard, however much we might enjoy some of the latter group’s work. This may make us less suited to comment on Lovecraft, and certainly other writers have more scholarly or critical knowledge of the issues than we do.

As Edwardians, we recognise the late-Imperial theme that it was all coming to an end, that something dark was on the horizon. The world, the society, to come was difficult to envisage. In Britain, with scientific optimism there also came deep political and social fears. Joseph Kestner noted:

In Edwardian detective fiction there is often a repudiation of closure to reflect Edwardian doubt, uncertainty, complication and indeterminacy.

The Edwardian Detective 1901 – 1915

Many had the uneasy sensation that the Empire and the carefully organised strata of privilege and rank were about to be swept away. It was a period of great change, and thus great threat. Psychiatry, women’s suffrage, and the telephone as a form of mass communication; the rise of the motor car, the abandonment of the corset and the erosion of aristocratic rights. Politicians, publicans and playwrights alike were concerned that the cost of maintaining Empire meant a level of poverty and injustice for so many citizens that it could not be sustained much longer.

And these societal issues often inform my own writing, when it isn’t done for pure amusement or just to vex someone. Lovecraft’s issues of malign or indifferent entities, cosmic horror, miscegenation and personal alienation are different matters. HPL isn’t big on society. I only write ‘Lovecraftian’ stories at all when I see a really intriguing prompt from a publisher. Even then, I have to question why I’m going there, and be satisfied that I’m offering something new. I like money very much, but that’s not enough in itself to go Mythosian.

There’s no doubt that ‘Cthulhu’ sells – the label has its own popularity or notoriety. H P Lovecraft’s personal beliefs have been aired a lot recently. It’s our general view here that, perversely, without some of his screwed-up attitudes, he may never have reached some of the more spine-chilling moments in his fiction. We don’t believe that Lovecraft was (or had to be) typical of his times. Perhaps his own troubled mind kept him from expanding beyond his prejudices. It also made his work unusual in that the term ‘post-Lovecraftian’ exists, and that there is such a large – and growing – body of Mythosian fiction (yes, we know about August Derleth etc, but the roots had to be there beforehand).

I have no score to settle with a dead man from Providence, but it’s no bad thing to look at how aspects of his cosmic horror can be developed into a far more inclusive body of work, some of which you’ll see in the two anthologies we’re going to cover. There are concepts in Lovecraft which deserve better, which deserve to relate to people of all colour, religion, gender and sexuality. We all know fear at some point in our lives, or experience a sense of our own unimportance. The enterprise of more inclusive writing can be a liberating, worthy, or amusing one. At what point we discard any relationship at all with Lovecraft is another matter…

As you can guess, we here are outsiders, crawling from the catacombs. We negotiate our way out of the vaults only to stumble upon a Lovecraftian party in the castle above. As people at the party flee in horror, we see ourselves in a mirror and realise the truth – that the beard really does need a trim.

See you tomorrow, hopefully.