Cthulhu May Not Live Here Any More

May 29, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

Welcome, dear listener, to our final Lovecraftian feature of the weekend. Today we mark the recent release of The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, with exclusive commentary by authors John Langan and Michael Wehunt on their contributions to the anthology. And after that we bump into Bobby Derie’s Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, more of a reference book but no less interesting. Both books might be called post-Lovecraftian, but in quite different ways. Oh, and we drift off into HPL and Hamlet later, but that sort of thing happens here…

We’ll start with Paula Guran’s new anthology of recent fiction by a terrific range of writers – The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu. Paula is senior editor for Prime Books, and edits the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series as well as other anthologies. Her work has won many plaudits – she has twice received the Stoker Award and twice been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. In her introduction to TMBoC, she says:

What I term “New Lovecraftian” fiction seldom attempts (although it does occasionally) to emulate Lovecraft’s writing style – a style that’s faults are, admittedly, many. Written with a fresh appreciation of Lovecraft’s universe, its writers do not imitate; they re-imagine, re-energise, renew, re-set, respond to, and make Lovecraftian concepts relevant for today.

New Lovecraftian fiction sometimes simply has fun with what are now well-established genre themes. Authors often intentionally subvert Lovecraft’s bigotry while still paying tribute to his imagination.

Yesterday we featured Dreams from the Witch House, edited by Lynne Jamneck (see voices from the witch house), and three of the writers from Witch House are also represented in this collection – Caitlin R Kiernan, Lois H Gresh and Amanda Downum – alongside other familiar names such as Laird Barron, Michael Shea and W H Pugmire.

Long-time listeners will know that this isn’t a review site, though we admit that we are enjoying the anthology. We thought that rather than rattle on, it would be more interesting to hear from a couple of TMBoC’s contributing authors. We were therefore delighted when John Langan and Michael Wehunt kindly agreed to say something about their stories especially for greydogtales. Both, purely by coincidence, reference music, and both give insights into the tales they spun for the collection. Here they are, for your listening pleasure…

Notes on “Outside the House, Watching for Crows”

John Langan

I wrote roughly the first half of this story six or seven years ago, possibly a little more. Up until this point, I had studiously avoided writing about adolescents, in large part because so much horror fiction focuses on this age bracket (think Something Wicked This Way Comes, It, Shadowland, A Boy’s Life, Ghoul, etc.) and I wanted to distinguish myself by doing something different. But I had an idea I would write about music, about a cassette tape whose songs come to inhabit the listener’s consciousness. And for reasons I’m not certain of (my twenty year high school reunion, which I’d skipped but was still in my mind?), when I started writing the story, it was about the tail end of my junior year in high school. I powered through the story until the narrator attends his junior prom, and read most of what I’d written at that year’s Readercon—after which, my friends who’d come to the reading asked me what came next. I told them I didn’t know: I was still writing the story.

In fact, I would be writing it for the next half a dozen or so years. Beyond what I’d already set down, I couldn’t work out where the story was supposed to go. I knew the weird tape the narrator was listening to, the music that had become his personal soundtrack, was going to lead him somewhere, but I could not work out what that destination was. So I pretty much left the story to percolate, returning to it every now and again to tweak a word choice or sentence, waiting for the Fornits to work out the rest of it.

This didn’t happen until I finished my second novel, The Fisherman. There’s a long story in the middle of the book—a novella, really—which involves some pretty far out stuff, including an old, frightening city on the shore of a black ocean, whose police force is not quite human. In the process of writing several other stories (including “Bor Urus,” “Mother of Stone,” and “Shadow and Thirst”) I had found connections between them and the material of the novel, particularly the neighborhood of that city.

When Paula Guran invited me to contribute something to the Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, I thought about that unfinished story and realized that the answer to its second half lay in The Fisherman and those other stories connected to it. There’s no need to have read any of the other stuff to appreciate this story (honestly, even if you do go through it all, it’s as much a series of hints and suggestions as it is anything more coherent at this point). What that material did was provide me a way to reflect on the desire—so strong in adolescence, but not absent from the rest of life—to break out of this existence, to find a way to something else, something different, something (maybe) more. Sometimes, the answer to the challenge you’re facing now comes from something you haven’t done yet.

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Notes on “I Do Not Count the Hours”

Michael Wehunt

When Paula Guran asked me to write a story for The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, I fainted. When I came to, I started thinking that I wanted to use music as the backbone of what would become “I Do Not Count the Hours.” I also wanted some creepy video footage, and I wanted to use a main character Lovecraft would not have approved of.

I wanted this latter because Lovecraft’s protagonists tended to be academics and men of science. Invariably white men. Ada Blount is a young black woman, short and petite, a deeply sheltered and codependent woman. And the story is entirely about her. She plays music, and in light of Lovecraft’s views, I thought the viola was a good choice, as it is the forgotten sibling of the famous violin and cello. But it features in nearly every string quartet, and it is just as essential.

My intent was not truly to address Lovecraft’s racism in this story. Others have done so wonderfully. I really only tried to give a voice to someone he would not have given a voice to. Otherwise the story just wants to be creepy as hell with a little beauty in the darkness. Several months later I would write a brother to “I Do Not Count the Hours.” It’s called “Drawing God” and it will be published late this year, I believe. There are slight parallels between the two stories, a sort of shared world, but in this newer story Lovecraft himself is brought more into the foreground, and I’m not particularly kind to him. Writing this second story exorcised my thoughts on the matter.

But he did give us a deeper fascination with the cosmos and our granular role in it, and for all his unforgivable warts as a man, his fiction does live on for a good reason. I don’t think cosmic horror will ever truly leave my bloodstream, and he’s an indelible part of it.

As for Ada, she has had a hard life. A singular life, really, and the way she grew as a character and as a woman fascinated me as I wrote the story. She was raised to be weak, and she grows strong. She goes deep into the woods and does what no one else can. Erich Zann wouldn’t have been up for it. Let that be a lesson to Howard’s ghost.

Meanwhile, I still get a little shiver when I think of those video files on that computer…

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We thank our talented contributors, and point out that you can pick up TMBoC right now:

the mammoth book of cthulhu

As we said on Friday we’re not academics, but we do like to delve deeper sometimes. A number of times we have turned to a very helpful fellow, Bobby Derie, for original material on HPL and his circle, including extracts from correspondence, so it seemed appropriate to mention his book Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) in this medley about Lovecraftian books.

We’ll quote from the blurb, because it seems silly to rewrite it:

In this pioneering study, Bobby Derie has presented an objective and scholarly analysis of the significant uses of love, gender, and sex in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and some of his leading disciples. Along the way, Derie treats such matters as Lovecraft’s relations with his wife, portrayals of women in his work, and the question of homosexuality in his life and work. Many Lovecraft stories are subject to detailed examination for their sexual implications.

There are two aspects of this substantial and fascinating book which we like in particular. Firstly, it’s meticulously researched and draws on genuine source materials as opposed to collating third-hand opinions just to stir things up. Secondly, it’s not an attempt to create one of those cod-psychological studies of Lovecraft – you can make your own mind up about what Derie presents, and there’s plenty of thought-provoking stuff.

Examination of Lovecraft and his work in such a context does raise some fascinating issues, so it’s helpful that this book includes further material on sex, gender and the mythos in the works of later writers. It’s an absorbing read.

Back here in our less-than-expert kennel, we find it hard to get away from the fact that Lovecraft appeared to have a bee in his bonnet about inter-breeding and miscegenation. It’s as if he feared the Outside breeding its way in to ‘normal’ society and ‘decent’ people – through blasphemous couplings with entities (The Dunwich Horror), through incestuous practice (The Lurking Fear) and through miscegenation (The Shadow over Innsmouth and so many more). The frequency of ‘unholy’ unions, be they with gods, Deep Ones or Polynesians, in his stories, and his dislike of what he saw of as mixed-race peoples, seems in retrospect to be less a matter of prejudice and more an obsessional issue.

It’s easy to despise his views on some areas of life (and right to reject them). We’re not great proponents of needless therapy, but at times we feel sorry that he had to carry such thoughts in his head for so long. Still his fiction prospers, we still read it, and some of it is jolly good.

But that’s only our passing pennyworth. Our other worry is that lurchers, who only exist because of a particular aspect of cross-breeding discovered centuries ago, may not have won his approval.

Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos by Bobby Derie is available here:

sex and the cthulhu mythos

As one of our many asides, we were moaning about the ditherings of Hamlet during our interview with SFF writer John Guy Collick (see a colossus of mars)a few weeks ago, and John commented at the time:

Watch the Russian film of Hamlet directed by Grigori Kozintsev… That’s how the play should be done, not as an introspective study of a procrastinator with his head up his bum but as a vast, brooding Piranesi-esque Gothic tale of politics, double dealing and passion.

Bobby Derie subsequently provided us with something we’d not come across before – HPL’s views on the Prince of Denmark. We extract a section because, well, it’s interesting:

I find in Hamlet a rare, delicate, & nearly poetical mind, filled with the highest ideals and pervaded by the delusion (common to all gentle & retired characters unless their temperament be scientific & predominantly rational–which is seldom the case with poets) that all humanity approximates such a standard as he conceives. All at once, however, man’s inherent baseness becomes apparent to him under the most soul-trying circumstances; exhibiting itself not in the remote world, but in the person of his mother & his uncle, in such a manner as to convince him most suddenly & most vitally that there is no good in humanity.

Well may he question life, when the perfidiousness of those whom he has reason to believe the best of mortals, is so cruelly obtruded on his notice. Having had his theories of life founded on mediaeval and pragmatical conceptions, he now loses that subtle something which impels persons to go on in the ordinary currents; specifically, he loses the conviction that the usual motives & pursuits of life are more than empty illusions or trifles. Now this is not “madness”–I am sick of hearing fools & superficial criticks prate about “Hamlet’s madness”. It is really a distressing glimpse of absolute truth. But in effect, it approximates mental derangement. Reason is unimpaired, but Hamlet no longer sees any occasion for its use.

Whether or not this is also a reflection of Lovecraft’s view of himself, and of some of his protagonists, we leave to cleverer people than us poor mutts.

Finally, as the I that is greydog supposedly runs this site, it would be foolish not to mention that I also have what Paula Guran might call a “New Lovecraft” story in the recently-released Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis. This is a cracking collection of dark and thought-provoking tales about the real nature of those who accept the Mythos into their hearts, edited by Scott R Jones – writer, editor and overlord of Martian Migraine Press.

Cthulhusattva is currently riding high in the Horror Anthology charts, and I don’t think that you’ll be disappointed by it – but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Over the next week or so, we’re back to lurchers, weird art, Victoriana, Dracula and lots of things which are decidedly non-Lovecraftian…

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Voices from the Witch House: An Interview with Lynne Jamneck

May 28, 2016 greydogtales 2 Comments

Greetings, dear listener. This weekend you find us in a rather post-Lovecraftian mood, and poking a stick at two new collections – Dreams from the Witch House, edited by Lynne Jamneck, and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran. Plus we’ll throw in a few H P Lovecraft-related musings and extras as well. We start with a terrific interview with the talented Lynne Jamneck, exploring her own writing, her editing role, themes in LGBT fiction and other topics.

As we’ll be talking about Lynne’s work during the interview, we’ll just say that she’s of a Kiwi disposition, based in New Zealand, with many writing and editing credits to her name. She has been nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda awards, and holds an MA in English Literature from Auckland University. She also shares our interest in home-brewing, but we couldn’t quite fit that in. Let us meander in her direction…

greydog: Lynne, welcome to greydogtales and our relentless efforts to weird the world wide web. It’s no secret that we contacted you initially to talk about your role in putting together Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, but like many of our guests, you have a number of strings to your bow. Let’s start with your editing work and move on from there.

When you first took on the editing role for Witch House, what did Lovecraftian mean to you?

lynne: “Lovecraftian” to me has always been more about mood than about Cthulhu, or Azathoth or any of the deities that populate the mythos. It’s about the uncanny, weirdness and cosmicism – the things we hide from behind ignorance and reality TV.

greydog: Did that change after going through the submissions and making your final selection?

lynne: My focus for Witch House was always on stories that somehow reflected the elements I mention above. I wasn’t specifically looking for stories that included deliberate reproductions of Lovecraft’s geographies or characters. Those spaces and places are definitely in the final stories, but in versions that feel more contemporary and therefore, more removed from imaginary Arkham.

greydog: Did you have a specific ‘feel’ for Witch House, beyond the core premise of Lovecraftian tales written by women? By that we mean was there a mood or tone that you wanted the anthology to convey?

lynne: I wanted stories to instil unease, and not necessarily as the result of violent, external elements. I think elements that involve apprehension toward humanity are sometimes neglected in Lovecraft’s work – in his case, arguably most explicitly conveyed in his views about other races and ethnicities. We don’t always need tentacles to be scared. Sometimes all we need to do is look in the mirror. That’ll drive a good lot of us insane.

greydog: Absolutely. How do you feel about being an editor? You’ve edited before (Periphery, for example). Is it a nerve-wracking job, or one where you sit back, kick off your boots and simply enjoy being able to browse other people’s work rather than have to write?

lynne: It’s exciting in the sense that you never know when you’re going to discover an absolute gem of a story. But it’s frustrating in the sense that you have a finite number of stories that you can include in the final book. There have been instances where it took me days to decide between two stories because they were both equally good. That’s not a fun task.

9780809572953-us-300 — jabberwocky 3, with lynne’s tale the morphology of snow

greydog: You’re also in the editor’s seat with S.T. Joshi for this year’s Gothic Lovecraft anthology, is that right?

lynne: Yes. That was a great experience, working with someone whose knowledge about Lovecraft is so vast and who has a well-trained eye for the uncanny. S.T. and I have slightly different tendencies when considering stories, but we also appreciate many of the same elements, sometimes just rendered a little differently. We ended up picking a great collection of stories.

greydog: Witch House is out now, with a great line-up that includes Elizabeth Bear, Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlin Kiernan and Storm Constantine. We’ll link to where people can get a copy at the end of this interview, but we want to talk about you and writing. Looking at your back catalogue, your range is fairly wide – crime, queer fairies and Lovecraftian horror, for example. Enjoyable diversity, an artist in search of a spiritual home, or part of a grand plan?

lynne: Those phases can likely be linked to whatever I found myself asking questions about at different times in my life. Or what I felt a specific kinship with. I read a lot of crime in my late teens and early twenties, and possibly considered writing crime as being a challenge. Then I discovered that as a writer, plot comes secondary to me. It’s characters all the way down!

As to fairies, in my experience, many queers go throw a period in their life where it almost feels that their sexuality defines them, whether they want it to or not. Fantasy lends itself well to addressing such issues because you’re working in a genre where the Other is often celebrated. This phase didn’t last long for me, though; heterosexuality doesn’t define anyone, so why should being queer define me? Like we say in New Zealand, yeah-nah, bro.

One thing that has always been part of my writing process is the act of asking questions. Questioning is an act of defiance; all of us can be rebels this way. We must never stop questioning –not ourselves, not other people, and not those who effect control over us. It also lies at the heart if what the Lovecraftian addresses. Specifically, it asks uncomfortable questions, some of which we don’t have answers for. But that’s okay. Sometimes you don‘t need an answer. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask the question anyway. I think maybe I’ve found my home here in this cosmic pool. Its comfortably uncomfortable.

greydog: We frequently slide back to writing Edwardian supernatural tales, despite our best intentions. Do you have a favourite genre or thematic area that you like to explore in your fiction?

lynne: I have a fascination with snow. Especially snow-covered landscapes. It’s not the Edwardians for me but the Romantics. William Blake wrote about how snow – something that is usually associated with purity and cleanness – can serve as a cover up for heinous crimes and other terrible things. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s depictions of Nature are the stuff of beauty and nightmares all at once. We often move through life without paying attention to the environments in which we exist, without being present. I’m interested in that moment when we see for the first time, are completely unravelled by it, and how we return from it. Or not.

greydog: Earlier this year we spoke to Cameron Trost, an Australian writer/editor who’s active in the Australian Horror Writers Association. Is there a similar scene in New Zealand?

lynne: The NZ speculative fiction scene is fairly small, but nonetheless very active. We have AuContraire each year, a week-end convention for speculative writers and other artists. This year will be its 37th iteration, so it has been going for a while! One thing I’d like to see is larger NZ publishers taking a more active role in promoting local speculative writers.

greydog: This site rambles on about gender and sexuality in fiction from time to time, so we thought we’d try a few thoughts out on you while you were here. For starters, we read somewhere that while you do write queer fiction, you don’t describe yourself as a queer writer. Is that because you see it as a limiting description?

lynne: This tags on from what I mentioned previously. I’m a writer who happens to be queer. That doesn’t mean I want to connect only with other queer readers. In that way it is limiting, but only in the sense that it confines me to writing within very specific parameters, which doesn’t challenge me as a writer.

greydog: In the past six months, we ourselves have written protagonists who included a teenage boy who liked wearing properly ironed skirts, a lesbian couple facing Lovecraftian horror and an Edwardian Virginian questioning both his sensual and sexual nature. None of these were written to make a point, except that people are interesting. Are we finally at a stage, do you think, where LGBT characters in fiction can just be characters like anyone else, rather than political symbols?

lynne: That’s the way I write queer characters but… I don’t know. Maybe not? It’s still very political to a lot of people and I completely understand that, because people are still being killed just for being gay. How can we not make that an issue? On the other hand, as a writer, I don’t want to talk about the same thing every time I write a story because I’d feel like I’m repeating myself.

greydog: We enjoyed your 2005 interview with Nicola Griffith, a terrific writer. We knew Nicola and met her a few times before she and her partner Kelly moved to America. In the interview, she said “There’s a limit to how many Coming Out stories—or Tales of Oppression, or whinges about How My Family Done Me Wrong Because I’m Different—can be interesting.” Do you think it’s true that many of these tropes or themes are getting worn out?

lynne: Yes. It’s difficult to explain this and I always seem to upset people with this answer. I’m not trying to devalue anyone’s experience of a horrible situation they may have lived through as a result of being queer. While we have made significant social and political strides in terms of gay rights, people still turn their backs on their kids for being gay; queers are still murdered simply for being. Nonetheless, I’d rather read a book with queer characters doing all the same things straight characters do in “normal” stories, experiencing the same problems (because we do) and having to navigate solutions to these everyday issues. Because we live everyday lives. I find that a lot more empowering.

The news and other media are always going to tell us about the horrible things people do to other people. I believe books can act as a countermeasure, a form of transcendent inspiration that moves beyond what the rest of the world constantly throws at us. The connection between reader and word is extremely powerful and it can work both ways, I believe. It can either empower or disenfranchise.

greydog: We’re reminded of our interview with Richard Mansfield last year. He and his partner Daniel make LGBT films (and some great supernatural adaptations as well). He said: “I think we were both feeling frustrated with gay cinema. There seemed to be very few releases with something different to say. Personally I wanted to make a film where the couple were secure and happy with themselves. I wanted to show a snap-shot in the lives of two men that had found a place to be themselves… Lots of gay cinema deals with self-loathing or homophobia but I wanted any negative influence to be external…”

Right, we’re running out of space. We always like to give our listeners a trail or two to follow. Who stands out for you (as a reader) amongst contemporary writers – genre or otherwise?

lynne: What a question! So many. But I’ll try. I adore Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and I cannot wait for the sequel. The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer – like an extremely weird version of LOST but with a better ending. I just finished Jacqueline Baker’s The Broken Hours: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft which was haunting and beautifully written. I’m currently reading All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, and it’s magical. Not to mention all the terrific short fiction out there – I highly recommend The Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthologies published by Undertow Publications.

greydog: What will we see from you in the next year or so? More fiction, more editing, or do you have quite different endeavours planned?

lynne: I’m currently working on a proposal for a collection of stories that will centre on the weirdness of nature. Because the natural world is STRANGE. I’ve been working on a novel for longer than I care to remember but I have some nefarious plans in that area that will hopefully come to fruition soon. The forthcoming Black Wings of Cthulhu V features my story “In Bloom”. And there’s some more stories in my skull banging away looking for an exit. Who needs sleep, right?

greydog: Lynne, thank you – it’s been a pleasure to meet you, and we look forward to your future works.

You can find out more about Lynne and her work on her own blog, here:

lynne jamneck diaries

And you can also dig into Dreams from the Witch House, which is available now, and sample the many interesting tales within.

dreams from the witch house (us link)

Later tomorrow – The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, and a few extra snippets.

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On Post-post-Lovecraftian Signposts

May 27, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

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.

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In the Terrible Depths – The True Origins of the Ghoul

May 26, 2016 greydogtales Leave a comment

Today, Agatha Christie plays Final Fantasy over the ruins of Babylon, watched by some bored Bedouin and an arthritic camel. And many apologies to lurchers lovers – our little donkeys will return next week. But for now it’s the final episode of Ghoul Trek, boldly going where most sites are smart enough not to go, and the last part of our scholarly investigation into the origins of the 20^th century literary creature, the ghoul. If, of course, instead of ‘scholarly investigation’ you’ll settle for three rambling articles nailed together under the influence of dog hair.

Many years ago, when we were young and danced merrily o’er buttercup meadows, we bought a great big book, The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. It’s basically 500 pages containing most of the poetry you need for an interesting life, including hunter’s songs, anonymous lines, historical verse and cool poets. And it has a fragment called The Seven. Poetry sucks, you say – where are all the creepy monsters? Well…

In the terrible depths, the dark houses
They swell, they grow tall
They are neither female nor male
They are a silence heavy with seastorms.

The whole piece is a disturbing evocation of something unholy and dark, ‘the faces of evil’. What are these creatures? They are gallu, our ultimate goal. Not as in we want to meet them, more as in ‘Where did the concept of the ghoul come from in the first place?’

No-one wants much of a recap on the last two articles, do they? Let’s just say that H P Lovecraft and other weird horror writers messed with 17^th and 18^th century Gothic muddles, Islamic tales varied, Bedouins crossed a lot of sand and found lumps of Mesopotamian legend in the ruins. It’s our formula of the month:

ghoul = ghul = gallu

In Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian mythology, the gallus or gallu demons were dark and wicked beings from the underworld. Sometimes they seem to have had the attributes of gods, sometimes they were seen as the offspring of devils and human women. They were unusual in their ability to travel between the normal world and underworld, and could carry people off into eternal darkness.

In Babylonian mythology they could be held back or appeased by sacrificing animals to them, as they were known to prey on herds as well as people. The gallu was generally humanoid in appearance, occasionally animal-headed (often that of a bull), and caused nightmares, making people flee in terror and so on.

Importantly for our trail, the gallu was known to drink blood and eat human flesh. So it seems that these gallu demons are the original source of the ghul, both in etymology and some of their habits. As suggested, the most likely reason for this is that the tribes of Arabia and surrounding lands had trade links with Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and its neighbours). Through these links, they absorbed and spread the idea of the gallu, which became the ghul.

by Walter Stoneman, bromide print, July 1934

R Campbell Thompson, the Edwardian archaeologist who we’ve met here before, translated many of the original cuneiform records in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To add to your trivia banks, we feel it only fair to mention that Agatha Christie, the detective writer, knew him.

In 1931 she and her husband (who was also an archaeologist) were invited to the excavation site at Nineveh. She dedicated her story Lord Edgware Dies to “Dr. and Mrs. Campbell Thompson”. In 1937 she wrote the play Akhnaton, which fascinated us when young.

Anyway, we were talking about Campbell Thompson. He wrote:

There are certain spirits described as “the Seven” around whom a great many poems were composed and welded into the incantations and spells. The best known is the Invocation against the Seven: —

Seven are they! Seven are they!
In the Ocean Deep seven are they!
Battening in Heaven seven are they,
Bred In the depths of Ocean.

Nor male nor female are they,
But are as the roaming windblast,
No wife have they, no son can they beget;
Knowing neither mercy nor pity,
They hearken not to prayer or supplication.

They are as horses reared among the hills…
Of these seven [the first] is the South Wind.
The second Is a dragon with mouth agape
That none can [withstand];
The third is a grim leopard
That carrieth off children…
The fourth is a terrible serpent…
The fifth is a furious beast [?]
After which no restraint…
The sixth is a rampant […]
Which against god and king.
The seventh is an evil windstorm…

These seven are the Messengers of Anu, the king:
Bearing gloom from city to city,
Tempests that furiously scour the heavens,
Dense clouds that over the sky bring gloom,
Rushing windgusts, casting darkness o’er the brightest day,
Forcing their way with baneful windstorms.
Mighty destroyers, the deluge of the Storm-God,
Stalking at the right hand of the Storm-God.

The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903)

note the seven animal-headed demons across the top

You”ll see the similarities in the above to the Rattlebag version, which was apparently freely translated by Jerome K Rothenberg in the sixties. His Technicians of the Sacred collection (1968) was described as presenting:

‘primitive’ and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating…the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets.

Can we provide any other evidence? For more on the gallu themselves, we turn to Morris Jastrow Jr and his book The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1893)

The demons were of various kinds and of various grades of power. The names of many of them, as utukku, shedu, alu, gallu, point to ‘strength’ and ‘greatness’ as their main attribute; other names, as lilu, ‘night-spirit,’ and the feminine form lilitu, are indicative of the moment chosen by them for their work; while again, names like ekimmu, the ‘seizer,’ akhkhazu, the ‘capturer,’ rabisu, ‘the one that lies in wait,’ labartu, ‘the oppressor,’ and labasu, ‘the overthrower,’ show the aim that the demons have in view. Putting these names together, we may form a general idea of the conceptions connected with the demons.

They lurk in hidden or remote places, in graves, in the shadow of ruins, on the tops of mountains, in the wilderness. Their favorite time of activity is at dead of night. They glide noiselessly like serpents, entering houses through holes and crevices. They are powerful, but their power is directed solely towards evil. They take firm hold of their victims and torture them mercilessly.

And there you have our ghul from last time, lurking in ‘hidden or remote places, in graves, in the shadow of ruins, on the tops of mountains, in the wilderness.’ We rest our case.

As an additional bit of evidence that these ideas survive far longer than you’d expect, even if they mutate a little, we’ll add a bit more of R Campbell Thompson:

But a still more striking evidence of the conservatism of Eastern tradition is shown in a Syriac charm which is worth quoting in full.

Seven accursed brothers, accursed sons!
destructive ones, sons of men of destruction!
Why do you creep along on your knees and move upon your hands?’
And they replied, ‘We go on our hands,
so that we may eat flesh, and we crawl along
upon our hands, so that we may drink blood.’

As soon as I saw it, I prevented them from devouring,
and I cursed and bound them in the name of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, saying,
‘May you not proceed on your way, nor finish your
journey, and may God break your teeth, and cut
the veins of your neck, and the sinews thereof, that
you approach not the sheep nor the oxen of the
person who carries [sc. these writs]! I bind you
in the name of Gabriel and Michael. I bind you
by that angel who judged the woman that combed
(the hair of) her head on the eve of Holy Sunday.

May they vanish as smoke from before the wind
for ever and ever, Amen!’

If you like to go Biblical, we add this from Luke 11:24-26:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

And if you thought that video games weren’t educational, the most contemporary use of gallu we could find was in the game Final Fantasy XI, where the gallu are fearsome demonic beings best not met. Especially not with their special abilities of Bolt of Perdition and Crippling Rime. Fancy that. The Sumerians would have been excited to get their hands on that one.

This weekend – it’s H P Lovecraft time again. Not content with dissecting his ghouls, we have a triffid interview with Lynne Jamneck, writer and editor of the recent release Dreams from the Witch House, coverage of the brand-new Mammoth Book of Cthulhu and some carefully chosen thoughts on sex with shoggoths. Come back in a couple of days and wallow in Mythosian badness…

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