Read Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois Online
Authors: Pierre V. Comtois,Charlie Krank,Nick Nacario
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Horror, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Supernatural, #Suspense, #Paranormal
Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (70 page)
Ultimately, my take on the Mythos is that it’s nothing to take very seriously, so why not have fun with it? It’s various components: Cthulhu, the
Necronomicon
, Dunwich and Innsmouth might be considered archetypes within its self-contained universe. Touchstones of inspiration that never seem to exhaust themselves, so why not explore them? Almost twelve years ago, I proceeded to do just that. Inspired by the stories first of Derleth, then of Lin Carter (his paperback edition of
Weird Tales
from 1980 was a big influence on my own publishing aspirations; by the way, does anyone out there have copy of #2 I can buy?) I determined to start my own magazine dedicated to the perpetuation of Mythos pastiche which I grandly called
Chronicles of the Cthulhu Codex
. And although that first issue had some great “yarns” in it, I was always a sucker for a good story, no matter how it was written, and included the inventive “Arc Tangent” by Gregorio Montejo. Although I dropped out of the small press and fiction writing in general for almost ten years, I’ve recently jumped back in with both feet with the revival of my old mag
Fungi
which I hope will offer an alternative to all the Mythos and splatter, s/exploitation mags flooding the postal routes these days. (One of the most disheartening things about getting back into the game has been all the submissions I get involving violence to children, exploitation of women, and simple bad taste, but I’ll leave that as possible fodder for a future editorial).
In the meantime, enjoy this latest crop of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, but before anyone writes to accuse me of possible hypocrisy, I have to warn you that Bob bears ultimate responsibility for the fiction department!
When first conceived some months ago, this editorial was supposed to address a trend in Mythos/HPL writing that I had thought to be something new and unique to HPL fandom. Well, since taking a little time to ask questions and look around, I’ve since discovered that in general, the use of an author within the fictionalized setting of a story or novel is not new (indeed, Dante used Virgil in
The Inferno
). However the purposes to which deceased authors have been used in fiction have changed over the years, a change that has resulted in a truly recent trend that seeks to explore their sexual lives as well as their perceived perversions and scandals.
Recent literary attempts of this nature have been done with Henry Adams and Henry James and in a related context, a slew of biographical films have been released as well.
But what prompted me to address the subject for this editorial was a casual thumbing through of a recent collection of new Mythos fiction called
The Starry Wisdom
(1996 expanded edition).
Now, at this point, I must admit and warn the reader that I am not nor have I been for many years, an avid Mythos reader. For reasons touched upon in my last column, I have given up on much of what the newer contributors and editors of Mythos fiction purvey as such. Consequently, much of my experience with modern Mythos fiction has been limited to casual perusals of collections found in my local Barnes and Noble or Borders. Also, my retention of much of any of it is low, resulting in my admission here that I can’t remember any of the titles or authors (except in a most generic way: the book with the photo cover or the one written by a couple of comic book writers, etc.) of most of the volumes I’ve looked at. Except when something so outrageous crosses my eye that it sticks with me. Such was it with the
Starry Wisdom
volume.
This is how it happened:
I was scanning the horror section at a Borders bookstore in West Palm Beach last Spring when I came across the
Starry Wisdom
book. As I always do, I took it down to thumb through it. I recognized the name of Grant Morrison (a comic book writer who’s achieved some modicum of attention outside the comics field), and decided to read some random paragraphs from his contribution called “Lovecraft in Heaven.” Well, imagine this old hand’s surprise when I came across passages describing in clinical detail the sexual activities of HPL and his wife Sonia Greene:
…Lovecraft enters her convulsively, clenching back the nausea that bubbles in his throat. She loops her legs around him and lets out a long breath. She bites his ear, whispers some Slavic endearment …The clock stops ticking and he empties his terror into her arctic gulfs, her cold wastes, her cellar spaces, going inside and out simultaneously. His prick goes soft inside her, with a great oceanic seizure and he finds himself walking along the train tracks̷
You get the idea. But in this story, even Lovecraft’s parents are not safe from such undignified treatment:
…The tattered, flayed corpse of his father is clambering through the wet earth into his mother’s coffin, prising the lid away with broken-stick fingers, eager for her fresher flesh…Father, corrupt, in-sane, tears, through her bridal veil, puncturing her rotten flesh and mindlessly fucking the punctures. The two bodies squirm and knot in a tangle of greasy, ruined limbs. Father’s swollen cock bursts and spills maggots, spits obscene crawling words…
What can I say about my shock, horror and dismay at this truly undignified, even insulting fictional account?
Call me naive (and in light of the biographical fiction noted above, perhaps I was), but for me it was the last straw. After years of coming across the use of HPL in fan fiction (as I recall, usually as a protagonist in solving mysteries or fighting Cthulhoid monsters), perhaps I should not have been completely surprised, but his use had never achieved such heights, or should I say lows, as this example. It started me thinking: just what is it with HPL that seems to attract such undignified treatment? Of course, one could point out that Lovecraft himself may have initiated the trend by first including his friends in his stories and later allowing himself to be killed as the protagonist in the Robert Bloch story “Shambler from the Stars,” but did he deserve to be so treated by Morrison?
Is such treatment of Lovecraft a subconscious thing or have fans always been secretly contemptuous of HPL? Not for his antiquarianism, not for his anti-semitism, not even for his racism, but simply for his lack of an interesting sex life? Maybe it was his professed Victorian values? Or is it all more a reflection of modern society’s
fin de siecle
attitude that imbues all things sexual as very nearly the only thing worth living for that it cannot understand someone like Howard who was not into its full swing? If so, then he must be treated as hopelessly contemptible and the full panoply of discredited Freudian psychology be brought to bear upon him.
It makes me wonder: is it time to begin a “respect Howard” movement? Is there anyone out there who feels that things have gone far enough and it is now time to simply treat Howard Phillips Lovecraft as a man and nothing else? Isn’t it enough that we pillory anyone who tries to rise above the crowd in our own society without feeling the need to grave rob even the dead of their last shred of dignity?
The notion that time changes all perspectives was never more true than with my recent rereading of a clutch of Lovecraftian chestnuts that I hadn’t looked at in nearly twenty-five years.
It’s a strange thing, inexplicable to me, that of all writers connected with the so-called Lovecraft Circle (and other contemporaries that have not been connected with HPL in a personal way), the one I have least revisited is the one that I first encountered and that made the greatest impression upon me as a teenager: H.P. Lovecraft. Why that has been, I don’t really know. I don’t necessarily find his prose inaccessible, nor do I find his stories unentertaining. The only thing I can think of is that over the years, I’ve read so many alternate versions, variations, articles and pastiches, that it sometimes seemed tedious to go back and reread the original stories themselves.
Consequently, what time I’ve ever spent rereading favorite stories has usually been spent with Robert E. Howard or Algernon Blackwood.
Recently however, I had the perfect excuse to revisit some of those Lovecraft stories that I had been telling myself for years that I really ought to reread. I’m speaking of S.T. Joshi’s recent volume of
The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft
. (At least I think it’s recent; since I bought it in paperback, it’s entirely possible that the volume had appeared earlier in hardcover). Besides my suppressed desire to reread some of HPL’s stories, what attracted me to the volume was the fact that the stories it contained were the cleaned up versions Joshi had recently assembled for Arkham House, Joshi’s copious footnotes informing the reader of the stories’ arcane subtexts and its affordability.
Fine, but what has all this to do with changing perspectives? As I’ve said, I hadn’t read these stories since I was in high school when my reading habits were just emerging from the pure pastures of science fiction and taking their first dip into the world of fantasy.
The Lord of the Rings
was a recent discovery along with Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series and I was just finishing up the last volumes I could find of Edgar Rice Burroughs when I stumbled upon the Ballantine Lovecraft series.
My first exposure to Lovecraft (besides such films as The Dunwich Horror and Die, Monster, Die which I saw before I ever heard of Lovecraft), was when I picked up the Ballantine Books paperbacks of the early 70s (you know, the ones with the weird heads with either shards of glass or coiled worms sticking out of them?) which duly knocked me out
.
Lovecraft, especially the Cthulhu Mythos, became a passion. But now, years later, after rereading such stories as “The Dunwich Horror” and
At the Mountains of Madness
, I find myself scratching my head and wondering just what it was about these yarns that so grabbed me? Of course after so many years HPL could hold no surprises for me, but still, I expected something a bit more dazzling. Instead, I found myself trying to figure out just what was it that was supposed to be so horrible that the narrator of
At the Mountains of Madness
needed to tell his story to warn off future expeditions to the Antarctic. When the shoggoths finally appeared they were an anticlimax. As a matter of fact, the moment passed with my hardly noticing it. When I finished reading, I couldn’t help thinking “That’s it?” Certainly HPL’s description of those cyclopean ruins amidst the frozen waste were as evocative as ever, but the menace implied in the story just wasn’t there. The next expedition should just come in force and bring plenty of hand grenades.
“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour Out of Space” held up much better as elaborate mood pieces still inspiring in me wild visions of the tangled New England back country where as a youth with an imagination freshly fired by these selfsame images, I wandered, hoping to stumble across empty farmhouses or abandoned orchards.
The menace in these stories was much more clear cut and easily understandable leading itself to an anticipatory frisson. Where HPL seems to falter in all these stories is in his unconvincing assertion that the human mind would surely be blasted upon sight of the menace. The difference between my teenage self and the present is that perhaps my first impulse at 17 would have been to believe HPL and run as he’d insisted whereas today, it would be to pick up a gun and start shooting.
Will I go back and read more HPL? I’m not convinced it would be a terribly rewarding task, but if Mr. Joshi decides to continue with his annotated volumes, I’ll consider it as a convenient excuse to disregard my doubts and indulge myself in a continuing program of reassessment.
You know, if I were fifteen years old again, these would be flush times to be a Cthulhu Mythos fan. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much Mythos material so easily available in the whole 25 years since I first picked up the Ballantine editions of
The Survivor and Others
and
Fungi From Yuggoth and Other Poems
in 1971.
Oh, I’d stumbled across the stray Lovecraft yarn in other collections of weird stories, but the impact was diluted. It was those two books along with Lin Carter’s
Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos
that set my imagination boiling with that first glimpse of a larger Mythos universe.
Then came the Ballantine line of Lovecraft fiction (those books with the funny heads; boy, I had a hard time explaining
those
to my teachers and fellow students at St. Joseph’s High School!) Also, because of Marvel Comics’ Conan strip, I was reading Robert E. Howard. I found Carter and L. Sprague DeCamp’s
Conan the Buccaneer
first and from there, ordered all the remaining books in the Lancer Conan series. Next it was Lancer’s
Wolfshead
and (along a completely separate reading path wherein I discovered volume two of
The Lord of the Rings
and got hopelessly hooked on straight fantasy), stumbled across Clark Ashton Smith in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series.
Almost before I knew what was happening, I had simultaneously discovered the three musketeers of
Weird Tales
: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and the hunt for anything and everything by them was on! In rapid and dizzying succession, I spent the next decade amassing scores of new paperback editions collecting everything it seemed, by these authors and other
Weird Tales
alumni. And stranger than anything in all those stories was, it was all good stuff!
Which brings me in my long-winded way to my opening statement that these are flush times for a Mythos fan. In the fifteen years or so since the end of those boom years around 1979, a drought settled in that had allowed only desperate searches in used book stores to satisfy my need for more weird material. Today, however, that’s all changed. The horror shelves in Barnes and Noble and Borders are crowded with Mythos material from reissues of Lovecraft and Howard volumes to new tomes about tales from Miskatonic University and Chaosium Inc.’s excellent anthologies. In addition, through the mails, one can find lots more stuff from Necronomicon Press (including sometimes even
Fungi
) the internet and a number of mail order outlets. In fact, there’s so much material out there that it would have been impossible for my 15-year-old limited income self to have kept up with it!
But there are two problems with it all.
And I’ll admit right here that both may be problems only I have with the situation, but that won’t stop me from laying my difficulties with them on you anyway!
The first is that in all this new material, very little of it seems to include the larger Lovecraft Circle (or even the inner circle, with virtually nothing being released from Clark Ashton Smith in popularly priced editions). Where are paperback collections of Frank Belknap Long, Vernon Shea, Henry Kuttner, Lin Carter, Brian Lumley and especially August Derleth? Where are the collections of other
Weird Tales
contributors such as Henry S. Whitehead, E. Hoffmann Price, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, Hugh B. Cave, Wilfred Branch Talman, Edmund Hamilton, Eric Frank Russell, Carl Jacobi and yes, Seabury Quinn? Where are such eclectic paperback collections as
The Books of Robert E. Howard
? Lin Carter’s
Weird Tales
volumes 1-4?
The Last Celt
?
The Howard collector
?
Great Short Novels of Fantasy volumes 1 and 2
?
Beyond the Fields We Know
?
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
?
The second problem is that with the concentration of new material by new and/or unfamiliar names rather than classic authors and knowing the anything goes attitude of much of today’s media (I touched upon this theme in an earlier column related to disrespect for HPL), it is difficult for the discerning reader to navigate the potentially offensive waters of modern Mythos fiction.
So what’s the answer? Heck if I know! All I can be sure of is that if paperback publishers issued more eclectic collections by the classic
Weird Tales
contributors, it would be a whole lot easier to choose among the proliferation of titles with a more than reasonable chance of being satisfied with a purchase and not morally repulsed by it. After all, how wrong could you go with say,
The Second Book of E Hoffman Price
or
Henry S. Whitehead: The Unpublished Stories
or
The Portable August Derleth
or even
A Seabury Quinn Omnibus
?
I’ve been thinking about style. What set me off was a notice for contributions to a proposed anthology called
New Tales of Zothique
. In the notice, the editor asked for submissions that capture Clark Ashton Smith’s themes and ideas rather than a slavish adherence to his writing style.
That started me wondering: Can the themes explored by Smith (and H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard) be separated from his powerful writing style? And if they could, would the results be recognizable as being unique to Smith?
I don’t think so.
Smith had a unique voice and although many of his plots could not be classified as terribly original, it was dressing them up in the uniqueness of his prose style that turned them into the purest of reading pleasures.
Robert E. Howard didn’t invent sword and sorcery out of whole cloth (heck, it went at least as far back as T.H. White’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
), but the way he could spin a yarn made it all seem brand new. H.P. Lovecraft took bits and pieces and influences from such disparate places as the Bible and the Arabian Nights to fashion his heavy handed horror stories into seemingly complicated psychological mystery plays (after all, could August Derleth have drawn his notorious conclusions about the Elder Gods and Great Old Ones if there wasn’t a hint of a Biblical parallel somewhere?). And Clark Ashton Smith turned out simplistic vignettes about monsters and sorcerers and transformed them into jewel boxes of verbal ironies (Grimm’s fairy tales, anyone?). Eliminate their writing styles and what’s left? Pretty standard stuff I’d say.