Cody Goodfellow's Blog, page 2

Notes From The Lovecraftian Ghetto

By Cody Goodfellow



People are saying the horror genre is dying, and the signs and portents have begun to roll in proving them right. But they always have and they always will, both within and without the writing cohort, for their own reasons. People who thought they could make a living at it discover they can't, either because of the criminally low "pro" word rates, the paltry number of decent markets, or their own cussed lack of talent. Fans who see every shift in merchandising at their local big-box bookstore, and every vapid paranormal romance franchise that steals the thunder of true horror releases, as the penultimate deathblow to the genre. Who would've thought that devotees of a genre devoted entirely to instilling fear would ever become so fearful?

In a lot of meaningful ways, the doomsayers may be right, and in a lot of ways, they always have been. Horror is a hard thing to share with someone who doesn't already have a predisposition to enjoy it. That mysterious mix of morbid curiosity and zeal for overturning taboos that makes a true horror fan is almost impossible to formulate. Simple child abuse won't do it––those kids all end up as CSI and Twilight fans. True horror fans aren't a demographic easily grown by mass media, so even as every other aspect of culture mushrooms, it's easy to feel like we're still the same small town spread to monofilial thinness over the western hemisphere, selling each other the same made-up bad news and lamenting the new hydroelectric New Weird dam sure to flood us all out of our hovels.

Because if one factor has started to take a bite, it's exactly the thing that at first seemed like horror's salvation. Recently, so much of what makes horror exciting to the mass public––the magic, action, otherworldly romance and dreams of immortal, invincible ass-kicking––has been skillfully grafted onto other, safer genres, leaving true horror the ugly, antisocial orphan at the genre homecoming, a vulgar, bipolar monster who won't take his meds.

But I'm not here to lament the passing of horror, or to throw lifesavers at its bloated corpse. Horror will get along fine without my advice––indeed, without your or my active participation. At its heart, horror and dark fantasy are mythmaking, and it stands to reason that, if we made up comforting myths about great sky fathers handcrafting the world for us to salve our ignorant terror of everything around us, then we must, in an age of relative rationality, stability and plenty, create unsettling myths that prick that sleeping ancestral caveman inside us, perhaps because we know we'll need him sooner, rather than later, to wake up.

No, in the face of all these doomsayers eager to help bulldoze the moribund horror ghetto, I'd like to offer a brief(ish) tour of a darker, poorer, freakier side of town right under their feet; one so profoundly misunderstood that, to its benighted inhabitants, the present dire straits look like a new Golden Age.

The Cthulhu Mythos is largely misunderstood in exactly the same ways that horror is misunderstood by outsiders, and likewise wrongfully crucified for its worst specimens. Few literary icons are more passionately divisive than Lovecraft, with many "serious" students of fantasy still disgusted by his rise to legitimacy, and some World Fantasy Award recipients embarrassed to find their totem of recognition cast in the likeness of the eldritch Yankee gent. While every serious horror reader has had enough exposure to Lovecraft's work to decide whether they love or hate it, the general consensus on everything after Lovecraft is "mostly crap."

When Lovecraft died and his works seemed doomed to obscurity, his young acolytes August Derleth and Donald Wandrei heroically established Arkham House as a shrine to his work, but also as a missionary project, to build on the shadowy canon of alien gods and make the Mythos a living, breathing artificial mythology, an existential pulp folklore. But like so many religions, the visions of the founding prophets got watered down and repurposed to suit the little visions of his acolytes. In flat pastiches and "dead zone duets" that fleshed out his mentor's unfinished outlines, Derleth systematized the Old Ones with elemental domains and a breathtakingly stupid family tree, draining all the mystery out of the pantheon. Worse, he placed them in opposition to a benign cadre of Elder Gods, who had whipped them into submission and imprisoned them, and presumably could do so again. And Lin Carter fucked the Mythos up beyond recognition. Later generations of Lovecraftian pilgrims have reduced the Great Old Ones to mere recurring supervillain punching bags for their larger-than-life heroes, completely inverting the dynamic that made this stuff more than a guilty pleasure in the first place. Their earnest love for Lovecraft's mythos nearly killed it.

After Lovecraft, much of the bracing existential terror that was Lovecraft's greatest triumph, the inevitability of the Old Ones' return and conquest, was washed away, and the Cthulhu Mythos became just another set of hoary tropes. The way was paved for scads of lame ripoffs with hokey alphabet soup godlings devouring amateur scholars who pick the wrong book/beach resort/screensaver, and sinister rituals to raise Cthulhu with virgin sacrifices forever foiled by intrepid gumshoes and retired librarians.

This is what has defined the Mythos for too many readers, for far too long, but there has always been a vital undercurrent of latterday mythmaking that neither shunned the most extreme vistas of Lovecraft's canon, nor plunged too far and too clumsily into imitating them. Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Brian McNaughton and T.E.D. Klein modified Lovecraft's visions, but also amplified them, because they preserved the uniquely arresting existential angst that set the Mythos apart from everything else.

I have heard Lovecraftian horror derided as dead-end grave-humping by successful writers content to blaze new trails with the further adventures of Batman, Tarzan, Conan and Sherlock Holmes, but Lovecraft's gift was not merely a closed book with room to scribble in the margins. It was never just his world. He freely borrowed from the worlds of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen, and just as freely offered his universe to any who cared to play in it, and would no doubt be flabbergasted, if not universally impressed, at its robust survival. He would probably also agree, though, that most of it is crap.

I have also heard Lovecraft's universe dismissed as pointless and bleak by writers unabashedly enamored of zombie apocalypses and torture porn. Lovecraft restored awe and grandeur to horror, but Lovecraft's monsters weren't his greatest gift, or the secret of his resonance. It was a new way of facing the materialist universe: a skeptical, yet creative view of the diminished state of humankind after Darwin, Einstein and Hitler destroyed our vision of a divinely guided, human-sized universe. To write in the Cthulhu Mythos, you don't have to ape Lovecraft's tropes, or, as so many unworthy Mythos writers do, ape his imitators: one must merely stare into the void until one's mind populates it with monsters, and start writing.

In notes for his Lovecraft Unbound story, Nick Mamatas opines that Lovecraftian fiction is "mercenary––there's an audience eager for it, and a market waiting for it," but then observes that the Mythos purists aren't ready for his kind of highbrow Mythos loving. Loath as I am to disagree with the meek and defenseless Mr. Mamatas, his statement betrays either an outsider's misapprehension of the market, or a secret knowledge of scads of high-paying Mythos markets he's hoarding for himself.

Through none of my own hard work, I live in a really nice neighborhood in LA. My well-to-do neighbors (some TV producers, but mostly pharmacists) all assume I belong here because I'm a writer of paperback horror novels. They think there must be good money in it, or how else could I live next to them? But we all know that almost nobody good enough to write horror worth reading does it just for the money. Horror writers are generally powerless to write anything else, and wouldn't write anything else with half the zeal, the mad, mostly unrequited love, they put into scary stories that nobody in their right mind would want to read. And so it goes, times a hundred, for those sad bastards who write Mythos stories.

While there have always been a handful of shaky Mythos markets swimming remora-like in the wake of Arkham House, the scene has always been a microcosm of the horror field at large. Amazon's communities registry lists about 50,000 self-identified horror fans, but only about 500 Mythos fans. Hardly a perfect survey, but a safe measure of how small a part of the horror field the Mythos represents. 1% is a bit slight, but 5% would be way too generous. Aside from the quite lavish book in which Mamatas's quote appeared, I know of no other major Lovecraftian anthologies coming out that year, and only two––Cthulhu's Reign and Black Wings––slated for this year (and I didn't get into either of them). But there are always a handful of semi-pro and for-the-love anthos in the works, and a bumper crop of earnestly amateur venues all over the net, and no end of mad bastards in a perpetual frenzy to bring this shit to life [http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html].

Sure, all writing is more or less mercenary, but unless you're on Ellen Datlow's speed-dial, you're probably writing Lovecraftian stories for next to nothing. Veteran editor Darrell Schweitzer recently told me that there "just isn't enough original material" for a healthy presence in the market, so one has to suppose that those willing to write cosmic horror purely for money have, with few exceptions, not found any money. If you're doing it, it's got to be for the love, and maybe a couple cans of navy beans.

As few fanatical Mythos writers as there are, there are even fewer reliable publishers, and their output is even shakier than the field at large. It's easy to see why some might misapprehend that writing horror is a shrewd financial pursuit, given how well Stephen King does at it, and what Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity raked in. But you'd have to be batshit insane to think writing Mythos horror will pay for your book-buying habit, let alone your crippling eating, breathing and breeding addictions.

Some writers may well try their hand at cosmic horror to crack a market, but excepting a few rare geniuses (Mieville, Chabon) who nuke every concept their pulsating mega-brains take a momentary shine to, nobody just waltzes into the subgenre on a lark and gets anywhere near the dance floor. You have to live for this shit just to get any good at it, and nobody expects to get rich off it. Whether it is a youthful dalliance (Lumley and Campbell), or a guilty pleasure indulged at one's kingly leisure, (King, Straub, Gene Wolfe), or a genuinely obsessive haunting (Ligotti, Klein, McNaughton), the people who write it seem powerless to stop doing so, regardless of where or whether it will appear. The Mythos ghetto's inhabitants are deeply tattooed; their numbers may grow glacially, if at all, but there are few subcultures deeper or more sharply defined. You either love it, or you rank it a notch above Furries in the geek pecking order.

My first professional sale was a game supplement for the Call Of Cthulhu roleplaying game, and I'm still waiting for them to pay me. Gaming writers are a rung below even the lowest Mythos-raping hacks in many purists' minds, but the game seemed like the best way to sharpen my skills as a storyteller, and seeing the faces of your readers as they react to your tale is, for writers, what peeking in on your own funeral must be, to everyone else. The Call Of Cthulhu RPG came out a year after I discovered Lovecraft at age twelve, and while my peers thought Lovecraft's writing "sucked ass," I could tie them in knots with a well-run game, so it became the best way to share my love of Lovecraft. It may have cheapened my understanding of the genre, but it taught me that, while the characters must be doomed from the first spoken or written word, it's no crime for the road to ruin to be an exciting one.

Right now, I have four big Mythos stories attached to anthologies, and I have no real idea when any of them is coming out, or what, if anything, they will pay. But I'm currently writing two more. While Mythos horror has been about half of my published output, including my first two solo novels, I have made less money from Cthulhu missionary work than from every other kind of writing I've ever sold. And left to my own devices, I'd still write that shit for free.

And because there just isn't enough decent Mythos horror to read, my friend Adam Barnes and I started Perilous Press, and with S.T. Joshi as our line editor, we've set out to dig up and commission Lovecraftian horror for the 21st century.

I keep coming back to it because it gets to the fundamental screws that hold my identity together. I have always been an organic atheist, and yet I have always been infused with the awe, fear and trembling of a spiritual seeker by the infinite strangeness, the abominable cruelty and awful beauty of the physical universe and all that lives in it. I write and publish this stuff because it fascinates me, and pushes buttons that other people push when they talk to or about God, but I am fully aware that even most horror audiences are turned off by it. Most supernatural horror–– with devils (and thus God) or vampires (and thus, vampire-slayers)––seems like comfort food, because the void holds no particular terror for me. To feel no comforting Creator's hand on one's shoulder, and to stand, seemingly alone in the universe, and yet surrounded, invaded and overrun by mindless life that seems to partake of some secret we cannot comprehend or accept––that's what makes a great cosmic horror story. That, and some tentacles.

But even as the horror field burns, Lovecraftian fiction is on the rise, with comics and movies and more presses small and large cashing in on, if not paying tribute to, the trappings, if not the true spirit, of the Cthulhu Mythos. Horror seems to thrive in times when we have it good, but feel we don't deserve it, but in times of trouble, people look for answers, and Cthulhu has them. Mamatas is dead right about much of what's on offer, these days: so much of the stuff most visibly touting Lovecraft's vision is just looking to cash in on the next zombie-vampire-werewolf boom. But I expect they'll come away disappointed.

Where Lovecraft's themes are stripped from his stuff, the result quickly becomes cheesy, trivial tentacle porn, and where it tries to keep them in a mass media project (The Mist), it devolves into a deeply unmarketable bummer. The lowbrow markets will never be able to distinguish Cthulhu from Davey Jones, but the movement to reform Lovecraftian horror into something worthy of "serious" readers aims instead to strip the themes from the weird, wonderful stuff, and keep the themes. And it promises to make much more serious, adult mistakes.

As if to atone for the sins of the genre's pulp past, literary Lovecraftian horror prides itself on its restraint––tentacles are blurred out as pornographic juvenilia, crazy invocations and colorful forbidden books are all chucked out as clichés or mocked in postmodernist meta-japery. The climactic visions are too often occluded, the intensity of the experience diluted, by the careful eschewing of Lovecraft's "vulgar excesses," to yield a more mature vision of cosmic horror. Always, we behold the Other at a great remove, either through the narrator's obsession with a lover or comrade who vanishes into occult secrets, or an oblique encounter with some atavistic pagan rite masquerading as hard-headed modernity. The coy withholding of the ultimate gnosis becomes less a sign of seriousness, and more a surfeit of self-consciousness. In an earnest desire to drag Lovecraftian horror into the ivory light of literary respectability, many have gone as far in their own misadventures as the pastiche-mongers who gave the Cthulhu Mythos such a bad rap in the first place.

Cosmic horror must offer an incontrovertible vision of the wrongness of the universe, not just a deft flick of a glimpse, and some narrative histrionics to infer the awesome, sanity-blasting otherness of something they can't be arsed to actually describe. Where early pastiches leapt too eagerly into the void and made it commonplace, the literary movement seems to have decided not to try, and so have surrendered the very heart of the effect that makes the pursuit worth it.

Mamatas's complaint that the subgenre doesn't want its tentacle porn disturbed with new interpretations also brings to light another common misconception––that everything after Lovecraft is reactionary pastiche, and apes Lovecraft's impenetrable style and hokey techniques. Pastiche has become a slur, in fact, and to become more than a fan-fic peddler, some drastic reinvention of the Mythos is essential. I don't know anyone who hated Move Underground, but if Mythos purists fail to embrace this kind of work, it's because the author samples the Mythos in a wry, ironic mashup with another off-the-shelf flavor of American popular culture. New, daring riffs on the Mythos are what most jaded Mythos fans want, but they expect to see it taken somewhat seriously as a living, breathing artificial mythology, not just another cheesy chestnut sampled by a writer all too hip to its ironic lameness.

Another smart way to wreck cosmic horror is to humanize it. Many authors who loudly denounce Lovecraft's racism and misogyny think they're setting the balance right by filling their stories with human characters and their motivations, their emotions, their ethnicity. This is great, but it misses the point. Anyone who clobbers Lovecraft for his (appalling) racism and (debatable) misogyny really isn't giving him credit for how much he hated all of humanity. In his smashing defensive tract, HP Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life, Houllebecq notes that the author's great texts came out of his catastrophic failure in New York; as a writer, a husband and a human being. His raging angst expressed itself in racist diatribes, but it uncovered a pattern that bore out through his treatment of everything on two legs. While a generous friend to many men, Lovecraft set himself as a resolute enemy of humankind. He was utterly uninterested in how human beings work inside, and swept it wholesale out of his stories. Except in their capacity to commit or witness monstrous atrocities on behalf of unnamable gods, Lovecraft had no use for humanity. While he might not have hungered for the extinction of the human race, he certainly would have been delighted to discover he was something else. This kind of sociopathic disconnection from the normal human world is not essential to writing a good Lovecraftian horror story, but it really does help.

Among those who humanize the Mythos without blowing it, George Browning Spencer is worth celebrating. No shrewder student of the human animal ever wrote, yet his insight manages to remind us how utterly fucking weird human beings really are. And many writers of Lovecraftian horror today do charge into the unspeakable, and bring back the goods, without looking like chumps. Laird Barron proves that complexity and subtlety do not absolve the writer from actually showing us the Thing Too Hideous To Describe, and where he does not, he adroitly makes even the most jaded of us genuinely glad that he hasn't. Mark Laidlaw and Michael Shea instill in the Mythos a much-needed poetical awe at the terrible beauty of the other face of nature, but they're not too fastidious to scare the shit out of you. Where Michael Cisco, Brian Evenson and Charlie Stross bring a gritty, modernist mindset to the Mythos universe, they fit snugly amid the anachronistic oddities of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, Brian Stableford and Dan Clore, whose lovingly antiqued works are like apocryphal entries cleverly snuck into the archaeological record.

Rich arguments can be stoked forever on the merits of any of these branches of Lovecraft's many-tentacled tree, but they are all thriving right now, and even if they're still a freakish undergrowth overshadowed by a twisted tree everybody thinks is about to fall over, yet the gardeners who love and tend it would give their blood to see it grow. And they do.

If this is not a Golden Age for the Cthulhu Mythos, then it's still a Gold Rush, with rich veins of the pure shiny stuff buried in mountains of ordinary rocks. Like all horror fans, we are misunderstood and our motives are mistrusted, but like all horror writers and fans, we love it not for the money(???) or the love of fear itself, but because in an empty universe, it somehow seems to love us back.

And if Cthulhu won't love you, who will?

In The Saddle Of Lovecraft Season

Rockin' The Innsmouth Look @ the WeHo Book Fair

I don't know what we did to deserve it, but the west coast now has two Lovecraft Film Festivals. Nicely bracketing my birthday, to boot.

When rumblings from up north foreshadowed that this year's fest in Portland might be the last, filmmaker, columnist and LARP guru Aaron Vanek embarked on a mad campaign to bring the best of the fest to southern California. The gorgeous Warner Grand Theater in San Bruno was a perfect setting for the one-day show, and the program included a pristine print of Re-Animator introduced by Stuart Gordon and a preview of The Whisperer In Darkness, the latest vintage extravaganza from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society.

Turnout was less than expected for a city half LA's size, but the response was good enough that Aaron's planning to do it again, and the mother fest in Portland now looks to be not only the best yet, but probably not the last.

Adam and I will be at the Hollywood Theater all weekend, along with Michael Shea, S.T. Joshi, Mike Dubisch and a stellar cast of incredible writers and filmmakers, with close and convenient bowling.

Perilous Rides Again… In Recession-Fighting Chaps

Vaya con huevos...

Nobody's got too much money to spend on books right now, and that goes double for us. But poverty is no excuse for shiftlessness, so we're releasing a new series of affordable, illustrated chapbook novellas.

At long last, In The Shadow Of Swords, the Radiant Dawn prequel novella, is back in print and available now soon in our store. Swords was the first piece of writing many fans and friends ever read of my work, and I'm thrilled to put it out again in an edition that's easy to misplace in airplane seat magazine slots. Black Wind, a brand new Mythos weird western featuring cover art by the inestimable Mike Dubisch and interior illustrations by joltin' Jeromy Cox, is also on sale now(?).

And next month, we are proud to present The Eye Of Infinity, a new Harrison Peel novella by Australia's most eldritch export, David Conyers. The dangerously overstuffed chap will feature a Dubisch cover and ten (10!) interiors by Nick "The Hat" Gucker. It's a dazzling new installment in an epic series that began in The Spiraling Worm, and a spellbinding fusion of cosmic horror, quantum physics and good old-fashioned espionage action.

While these books will be cheap, their numbers will be limited to under 500, and they'll only be available through our store, and at conventions and signing appearances.

The Womb of Time

Perilous Press is proud to announce the next release in its New Millennium Mythos series, THE WOMB OF TIME by Brian Stableford. The volume will contain the title novella as well as "The Legacy Of Erich Zann."

Brian Stableford is a past master of British New Wave fantasy and science fiction, with over 50 novels and seven collections to his credit. A literary scholar with one hundred translated volumes, Stableford is also an adept craftsman at literary pastiche, but his true skill lies in subverting familiar subjects into new and dangerous shapes. Thus, in The Womb Of Time, what the pilgrims to the ruined town of Dunwich witness on the exposed sea floor is far more subtle than the average tentacular potboiler, but strikes at the heart of the dreaded Cthulhu archetype as no other work has yet dared.

"The Legacy Of Erich Zann" is a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft's short masterpiece, but Stableford injects Poe's seminal master detective Auguste Dupin into a diabolical mystery that pits the unflappable against the unthinkable.

Edited with an introduction by S.T. Joshi, with sublime artwork by Cyril Van Der Haegen, THE WOMB OF TIME is a groundbreaking vivisection of the meaning and mystery of the Cthulhu Mythos.