Cthulhurotica

Kenneth Hite CTHULHU’S POLYMORPHOUS PERVERSITY

For $19.95, you can buy a foot-tall plush toy Cthulhu from ToyVault. You can also buy a plush “Mini Cthulhu” (only 8 inches tall), or a plush Cthulhu in a Santa Claus outfit. Plush Cthulhu also comes in variant color schemes (red-black, black-silver, and “wicked”), or with mounted suction cups for window-clinging action, and in the form of slippers, gloves, fanny packs, hats, dice bags, backpacks, pillows, and Christmas wreaths. Or you can buy small plastic Cthulhu collectible “action figures” called Mythos Buddies in blind packaging: will you get My Little Cthulhu, Goth ‘Thulhu, Coolthulhu, Matrixthulhu, Ninjathulhu, Ghost ‘Thulhu, or “Buddy ‘Thulhu”? (That last Mythos Buddy, a parody of director Kevin Smith’s satire of the modern Church’s “Buddy Christ” travesty of Jesus, may be so semiotically weightless that it actually floats away of its own accord.) What’s that? You don’t want Great Cthulhu in collectible toy form?

Not a problem. You can also get Cthulhu in comic books (The Fall of Cthulhu or Cthulhu Tales), card games (Mythos or Unspeakable Words or Munchkin Cthulhu), or board games (Arkham Horror, Do You Worship Cthulhu?, The Stars Are Right!), not to mention refrigerator magnets, bumper stickers, pendants, Tarot decks, poker decks, and rub-on tattoos that proclaim your allegiance to the Dreamer in the Deep. You can mount a “Campus Crusade for Cthulhu” or sport a “Cthulhu For President” button. (“Why settle for the lesser of two evils?”) Cthulhu or his ilk inspire music from Metallica (“The Call of Ktulu”), Fields of the Nephilim (“Kthulhu”), Deicide (“Dead but Dreaming”), and Blue Öyster Cult (“The Old Gods Return”), plus an entire Canadian ska-punk surf-rock band, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. (To say nothing of the 60s psychedelic quasi-rockers The H.P. Lovecraft. Of whom, “to say nothing” is exactly the thing to say.) Perhaps appropriately, Cthulhu appears as a bass player in the comic book Savage Henry, as well as in episodes of South Park and in Donald Duck comics, in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft (under the risible alias “C’Thun”) and in an Expressionist silent film — albeit one shot in 2005. Cthulhu is everywhere. He is the King of All Media.

What’s that? You only want Cthulhu stories? Actual fiction? Words on a page?

No problem. You can get Cthulhu stories by everyone from Neil Gaiman to Nick Mamatas, from Michael Chabon to Stephen King, or by the standard litany of Cthulhu Mythos authors: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Lin Carter, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Willum Hopfrog Pugmire… Enough of that. By now, the standard litany goes on longer even than Lovecraft’s lists of eldritch names. Or perhaps you’d prefer to browse by genre? There are Cthulhoid novels of espionage, mystery, adventure, sword-and-sorcery, splatter-and-crime, and office politics. Cthulhu has crossed over into novels starring Godzilla, Doctor Who, and Jack Kerouac. There are anthologies of Cthulhoid Westerns, sea stories, Sherlockian pastiches, post-apocalyptic tales, school stories, hardboiled detective tales, Japanese Cthulhu Mythos fiction, “literary” fiction, and now (ahem) erotica.

Cthulhu, and his titular Mythos, have increasingly come to resemble another of Lovecraft’s creations: the protean shoggoths from the novel At the Mountains of Madness. The rational, calculating Antarctic crinoid creatures created shoggoths as slaves, but the ever-shifting, formless things proved impossible to keep penned in their original role. They rebelled, and eventually came to replace their creators, slowly exterminating even the few pure rational remnants that survived. So, too, the purist Lovecraft scholars seem to feel about the wave of pastiches, mashups, and “Cthulhu kitsch” that by now outweighs Lovecraft’s original work by orders of magnitude in words read, dollars earned, or Warholian minutes of fame. Worse, this tsunami of “infantile” cultism (in the words of Edmund Wilson, one of the first major critics to engage with Lovecraft) seems to swamp, or even drown out, the legitimate literary merits of Lovecraft’s original story. Nobody worth reading, the serious-minded Lovecraftian frets, wants to read about Cthulhu, for fear of being swallowed up in the accompanying detritus. “If only Cthulhu were less popular,” goes the lament, “then he’d be much more popular.”

But Cthulhu is not unique in this. Everything that can be sold in the modern age will be sold, and in every form possible. Count Dracula, after all, not content with great movies, novels, mediocre movies, nonfiction tie-ins to novels, debunkings of non-fiction tie-ins to novels, worse movies, superb comic books, and the entire Romanian tourist industry, appears thinly disguised as a fictional children’s rabbit (Bunnicula) and a molar-corroding breakfast cereal (Count Chocula). There are bobble-heads, and illiterate T-shirts, and clever board-games, and plastic toys, and ridiculous cameo appearances devoted to Dracula, and James Bond, and Batman, and every other figure of modern myth. (You can also get a plush Cthulhu dressed as Dracula or James Bond.) No, John Updike’s “Rabbit” doesn’t have a video game or a plush toy — but who really thinks Harry Angstrom will outlive Dracula?

Not only does the necromancy of modern marketing summon them up in many forms, all the great monsters are polysemic; they are symbols with more than one meaning. Vampires, for example, have been read as the plague, rabies, tuberculosis, syphilis, and AIDS; as the fear of heresy, of foreigners, of the aristocracy, of juvenile delinquency, of religion, of atheism, and of sexual degeneracy caused by any or all of those things. Authors, directors, and critics have created vampiric metaphors for drug addiction, Communism, capitalism, fascism, feminism, black power, rock music, opera, cults, Catholicism, and anarchy. Vampires have represented perversion, sterility, temptation, homosexuality, adolescent love unleashed, and adolescent love restrained. By comparison, Cthulhu seems almost ascetic.

Partly this is a factor of time: vampires have been in Western culture’s bloodstream since 1732 (the first use of the word “vampire” in English), and have erupted in chronic outbreaks from 1819 (Polidori’s novel The Vampyre) onward. There have been at least six waves of best-selling vampire novels since then, as well as feature films (over 100 films alone starring Dracula) and two wildly popular television series. Cthulhu has broken out of his undersea mansion with none of these advantages. He was created (or rather, revealed to us mere mortals) barely a lifetime ago, in a low-selling niche publication in a despised marketing category. (If there were “respectable” pulps, which there weren’t, Weird Tales was not one of them.) There has never been a best-selling novel, or a mainstream blockbuster film, or a TV series featuring Cthulhu or his Mythos. Even Cthulhu’s comics are late, marginal additions to the field: his first (and so far only) continuing title, The Fall of Cthulhu, only began in 2007. The most successful pop-culture Cthulhu product is probably the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game (speaking of despised marketing categories), which has sold well over 300,000 copies since 1981, and which contributed to the return of Lovecraft’s work in mass-market American paperback form. “The Call of Cthulhu” received little attention when it was published in 1928, but it has not been out of print in America since the year after the roleplaying game appeared, when Ballantine/Del Rey released The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, a collection that flies off bookstore shelves (physical and virtual) to this day.

Why Cthulhu? Why is Cthulhu the global icon, the “blasphemous soul-symbol,” of the New Weird? Why, given his unaccountable absence from the main feeder lines of popular culture — movies, TV, novels — is he everywhere visible in popular culture? Why have tentacles replaced talons as the universal signifier for Evil? Why Cthulhu? Why not William Hope Hodgson’s “Hog” or M.R. James’ “thing with a face of crumpled linen”? Why not some forgotten demon invented by Nictzin Dyalhis or Seabury Quinn? Why not Robert E. Howard’s Gol-Goroth, or C.L. Moore’s Yvala?

To begin with, Cthulhu began as a cross-genre figure. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft first masters the art of combining science fiction, fantasy, and horror into something new. (“The Shunned House,” written the year before, is an earlier Lovecraftian experiment in that line, combining “Crookes tubes” and “lines of force” with werewolves, vampires, and ghosts.) Cthulhu is an alien, a being from another star. If he violates physical law, it is because his native planet (or dimension) operates under different, vaster laws than the local ones perceived by Earthlings. But he is also a magician and a “priest,” casting “spells” of suspended animation, and a primordial god worshipped when the earth was young. And he is a monster, a ravening entity driven by a desire to rule his ancient domain and to bring down the tottering structures of human law and reason in the process. This plastic extension across genres is mirrored almost precisely in Cthulhu’s iconic description: “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.” The result? Cthulhu’s influence now extends down three lines of descent: SF authors (James Blish, David Drake, Charles Stross), fantasy authors (Lawrence Watt-Evans, Neil Gaiman), and horror authors (Robert Bloch, Stephen King), fruiting luridly in all three gardens at once. With the rise of postmodern, cross-genre marketing, Cthulhu re-emerges as both a contemporary figure and an archetypal prefigure in the works of Michael Chabon, China Miéville, and other “slipstream” authors.

Cthulhu silently suborns another genre, although this time adapting it to his own ends rather than seeding himself across it: mystery fiction. Lovecraft’s stories are structurally mysteries, as S.T. Joshi has noted in explicit connection with The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Specifically, “The Call of Cthulhu” begins with a mysterious death, and involves a detective-like hunt for clues across two continents and three decades. The reader of a Cthulhu Mythos tale, like the reader of a mystery story, stays alert for hints and indications and derives much of the frisson (in both cases) from either solving the mystery ahead of the protagonist — or from the sheer unexpected jolt of the final revelation. Given that Edgar Allan Poe invented (or at least pioneered) both the detective and horror genres, and given the strong similarities, thematic and structural, between mysteries and Gothic fiction (explicit in such works as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White), the observation is elementary. It was, however, almost completely neglected until Sandy Petersen pointed it out in the pages of his roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu; and only with the 2008 roleplaying game Trail of Cthulhu (written by your humble author) were the connections between “solving mysteries” and “uncovering horrors” made fully manifest in the game’s rules and structure.

It is this sense, of teasing out a hidden truth from the seemingly mundane pages of, e.g., artistic trends, archaeology, anthropology, shipping news, and criminology (to select only the fields investigated by Francis Thurston in “The Call of Cthulhu”) that makes Cthulhu especially attractive to a certain kind of artist. Creators who find themselves drawn to Cthulhu are those likewise (like Thurston) drawn to teasing out hidden, subversive, even terrifying meanings from the bland corpus of modern life. Not always “counter-cultural” creators, they are nonetheless “cult-cultural” ones: creating art for self-selected outsider audiences (like the weird pulp fans of the 1920s or the Goths of the 1980s), for those predisposed to reject the bourgeois, mass-market concerns of the culture at large in favor of the hidden, the outré, the Weird.

Hence, Cthulhu’s great popularity with heavy metal musicians (never the mainstream face of popular music), comics artists (never the acceptable image of great art), and roleplaying gamers (never the cool kids in high school). Cthulhu appeals to those constructing anti-narratives against the received and accepted truth, from French literary critics (Gilles Deleuze and Michel Houellebecq are Lovecraft devotees) to Swiss surrealists (H.R. Giger called three of his collections Necronomicon) to ritual magicians. Lovecraft is quoted and alluded to respectfully in Pauwels and Bergier’s vastly influential 1960 counter-culture text Morning of the Magicians (a seminal document for everything from UFOs to ancient astronauts to New Age spirituality), in Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, and in numerous magickal textbooks by Aleister Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant. Comics writer and magician Alan Moore has designed a Cthulhoid Kabbalah; a New York occultist calling himself “Simon” attempted to merge Crowley and Lovecraft in a paperback Necronomicon in 1980; Phil Hine’s text of “chaos magick” is called the Pseudonomicon, after Lovecraft’s pseudo-gospel; a quick Googling points to any number of Cthulhu cults defying all Lovecraftian logic in the attempt to contact the Great Old Ones.

But the act of digging up the “real truth about the world” is not just a creative act, but almost always a fundamentally reactionary one. The “real truth” is, by definition, deeper, older, truer. (If postmodernism says “there is no real truth,” then that must surely apply to postmodernism itself. And in this context, note that Lovecraft got there before Derrida.) As contradictory as it may seem, I think that Cthulhu must draw some large part of his polymorphous power from his connection to this single realization: that the modern consensus world is wrong. Michel Houellebecq calls Lovecraft’s great tales works of “rage against the world.” One can keep more of Lovecraft’s cool, rational demeanor in mind and still notice that Cthulhu does not merely refute the modern world, his existence demolishes it in fire and flood and chaos. He is simultaneously all that is wrong with modernity and all that will destroy it.

Lovecraft created Cthulhu as a new kind of monster, one for an age in which the sciences “each so far striving in their own direction” had demonstrated that mankind was irrelevant and meaningless: Einstein’s physics, Hubble and Shapley’s astronomy, Rutherford’s geology, and Haeckel’s biology all showed that mankind was a brief, accidental flyspeck in an unfeeling, insensate cosmos. By discovering that our creation is meaningless, we reveal that the end is likewise unimportant. Lovecraft realized, or discovered, or revealed, that horror no longer comes from mankind or his parochial myths; it comes from off Earth, from the universe at large, from Outside. (Fritz Leiber famously called this Lovecraft’s “Copernican Revolution of horror.”) And the Outside doesn’t care. It doesn’t even care enough to hate us; it will destroy us at the moment of impact. Cthulhu is that nihilistic realization given form, the inevitable modern science that will destroy the modern world. Cthulhu drowns us in that realization; he embodies our rage at our own inability to matter. The Cthulhu Mythos is, in John Clute’s words, pre-apocalyptic fiction.

Lovecraft embodied Cthulhu with any number of his own apocalyptic fears and hatreds: not only the vast implications of 20th-century science, but the “yellow peril” that would destroy the white race (Cthulhu’s Pacific cult is run by “deathless Chinamen”), the blasphemous vandalism of modern architecture (R’lyeh’s “Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths” are explicitly described as “Futurist”), the collapse of Anglo-Saxon mores and culture (Cthulhu’s coming will be heralded with “laws and morals thrown aside”), and even his own distaste for seafood. Other critics have intimated that Cthulhu represents Lovecraft’s fear of his own creative powers, or Lovecraft’s hatred of women, or any number of other personal apocalypses.

Other authors have attached Cthulhu to their own hatreds of the modern world, from Robert Bloch echoing Lovecraft’s concern with social decay in Strange Eons to William Browning Spencer’s Resumé With Monsters casting the Cthulhu Mythos as representative of the anti-human office culture of the corporate world. In Move Under Ground Nick Mamatas opposes square Cthulhu to the doomed, liberatory Beats; in “The Deep Ones” James Wade indicts the counter-culture as Cthulhu-spawn; in “Recrudescence” Leonard Carpenter points up the eerie similarities between Cthulhu and petroleum. Thomas Ligotti ingeniously makes Cthulhu (under the transparent disguise of “Nethescurial”) represent the insidious collapse of originality in cosmic horror, while lesser lights from Michael Slade to Joseph Pulver have paralleled Lovecraftian fandom and serial murder in murky attempts to personalize and ironically examine the Cthulhoid apocalypse. In short, there has been surprisingly little push-back against Cthulhu’s main symbolic meaning of the horrific Modern. But then, it’s only been a lifetime.

A few of Lovecraft’s successors have teased out another thread in Lovecraft’s work: Cthulhu as “strange attractor,” as the Faustian rapture of knowing what man was not meant to know. The discoveries of the modern will, it is true, unmake and devastate our humanity — but is that such a bad thing if human concerns are purely parochial? Lovecraft, in this light, prefigures “posthuman” science fiction and ideology. Thomas Olney in “The Strange High House in the Mist,” Robert Olmstead in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Randolph Carter in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and Henry Akeley in “The Whisperer in Darkness” all give in to the Mythos, to the seductive power of the Outside. Robert Blake seemingly joins with Nyarlathotep in “The Haunter of the Dark,” and there is some ecstasy blended with horror in his final apotheosis. Certainly the seductive allure of Cthulhu runs under his popularity as well, from Giger’s artistic lustmord to Japanese hentai to the paeans to the uncanny in Willum Hopfrog Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley story sequence.

Vampires, after all, spent a hundred years as stinking corpses before they joined the Gothic seducer and got cleaned up. The journey from Stoker’s foreign rapist to Anne Rice’s cruising rock star took less than a century, culminating in Stephenie Meyer’s teen crush object. Now, the erotic — even the romantic — and the vampiric blend inextricably. Is it time, likewise, to embrace Cthulhu? For those worried for Cthulhu’s integrity as a horror icon, frightened that love conquers fear, they can be reassured that Near Dark and Let the Right One In remain both terrifying vampire stories and terrifying love stories. No matter how scattered his plasticity, Cthulhu will inevitably recombine in his “hateful original form.” That cannot be killed, that can eternal lie. Where he lies for now, and with whom, is up to us, his acolytes, his stalkers, his devotees.

Cthulhu fhtagn.