Cthulhurotica

Justin Everett, PhD CTHULHUROTICA, FEMALE EMPOWERMENT, AND THE NEW WEIRD

When I was initially invited to write an essay for a volume provocatively titled Cthulhurotica, I admit I approached the task with some degree of trepidation. Though I have long been familiar with Lovecraft’s work, I had never considered the strange and wonderful marriage that might occur were the two genres of Lovecraftian horror and literary erotica to be combined. While this merging of traditions may seem odd at first, upon further examination it makes perfect sense. Both genres are about crossing boundaries and moving from innocence to experience. Such tales commonly feature naïve characters who believe they understand the rules and limits of the worlds they inhabit. When those boundaries are crossed the rules that govern the worlds they know are set aside. The protagonist is usually faced with the choice of learning the ways of the new world and embracing it, and as a part of this process becoming forever changed, or rejecting the new reality, often fleeing from it in terror. In Lovecraftian horror the adept is faced with a new understanding of the order of the cosmos; in erotica, the rules are often social, requiring the adept to confront their preconceived notions of sexuality, gender and relationship dominance. When the two are combined, the effect is powerful. The subversion of social norms is magnified through the transformation of self on a literally cosmic scale.

In any collection of stories based on an author’s prior work, artists experiment with the original form and apply it to new ends. Cthulhurotica is no exception. This new offshoot of stories of the “Cthulhu Mythos,” what we might otherwise call the Lovecraft School of writing, has as its inspirational material many of Lovecraft’s original tales. Starting points or inspiration for many of the stories in this collection have included “Dagon,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” Nyarlathotep,” “The Silver Key,” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” to name a few. Like others who carried on the Mythos tales after the author’s death, the contributors to this volume have made the material their own and have responded to the literary and cultural influences of our own age. In combining the transformative experience of literary erotica with the cosmic terror of the Mythos tale, the stories in this collection have created worlds that are at once familiar and estranged; ordinary, and surreal. As its characters undergo a transformation in relation to cultural norms and embracing cosmic horror, they do not do so in a macabre otherworld. The transformation remains anchored in, and interweaves with, the ordinary and common. It is this difference from Lovecraft’s original work, and the Mythos stories that followed, that separates Cthulhurotica from its predecessors and places at least some of the stories within the contemporary genre known as New Weird.

What we now know as the “Cthulhu Mythos” is a collection of tales that began with the “Lovecraft Circle.” Writing primarily for Weird Tales, in the words of editor Farnsworth Wright, “the unique magazine,” Lovecraft entered in correspondence with other writers of what was then termed “weird fiction.” This magazine, largely ignored by literary criticism, is particularly important not only for the authors it published but also because it served as a nursery for new forms of experimental fiction that either did not fit in with, or were too extreme for, the adventure pulps that grew out of the dime novel tradition. In his essay “The Supernatural Horror in Literature,” first drafted in 1927 and expanded in 1933-34, Lovecraft argues that weird fiction must go beyond the usual parameters of murder mystery or gothic horror:

The weird tale may contain elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction based on the assumption that, as Brian Stableford has put it, “the vast universe revealed by astronomical science diminished humankind to the status of a mere plaything of vast alien entities” (35). Though this notion would be largely rejected by mainstream Science Fiction, the atmospheric richness of and cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s tales would live on after his death. However, the Mythos tradition might not have ever begun had it not been for his voluminous correspondence with his fellow Weird Tales writers and other contemporaries. Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Leiber would all craft stories in the Mythos tradition. In the decades that followed, these names would be joined by Colin Wilson, Joanna Russ, Philip José Farmer, and Stephen King. Most of these writers stayed ensconced within Lovecraft’s enclosure of horror within a secondary story world either separated from, or isolated within, our own. This enclosure–in a haunted house, on an island, on another planet–envelops the story world and isolates it from our own, allowing it to operate by its own rules. What separates the Cthulhurotica stories (for the most part; “The Assistant from Innsmouth,” for example, follows the traditional microworld formula) and what characterizes many tales associated with the New Weird is removing the isolation of the story world from our own, interweaving the rules of the Weird with the contemporary world, and creating a funhouse reflection of reality that is, for lack of a better word, weird.

According to New Weird author and critic Jeff VanderMeer, New Weird may be characterized as:

The stories in Cthulhurotica share the blending of the ordinary and extraordinary, elements of fantasy and horror, and the subversion of place by blending the laws of secondary reality with the contemporary world. However, because the stories in this collection are a part of the Mythos, they are not isolated in a secondary world; they are a part of our world. The horror Lovecraft inserted into his original tales resulted from the sudden awareness that the universe was not as it seemed; the universe had a deeper history than anyone could imagine, in which humankind is but a plaything of much older and more intelligent, and malignant beings. In the original Mythos, the result of this realization is almost always horror and madness. Not so for Cthulhurotica.

Lovecraft appropriated Gothic literary forms and applied them to the subject matter of science fiction. This reaction was much different than that of much mainstream SF, and particularly the galactic adventures of Lovecraft’s contemporaries. Eventually, SF would form two reactions to the problems of deep time and the irrelevance of man in the wider universe. One would gaze at the stars in wonder; the other would lay its head into its hands in despair. The first approach we can associate with the form of fantasy defined by literary critic Farah Mendlesohn as the portal quest. This type of fantasy is mostly, though not universally, optimistic and involves passage from our world (or the protagonist’s world) into a new reality that operates by different rules, with the usual result of returning to our world enlightened. The secondary world remains contained and does not infiltrate our world.

The second approach we can associate with what Mendlesohn defines as intrusion fantasy, in which “the fantastic is the bringer of chaos” (Mendlesohn xxi). In this form, the fantastic “leaks” into our world and infests it. She puts traditional horror, the New Weird, and Lovecraft in the intrusion fantasy class. This form, she argues, relies “on the naïveté of the protagonist and her awareness of the permeability of the world–a distrust of what is known in favor of what is sensed” (115). In this reality, “[t]he trajectory of the intrusion fantasy is from denial to acceptance” (115; emphasis in original).

Literary erotica might be said to blend the qualities of the portal quest and intrusion fantasy. Though erotica need not be associated with the fantastic, it often involves the passage into a secondary world with return from that world. The protagonist moves from innocence to experience, and usually returns wiser than when she departed. Like intrusion fantasy, the protagonist in literary erotica moves from denial to acceptance. Once in the erotic setting, her sense of social norms, morality, gender, patriarchy and power may be challenged. As a result she undergoes enlightenment or transformation. In literary erotica, when she returns (if she chooses to) she is not only wiser, but fundamentally different in nature than when the story began.

The stories of Cthulhurotica, by blending the forms of intrusion fantasy and the transformational experience of literary erotica result in a magnification of the transformative experience. The protagonist moves from denial to acceptance along the double trajectories of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and the sexual liberation of the female, who may or may not be the story’s protagonist. In many of the stories in this collection, the female protagonist often experiences transformation and sexual liberation, though this may occur outside of the story’s narrative. This liberation inverts the patriarchy–the rules of “our” world where the male dominates and controls the female. The intrusion of Lovecraftian horror into our world not only moves the protagonist from innocence to experience with knowledge of the vastness of the cosmos and the insignificance of humankind, but often inverts the patriarchy by empowering the female who has “crossed over” and embraced the new reality. For the empowered female, this is an act of joy, not horror, punctuated by orgasm, fertility, and the dominance of the female over the male. For the male protagonist, this transformation often results in horror as his grasp on, and control of, the female is lost. In the end, the female may gain power over the male and ultimately destroy or discard him. This analysis is an admitted overgeneralization, and is not meant as a blanket characterization of all stories presented in this volume, but as a common characteristic of those discussed in the following analysis.

The first tale in this collection, “Descent of the Wayward Sister” by Gabrielle Harbowy, suggests the potential for liberation through sexual transformation. As a woman on one of the lowest rungs of the social order — she is presumably a Victorian-era thief and prostitute — she represents the disempowerment of the female in a male-dominated society. The reader soon learns that this powerlessness is in part illusory. As someone who has “seen too much of the lively underbelly of the world to be content sitting still,” she takes it upon herself to pick the lock to the basement, where she finds a naked girl lashed to an altar. Immediately gothic motifs are invoked for the reader and subverted as the victim rejects freedom in favor of a different kind of release. Following the erotic scene, the author momentarily invokes horror through her description of the tentacled intruder, who is left largely in shadow, leaving the details to the reader’s imagination. This suggestion of horror is soon released, placing emphasis on the protagonist’s desire as well as the monster’s. While this story is largely tongue-in-cheek, its presentation of a self-empowered female allows her to move quickly from denial to acceptance. Having already seen the worst of the patriarchy, she reacts not with horror, but curiosity and desire to the Lovecraftian intrusion into our world. Instead of recoiling from the creature she accepts the tentacled beast as yet another man (I think) and one supposes that she will do well.

Cody Goodfellow’s “Infernal Attractors” is also a tale of a sexual adventuress. In this story Marc is a man both outclassed and dominated by the powerful Shirley, for whom Marc’s presence in the story is almost irrelevant except to operate a piece of Lovecraftian machinery for opening a portal to the other world. This tale is as much about the emptiness of multiple-partner sexual experimentation and fetishism as it is about Mythos. This effect is further emphasized by Shirley’s empowerment from the story’s opening. She has long completed the arc from innocence to experience and has moved beyond denial to acceptance. Her prior casting off of traditional roles and expectations has made possible the final step of transcendence via copulation with — from the reader’s perspective — a vile entity from the other side. The entity is more intricately described than in most of the other tales, contributing perhaps to the sense of Marc’s helplessness in knowing that he is not only a witness to his girlfriend’s copulation with, and dominance of, this creature, but that he has also been forced to into the role of willing participant. One is left to wonder how often Marc has been forced arrange and watch Shirley’s trysts with other unimaginable entities. Indeed, Shirley’s possession of the gun at the beginning of the story further empowers and emasculates her while emphasizing Marc’s helplessness. When Shirley is finished with the act, the fearful beast with which she copulated is left an empty shell. As she has destroyed this creature, she has destroyed Marc as well.

Other stories of female empowerment in this collection are told from the perspective of a male character who loses control of his female counterpart. “The Cry in the Darkness” by Richard Baron is one such story that emphasizes the all-too-common fear of estrangement from one’s spouse. This story begins by invoking “The Dunwich Horror,” and the fear of degeneration inspired by Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for eugenics and fear of racial mixing. In the original story, the race is truly alien, as emphasized by the half-human progeny of the Whateley’s. In Baron’s story, Mamie Bishop’s unknown history at the Whateley house, and her desire for a child that Earl cannot provide, once again invokes the ghost of Lovecraft’s eugenics and the fear that “pure” blood would be thinned by the proliferation of other races. The story connects Earl’s infertility with the infertility of the land; the tragedy is doubled as he fails to provide for his wife or impregnate her. His fears regarding his own masculinity are further accentuated by his inability to make a decision. Further, the signs that Earl finds of her nocturnal wanderings — mud on her feet and a gelatin-like substance on her body that is suggestive of sperm — confirm an implied fear that his wife may leave him. This is not a story about Lovecraftian horror as much as it is a testimony to one man’s self-doubt. Earl’s lack of masculinity and unwillingness to act may be seen to enable and encourage Mamie’s transcendence as well as her indifference to him.

Other Cthulhurotica tales take the theme of female empowerment further. “The C-Word” by Don Pizarro is interesting both for its contemporary themes and its modernization of Innsmouth as integrated into, rather than isolated from, the modern world. Elliot is not only younger and less experienced than Anna, but seems emotionally dependent on her, whereas Anna is aloof and independent of him. This story is a narrative of their relationship with Elliot in a dependent, feminized position as he attempts to convince her that the gap in their ages makes little difference to him. The irony of the story is provided by the reader’s own knowledge of Innsmouth. To a reader unschooled in Mythos tales, the final scene would be puzzling. What the informed reader knows, and Elliot does not, is that the true difference between the two is not a matter of a couple of decades, but one of degeneration and race. The Weird element of the story does not enter the tale at all, except for the words that Anna speaks at the story’s end. The reader is left to envision the transformation and imagine what will become of Elliot once he leaves Innsmouth and steps into the sea.

The domination of the female over the male achieves its most extreme form in three stories: “The Assistant from Innsmouth” by Steven James Scearce; “The Lake at Roopkund” by Andrew Scearce; and “Between a Rock and an Elder Goddess” by Mae Empson. While in all three of these stories the men are but objects to their empowered mates, in the first two follow an arc more typical of Lovecraftian horror. Investigation is the plot device by which the men in the story begin to uncover the histories of their female counterparts. As they move from denial to acceptance, in the first two tales acceptance comes at the price of horror. In the last tale, more typical of the transformation experienced in literary erotica, the protagonist moves gradually through stages of initiation, like an adept proceeding toward priesthood, preparing himself for the reality he will find when he enters the inner sanctum. In the first two tales, horror results because the males are not prepared to accept the dominance of the female; in the last story, Dennis’ more gradual preparation leads him to embrace the Weird, and his feminized role with it, just as Gabrielle Harbowy’s wayward sister embraces the sexual extremes for which she has long been prepared.

“The Assistant from Innsmouth” is perhaps one of the most Lovecraftian stories in this collection in terms of tone and setting. The plot of the story is reminiscent of “The Silver Key,” with a visit to an isolated mansion, though elements of “The Dunwich Horror” are invoked in the story’s opening. Set in the Whateley mansion, the reader eagerly anticipates the eventual appearance of the Whateley progeny. Anna first enters the story as an “assistant” to Mr. Combs, but her knowledge of the arcane materials places her in a position of superior knowledge that the reader anticipates extends beyond her ability to catalogue property. The Weird and erotic elements enter the story simultaneously. Anna’s distant formality up to the point of their encounter in the bedroom fail to prepare the reader for what is to follow. When she disrobes, she becomes almost vampiric in this scene, entrapping Combs with both her body and her gaze. She fails to respond to Combs’ weak attempt at seduction, further empowering her as she climbs on top of him and orders him to open his mouth. What transpires next feminizes Combs:

Anna’s superior strength feminizes Combs even more. She makes of his mouth a vagina, and the liquid within her flows into him like semen. By the story’s end, this act of rape seems to have been to prepare him for food. Whether or not something else gestates inside him is left for the reader to decide.

Similarly, “The Lake of Roopkund” makes of Isha’s husband Jaswinder little more than a vessel for the story’s transcended, empowered women. He enters this tale, as Combs enters his, as an investigator — a common motif in Mythos stories. However, his destruction is more profound than Combs’s because he begins the story in a position of traditional masculine dominance over his wife Isha. Enraged when he believes he discovers that his wife is planning to engage in a lesbian affair with her old college roommate Heather, he confronts the two of them, opening Heather’s bag to discover a “fertility idol” that the reader had been led to believe might be a sex toy. When Jas is told that the three of them are to participate in a fertility rite to help Isha conceive, he relents. Jaswinder’s double standard becomes evident as the story progresses. He was infuriated when he thought his wife was having an affair, yet becomes cooperative when it appears the “fertility rite” may lead to a threesome at Lake Roopkund. At the story’s climax, Jaswinder’s fate at Heather’s hands mirrors that of Combs. She overpowers him physically and pins him like the victim of a rape. The greater shock comes with the reader’s realization that the marriage was likely no marriage at all, but part of a long-term plot by Heather and Isha. Jaswinder’s assumptions about the world constitute denial of the story’s supernatural elements until the very end. At that point acceptance comes too late — literally at the moment of death. At that juncture, his patriarchal view of male-female roles is inverted as Heather begins to wring his neck.

The last story of female domination I shall discuss in this essay is “Between a Rock and an Elder Goddess.” This story lacks the element of horror of the previous two stories because the dominating female, Circe, does not bring upon Dennis acceptance in a sudden realization, but allows him to be gradually seduced by it through his study of the Dervini Papyrus. This story is also particularly clever in its interweaving of myth, history, and fiction in a way that represents the interlacing of the ordinary and fantastic. This makes the story’s Weird elements not seem “weird” at all, but a normal part of the fictional world. In the New Weird, Miéville’s New Crobuzon invokes London as easily as it does its secondary world setting. The “intrusion” in this novel cannot be easily identified in terms of its directionality (as we can with Dracula, whose intrusion comes from a single castle and invades London) but weaves into it from many directions as the familiar and the unfamiliar twine in and out of each other. Empson’s story, through the interlacing of the story’s timelines, characters, and narratives provides the reader with a sense of the interweaving of the Weird and the mundane. Circe seduces Dennis through the very ordinary activity of his study of the papyrus just as surely as she seduced Anaximander in real life. Through the manuscript she leads him to her dwelling, where he has been prepared for what he will see. To us, the half-woman, half-monster would be an abomination; however, because Dennis has been prepared, acceptance of the Weird is met not with revulsion, but pleasure.

Though themes of female dominance and the subversion of patriarchy are by no means the only literary elements to be found within these tales (as well as those I have not analyzed), it runs as a dominant theme through many that are collected here. By merging the erotic with the Cthulhu Mythos, these stories afford the opportunity to examine gender and patriarchy in a way that allows them to remain anchored in their contemporary contexts while magnifying the themes of empowerment and transformation through the metaphor of the Cthulhu Mythos. For Lovecraft, the Mythos represented the impersonal, indifferent, and ultimately unknowable elements of the universe that terrified him. These elements extended from the sea itself — personified by Innsmouth and Dagon — to the terrors that modern science would uncover, as he made clear in the first paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.” Over the years, Cthulhu Mythos stories have both underscored and subverted this fear. The stories in this collection have viewed Lovecraft’s insight from both angles. The unknown can be feared or embraced.

In Cthulhurotica, this apprehension is not as much a terror of the universe’s vastness and the insignificance of man as it is the dread of social change. Literary erotica has long confronted such fears through the plot motif of initiation and transformation, illustrated above in the discussion of Empson’s story. (This theme is also present in many of the stories discussed above, in addition to “The Summoned” and “Song of the Catherine Clark,” which I sadly could not fit in to this essay’s discussion). What these stories confront instead are the social rules and the enclosures that govern our lives and prevent us from engaging in behaviors that are at once enticing and self-destructive. As the roles and relationships of men and women have changed since Lovecraft’s time, what these stories permit us to do is question the limitations placed upon us by marriage, gender-identity, gender-dominance, and even pair bonding itself. This does not mean we should surrender those rules of conduct, but we should enter a discussion about them and confront our own long-buried fears associated with issues of sex and power.

Stableford, Brian. “Science Fiction Between the Wars: 1915-1939.” Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. Ed. Neil Barron. Westport, CT and London: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. 23-44.

Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Art and Popular Culture. 28 Oct. 2010.

Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008.

VanderMeer, Jeff. “Introduction.” The New Weird. Ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008.