Didn’t get much reading done on Sunday because I watched the third and fourth episodes of this season's
Game of Thrones, among other things. Then, on Monday, I spent a lot of time working on Milton Zysman’s
Unravelling Genesis project, which again limited my personal reading time.
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BLACK WINGS OF CTHULHU 6 (continued)
Twenty-One New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Edited by S.T. Joshi
“Carnivorous”, by William F. Nolan ~ Martha and Dave Burns are sick and tired of cold Chicago winters, so they decide to post an online ad seeking rental of a modest house in Los Angeles over the winter/spring months. They get a single reply, from a prim and proper Victorian type named Viola P. Fanning, who agrees to let the couple stay at her beautiful home while she tours Europe for five months in search of new objects for her collection of rare fungi and exotic plants.
Furthermore, she will let them stay without charge, as long as they agree to care for her collection. This involves twice daily plant feedings using a special, gruesome concoction that is swimming with tiny living things, and a midnight sing-song of classics from the American Songbook. Oh, and Martha and Dave are never, under any circumstances, to open the locked door at the back of the greenhouse! Ridiculous, yes, but it’s a deal they can’t refuse.
Upon arriving at the home, they find it to be quite spacious and lovely, but the specimens in the greenhouse are hideous—mostly carnivorous plants and fungoid growths that give off both a repellent stench and an odd orange luminescence. All in all, it’s a fun if somewhat predictable little tale, featuring some truly interesting information about real-world carnivorous plants and a gruesome denouement featuring a far more violent version of what Stephen King turns into at the end of the
Creepshow episode, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”.
“On a Dreamland’s Moon”, by Ashley Dioses ~ Not being a fan of horror poetry, nor of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories, this particular offering didn’t have much to offer me, personally. There are some lovely lines, featuring some exquisite imagery, however. And it doesn’t take long to read. So I wouldn’t skip it if I were you.
“Teshtigo Creek”, by Aaron Bittner ~ Jim takes his girlfriend Kelly camping at a state park, even though, as a duo of park rangers try to warn them, it’s the middle of mosquito season, the water is still freezing cold, and the campground is only accessibly via canoe.
Things go from bad to worse as the couple get drunk and, at Jim’s urging, decide to try and skinny dip, only to have Jim step on something that puts a dozen tiny needle-holes in his foot, causing him to pass out in agony and nearly drown. Kelly pulls him out of the water and the next day they head home, with Jim now suffering from the head cold to end all head colds.
The weekend was pretty much a disaster… so bad was it, in fact, that when Jim is sent home sick from work, he arrives to find that Kelly has packed up her shit and moved out. He tries calling her, then gives up, promptly collapsing to the floor and passing out.
Jim wakes up to find the older of the two park rangers from the Teshtigo outing standing over him, reciting some weird incantations. He feels something squirming painfully in his sinus cavities. Then he feels something explode from his face… a tiny monster! With teeth like a piranha and two little salamander legs tipped with three razor-fanged fingerlings!
Jim feels his sanity slipping away as he watches the park ranger gently pick up the creature and tuck it away in a pocket of his windbreaker. Not too far gone to ask questions, Jim demands to know: “Why did you come after me? What is that thing? What’s going on?”
Turns out the park ranger knows these little creatures, and that he felt he “had to get the nuttaunes back.” Nuttaunes, by the way, is a Lakota word meaning “my daughter”. And then he walks away. As brisk and amusing as this story was to read, it also felt like a bit of a rush-job. I’m surprised it made Joshi’s cut.
“Ex Libris”, by Caitlin R. Kiernan ~ Maggie shows up at her friend and lover’s apartment—this unnamed individual providing the story’s first-person narrative—with a battered Campbell’s Tomato Soup box containing 11 very old and creepy books that she picked up at an estate sale. Maggie keeps “forgetting” to take the books home with her, and over the span of a couple weeks, simply being in the presence of these tomes begins to exert a number of changes over both the teller of this tale and Maggie, herself.
Those books that are named should be familiar to most fans of Lovecraft’s work: Freidrich Wilhelm von Junzt’s
Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Ludvig Prinn’s
De Vermis Mysteriis, Francois-Honore’ Balfour’s
Cultes des Goules, etc. However, it’s not the books themselves, but the effects they have on the narrator and Maggie, that matter. Both experience these effects in their own way. Maggie begins to change physically, becoming more sexually aggressive and violent, whereas the narrator feels that the books are telling her stories.
The first one she relates is probably the most interesting. It’s about a 19th century Englishwoman named Harriett* who uses an incantation found in
Der Vermis Mysteriis to call down a horrible entity by the name of Mynarthitep, a blasting darkness who squeezes tight against her magic circle, which proves to be of insufficient strength, eventually collapsing like a submarine in an uncontrolled descent… but not before the she pulls a trick on the entity by killing herself before it can mess her up too badly.
As the story evolves, the narrator suffers some sort of mental breakdown, seeing visions, visiting buildings that burned down ages ago, applying all of her worldly erudition to the situation at hand. This causes Kiernan to skillfully embed deep cultural, historical, literary and artistic references throughout the story, everything from Hesiod to Nietzsche to Steinbeck to William Burroughs, including extended meditations on sin, and an impressive dissertation on dueling academic opinions on the meaning behind the story of Pandora’s box. Kiernan even manages to sneak in a bit of a mystery about the most likely provenance of the books, a story that involves the Starry Wisdom cult and an occult-obsessed thief named Robert Blake.
Eventually, Maggie literally transforms into a “shining trapezohedron”, as described in the
Livre d’Eibon, only made out of bone, blood, muscle and sinews. Pretty weird.
*There’s a line on page 152 that gave me a chuckle. When relaying the story of the Harriett the Englishwoman, Kiernan writes: “Her name must have been irrelevant, because I never did learn that…” Funny for two reasons… first, two paragraphs later she identifies the “unnamed” woman as Harriett, and second, due to the fact that the narrator of “Ex Libris”, herself, goes unnamed.
“You Shadows That in Darkness Dwell”, by Mark Howard Jones ~ Another nameless protagonist, this time, experiencing some truly beautiful weirdness, along with some absolutely chilling, surreal, evocatively written architectural horror.
A soon-to-be-divorced man, indifferent to his money hungry wife and his insolent, unloving daughters, tries to take his mind off things by going on a hiking holiday in an unnamed foreign land. He becomes lost, then comes across a boatyard, where he rents a small, motorized boat to make his way downriver.
Unfortunately, this only gets him MORE lost, as he can’t turn the boat around after crossing swift waters that he’ll never be able to navigate upstream. So, he pulls the boat out of the water and once again starts walking. That’s when he begins to notice black poppies, as well as a massive, man-made structure—a cathedral?—with spires that appear to reach impossibly high.
As he crests a hill, he sees a vast plain made black by the proliferation of the aforementioned black flowers, and he can see that the structure is much farther away than he originally thought… which means that it’s bigger than he first surmised. He also sees, in the far distance, the tiny figure of a woman hurrying through the flowers towards the tower. After a moment, she falls and he loses sight of her.
With little choice, he makes his way towards the tower. Still miles away from the structure, a light rain of silky black fluid begins to fall. What is this curious black rain? Industrial pollution? He hurries towards the structure, and as he approaches, it becomes even more disturbing in appearance.
“Arches seemed to flow one into the other, while buttresses tried to loop inside one another, as if someone had plucked the designs from the nightmares of some half-insane architect and rendered them solid.” From certain angles, it even seems to lurch towards the observer.
Fortunately, it was also on an elevated foundation. Once he reaches the structure and climbs aboard, he circles it, finds a door sufficiently recessed to offer him shelter, and notes a “whimsical” design feature resembling the top of a human skull—fontanels and all—sunken into the black stony material of the structure, apparently serving as some sort of doorstop.
Other fantastical features include a kind of dry pool with two immense, horn-like shapes (instrumental horns, not from a bull’s head) facing each other. In the pool section, between the horns, figures in varying states of disassembly are visible, almost like they’re sunken into the floor. There is also a figure of a vast hand, three times taller than the tallest human shape, with screaming, roaring faces at each fingertip.
The black rain, in the meantime, has turned the building's foundation into an island of sorts. Black waves lap against the steps leading to the platform level. The wind picks up, causing the twin horns to howl in a painfully loud monotone. He blocks his ears, falls to his knees, and realizes that anything caught in the dry pool between those horns would be pulverized into putty by the decibel assault.
As the noise dies down, he spies a procession of tall figures appearing to walk on the black water towards the structure, as if called there by the howling. Their garments seem to drink in light. They are followed by smaller creatures wearing masks to hide their essential facelessness, “the very lowest apostles of depravity”. The narrator feels that he recognizes some of them.
A ridiculously tall door opens to let them in, giving the narrator a glimpse of the crimson interior. Then there is a cacophony as what sound like huge metal hooks slam and bash, moaning and screaming and other voices intoning: “THERE IS NO OUTSIDE!” over and over again.
More horrifying sounds. He plans to make good his escape by running across what he believes is an underwater platform that the worshipers used to “walk on water”, but he’s too frightened to take that first step. Then he spies a flash of white rolling in the black water. It turns out to be the corpse of the woman he'd seen earlier that same day. Something has used her as food.
And now it is night, dark as raven’s feathers in tar. Fortunately, he sees that his boat has been flooded off the shore and back into the water, and is now floating towards the structure… towards him. He manages to snag it with his jacket.
Though he can’t imagine how, he knows that somehow, this leviathan citadel of night must be destroyed. He also realizes that he’s become lost by drifting into part of the map stained by someone who spilled ink on it. As for his future life, he knows what he must do, but he is too afraid to do it.
I want to draw scenes from this story. For the imagery alone, it’s one of the best in this compilation so far, and one of the most impressive surreal short horrors I've read in a long time.
“The Ballad of Asenath Waite”, by Adam Bolivar ~ Basically, a balladic retelling of “The Thing on the Doorstep”, the same Lovecraft story that inspired “The Once and Future Waite”, a story also featured in this collection.
“The Visitor”, by Nancy Kilpatrick ~ Rob has just left his lover, Ian. Moved out and left his life a mess. Following the advice of friends and family, Ian takes a long weekend trip to Grenada for a sunny mini-vacation. Unfortunately, he’s miserably sick and riddled with anxiety for his whole time there. After sleeping through a couple of meals and missing most of his vacation, Ian encounters an intelligent talking bug (he thinks it’s a cockroach, she counters that she’s a “Palmetto”). She claims to be his spirit animal, but the way it’s talking (in Rob’s voice no less), it sounds more like an intelligent species looking for a way to mess with or reign in humanity’s worst instincts. Fun little story, but not very Lovecraftian, and probably insufficiently spooky for a prestige collection like this, which purports to be the gold standard
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DRIPPIN’
by Laurence Engraver
A beautiful, etching-style exploration of meat, and what it means to eat it… and think about it, which might not be such a great idea if it’s too early in the day for you to be exploring such stuff. Clocking in at an ad-free 28 pages, each page of
Drippin’ features a full page image of butcher shop backdrops, with livestock in various states of preparation (cuts, chops, offal, etc), some sort of monster, as well as a diabolical meat deity. Personally, I pretty much love every book put out by
Hollow Press, including their
Under Dark Weird Fantasy Grounds anthology. And so now we have
Drippin', which holds a place near and dear to my heart. What a wonderful, almost wordless Lovecraftian panache! Fans of such things owe it to themselves to look into all of Hollow Press' publications.
