Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois

by Pierre V. Comtois

  “Run!” Montrose heard himself say as he turned from the pyramid and stumbled in the darkness. He cut himself on some sharp rocks but never noticed as his fingers dug in the loose, ashen soil and he scrabbled like some insect, desperate to avoid the descending hammer. Around him he heard the wailing cries of his fellow worshipers, some former classmates from his days at Miskatonic University where they had first fallen under the sway of the Cthulhu Myth Cycle. Now, as he looked, they scattered in all directions, blinded by the dark, falling into hidden pits, becoming mired in sinks of tar. Sobbing, he muttered a last plea to the god he had worshiped all his adult life. There was no response, and his disordered mind wondered if he had been betrayed. Like rats down their holes, his thoughts skittered along corridors of memory; bits and pieces of increasingly scattered experiences flashed across his mind until settling on a single incident recalling something someone had said to him once, in a different lifetime: something about the utter impossibility of alien minds making themselves understood by human beings. As panic began to well up inside him, Montrose wondered: had he been wrong about Nodens? Could he have misinterpreted the god’s intentions? And then a far worse thing occurred to him: what if the god had understood his human servant? What if the only thing in question was the meaning of the word “reward?” Then, as he scrambled desperately toward a dim glow in the surrounding darkness, the fate of his friends long since driven from his mind, he found himself falling into a pit at the bottom of which writhed an oily mass of giant slug-things. He screamed in mad terror, trying uselessly to halt his slow slide toward those hungry, searching mouths and it was then, in the last glitter of sanity in a shattered brain, that the final horrifying revelation occurred to him: Nodens had not betrayed them. Nodens had kept his word. There was no miscommunication. He was to be rewarded. The only thing was, to the alien Nodens, nothing could be finer than for a human to be consumed by the spawn of the Old Ones!

  en him up.

  Some Thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Mythos, and the State of Weird Fiction

  Notes from The Cthulhu Codex

  1997

  Bob Price has done a great service for Mythos readers in recent years by his vigorous defense of pastiche in general and the Derlethian take on it in particular. Well, that’s how I feel about it anyway. In his first editorial in issue #7, Bob described a personal revelation that, in effect, brought his appreciation of the Mythos full circle; from his early days of wide eyed wonder in the first flush of discovery through a period of pretension and elitism to, more recently, a more simple acceptance of the elements in the Mythos that lend themselves to clearer, more forthright stories unencumbered by an author’s need to avoid the appearance of being too slavishly attached to Lovecraft’s original stories If I’m assuming too much of an interpretation of Bob’s words, then I’m sorry, but I don’t think I am. Because you see, much the same thing has happened to me.

  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 in 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. Slowly, I discovered the wider Lovecraft circle and enjoyed them, I was reading anything associated with Lovecraft, them as well. By that time, I was reading anything associated with Lovecraft, mostly pastiche. But slowly, as the available sources dried up, I had to content myself with newer product. Here, in the beginning, Crypt of Cthulhu helped with its frequent all-fiction issues that featured mostly rare stuff by established authors; but soon, that material started to dry up and I finally found myself in a literary desert of “new style” Lovecraftian fiction in which authors, swallowing the elitist line of the times, decided to write Mythos yarns that bore as little relation to the HPL originals as possible. This wild experimentation was a total flop to me. Maybe I didn’t take my Lovecraft seriously enough, it was always good, entertaining, escapist fun for me, thus perhaps, my attraction to pastiche. My interest in Mythos fiction became mostly a nostalgic one. When I was in the mood to recapture a bit of my youth, I liked to read a good Mythos “yarn” (as Robert Howard used to say). How could the tortured, punkish, new style Cthulhu story be construed as fun?

  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!

  1997

  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 contribu
tion 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?

  1998

  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.

  1998

  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.