Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Molly Tanzer is the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of two collections: A Pretty Mouth (Lazy Fascist, 2012) and Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations (Egaeus, 2013). Her debut novel, Vermilion (Word Horde) is now available, and her second novel, The Pleasure Merchant, will be published by Lazy Fascist in November of 2015. She is also the editor of the forthcoming Swords v. Cthulhu (Stone Skin Press). Her Lovecraftian fiction has appeared in venues such as The Book of Cthulhu (I and II) (Night Shade), The Book of the Dead (Jurassic London) and The Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing). She has had additional short fiction appear in Schemers (Stone Skin Press), Running with the Pack (Prime Books) and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, among others. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat. She blogs—infrequently—about hiking, vegan cooking, movies, and other stuff at http://mollytanzer.com, and tweets as @molly_the_tanz.

  Kelda Crich is a newborn entity. She’s been lurking in her creator’s mind for a few years. Now she’s out in the open. Find her in London looking at strange things in medical museums. Her work has appeared in the Lovecraft E-zine, Journal of Unlikely Acceptances, The Mad Scientist Journal and in the Bram Stoker Award-winning After Death anthology.

  Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over eighty literary and speculative journals and anthologies, including several “Best of” collections. She has published two short-story collections and four novels, and won an O. Henry award in 1998. She lives in New York with her dog, Philip K. Dick, and her cats, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.

  Lois H. Gresh is a six-time New York Times bestselling author and USA Today bestselling author of 29 books and 65 short stories. Look for her trilogy of Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes thrillers coming soon from Titan Books. Her books have been published in 22 languages. Current titles are Cult of The Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales (Hippocampus, 2015), Innsmouth Nightmares (Editor, PS Publishing, 2015), and Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk! (Editor, PS Publishing, 2013).

  Nancy Kilpatrick is an award-winning author who has published 18 novels, over 200 short stories, and has edited 15 anthologies, including the 2015 works Expiration Date, and nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre. Her most recent short fiction can be found in the anthologies Searchers After Horror, The Darke Phantastique, Zombie Apocalypse: Endgame!, Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women, The Madness of Cthulhu 2, Innsmouth Nightmares, Gothic Lovecraft and non-fiction in Stone Skin Bestiary. Join her on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/nancy.kilpatrick.31

  and on Twitter:

  https://twitter.com/nancykwriter

  E.R. Knightsbridge hails from London, England, and enjoys such things as peeling stickers off fruit and binging on TV box sets. Her stories have been published online at Camroc Press Review and in a print anthology of dystopian tales, Small Town Futures. Another flash fiction piece will appear in the Shade Mountain Press Female Complaint anthology in November 2015.

  Amanda Downum may or may not be a barrel of crabs piloting a cunning human disguise. She is the author of the Necromancer Chronicles, published by Orbit Books, and Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Weird Tales, as well as Lovecraft Unbound and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu. She lives in Austin, Texas, but will one day return to the sea. With or without the human disguise.

  Christine Morgan works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility, which plays havoc with her sleep schedule but allows her a lot of writing time. A lifelong reader, she also reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. Her other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, cheesy disaster movies and training to be a crazy cat lady. She can be found online at https://www.facebook.com/christinemorganauthor and https://christinemariemorgan.wordpress.com/

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, the mispronunciation of common English words, and the writing of speculative fiction.

  She lives in Massachusetts with a Giant Ridiculous Dog. Her partner, acclaimed fantasy author Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin.

  Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. She studied English and Classics in college, and have gone on to complete an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. Her novels are published by Ace Books. She has also collaborated with Elizabeth Bear on A Companion to Wolves (Tor). Her short stories have appeared in many different places, including Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Alchemy, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons. She collects books, and her husband collects computer parts, so their living space is the constantly contested border between these two imperial ambitions.

  Storm Constantine has written 35 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and well over 50 short stories. Her novels span several genres, from literary fantasy, to science fiction, to dark fantasy. She is most well known for her Wraeththu trilogy (omnibus edition published by Immanion Press). Storm is the founder of the independent publishing house Immanion Press, created with the aim of getting classic titles from established writers back into print and introduce innovative new authors to a reading audience. She’s currently working on several ideas for new books, as well as short stories. She lives in the Midlands of England, with her husband, Jim, and four cats.

  R.A. Kaelin is a short story writer from Lubbock, Texas. She graduated from the University of North Texas with a BA in English literature. This is her first published work. You can visit her at www.RAKaelin.net.

  About the Editor

  Lynne Jamneck is a fiction writer and editor. She has been nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda awards, and holds an MA in English Literature from Auckland University, New Zealand. Her fiction has appeared in Jabberwocky, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Something Wicked Magazine, Fantastique Unfettered and the collections So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction, Tales from the Bell Club, Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention and Black Wings of Cthulhu 6 (forthcoming). She is the editor of Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures (2008) and with S.T. Joshi, she co-edited Gothic Lovecraft (Cycatrix Press, 2015).

  She blogs at: http://lynnejamneckdiaries.blogspot.co.nz/

  Editor’s Notes

  Shadows of the Evening by Joyce Carol Oates

  As I reread this dreamlike story, written some years ago, I am struck by figures of speech and repetitions that resonate deeply with me.

  “Magdelena” is imagined as my mother Carolina Bush, who was known as Lena; she too had been born in the Black Rock neighborhood of Buffalo, to a large family of Hungarian immigrants; she too was “given away”—but not at the age of sixteen, at the age of less than a year. My mother’s remarks as an elderly woman were poignant to me—“My mother didn’t want me. My mother gave me away.” Through many decades she remembered this wound of childhood.

  The Lovecraftian aura is that of Lovecraft in his more benign, dreamlike and entranced state. Here is not the raw, overwrought horror of the more famous (or infamous) of Lovecraft’s stories like “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Dunwich Horror,” or anything involving monstrous creatures; here is a more subtle Lovecraftian accursedness, embodied not in the innocent young girl-witness but in the singer with a beautiful voice who cannot stop singing, whose fate is to sing. Obviously, the singer is an emblem of the artist; the girl suggests normalcy, though she is very much attracted to the singer as a young man, and would have sacrificed herself for him if he had allowed her. (Instead, another presumably innocent young woman has taken her place.) Magdalena will marry a well-to-do young man, whom we’ve just glimpsed in her aunt’s parlor; she will be happily fulfilled as a wife and mother; she will not be coupled with the accursed singer/ artist.

  There is some fable here of the doomed artist and his appeal to others who can be haunted by him, th
ough they can never understand him.

  It’s clear that I was reading Lovecraft’s short, sketch-like story “The Music of Erich Zann”—not a typical Lovecraft story, but one which lingers in the memory like a fading dream.

  The Genesis Mausoleum by Colleen Douglas

  When I was a young teen, I went to visit my grandmother, who lived in a village on the East Coast of the Demerara River. She lived in an old-style house, built on stilts near the main road which ran through the village. On late afternoons I would sit on the stairs after my chores. It was one such afternoon that I spotted the flashes of red against the verdant green of the parapet on the opposite side of the road. I was fascinated and tried to discern the source, which turned out to be a green frog tied in a red bow. It proceeded to make its way up the stairs of a neighbour’s house and as it reached the top stair it disappeared. Almost instantly, there was awful screaming from within that house. I ran inside to tell my gran what I had seen. She told me to say nothing. That memory stayed with me. Later, I learned the woman in that house was an outsider who came to teach the children and had started an affair with the son of a “spiritualist” (I use the term exceedingly loosely). At the time, I had no context, but in later years when I thought of what I’d seen, William Blake came to mind… “There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors.” It seemed to me that like the neighbor in my grandmother’s village, the characters in “The Genesis Mausoleum” had met such a “door”.

  The Woman in the Hill by by Tamsyn Muir

  I grew up a few kilometres away from Waikopua Creek in what is today known as Whitford, and consider the New Zealand bushlands and rural existence very evocative of Lovecraftian horror: beautiful, but also isolating and impenetrable. “The Woman In The Hill” takes place in the landscape of Whitford and Turanga, in a time when that isolation would have been much more pronounced than it is today. For the sake of accuracy, the original New Zealand language and spelling has been maintained in this letter.

  The Face of Jarry by by Cat Hellisen

  I walk my dogs along a fairly untouched stretch of coastline, and storms often leave great tangles of kelp along the shore. I started wondering if the gnarls and lines of sepia kelp on white sand were messages from another world. Jarry and the Long Road are elements from several other stories I’ve written, where Jarry is a space between worlds, a no-land where dream-detritus gathers. Between dreams and seaweed and purgatory, I had my story.

  Our Lady of Arsia Mons by Caitlín R. Kiernan

  “Our Lady of Arsia Mons” grew out of a conversation I had with artist Lee Moyer, when we first met in Portland at the 2010 HPL Film Festival. He was very excited to show me photos of the Henry Clews sculptures, and he wanted to talk about the possibility that either Lovecraft influenced Clews or Clews influenced Lovecraft, because there’s some eerie similarities between their work. Clews was born in Newport, Rhode Island, after all, and maybe Lovecraft had seen an exhibition of his work before he left the states. Something like that. Ultimately, we couldn’t find any evidence one way or the other, but it was an exciting possibility, and this story is an expression of gratitude to Lee for introducing me to Clews’ magnificently bizarre work.

  The Body Electric by Lucy Brady

  I had wanted to explore the concept of demonology in cyberspace for some time when I came to write “The Body Electric”, and had been reading around the subject of artificial intelligence. The inspiration for the story itself came when I was reminded of a news story I’d read some years ago about the Large Hadron Collider. At the time, the LHC was undergoing a series of unexplained malfunctions. Two theoretical physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, proposed a theory that a godlike intelligence that exists in the future (possibly the LHC, or the Higgs Boson itself) was retroactively sabotaging the systems in order to prevent the potentially destructive power of the Higgs Boson from being unleashed. Though probably conceived primarily as a joke, this seemed like an interesting basis for exploring other questions about philosophy and technology, and I thought about how a similar model of an entity outside of time could exist in the field of artificial intelligence. It was this that formed the basis of Eugenia Clarke’s computerized nemesis. Bech Nielsen’s interview can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOI8byIV_GI

  The Child and the Night Gaunts by Marly Youmans

  The tiny tales of “The Child and the Night Gaunts” were written at night—naturellement!—on the tiptop of a mountain and in a house with glass walls, surrounded on all sides by great crevasses of mist and cold streams. Lovecraft is in these tales (bits of his biography and his creations), along with memories of walking on the paths through Swan Point Cemetery, where he is buried (though his monument keeps vanishing), and many strange things—the recollection of a little gold saltcellar of a boat, the fantastically guised and jeweled catacomb and church skeletons that Paul Koudounaris photographed for his Heavenly Bodies, the weird red light of Poe, and even a simple thought that occurred to me on a night 18 years ago, when toxemia pulled me close to the edge of death. Such oddnesses are flecks of color in these Lovecraftian tinies, written as I sat by a dark glass wall, through which I could barely discern the distant mountains, lit by a moon ringed with a moon bow and backed by cloud. Now and then the breeze made tall-flowering pokeweed (edible poke salad when shoots and leaves are young, though dangerous if not properly prepared, and, when mature, poisonous in the root, the leaves, the red stems, and the purple-black berries) brush against the glass wall of the house, startling me with its white heads of blossom.

  All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts by Sonya Taaffe

  I have had an affinity for the sea all my life. My coastline is the cold Atlantic; I jumped into the high tides of the winter sea when I was less than two years old. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is the first Lovecraft story I can remember reading and I loved it for all the wrong reasons, at least from Lovecraft’s perspective: sea-change, sea-cities, the eternal ocean waiting. I have neither gills nor fins. When I lie in a bathtub, my skin does not crinkle into scales. When I was invited to participate in this anthology, my first idea was, “I want to write about the people Y’ha-nthlei throws back.” I am indebted to Amal El-Mohtar for inspiring the title. One of the characters looks like a dream I had in October 2014.

  Every Hole in the Earth We Will Claim As Our Own by Gemma Files

  I came into this project having just done my story for Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles’s all-female Lovecraft anthology, She Walks in Shadows, which involved selecting a specific Lovecraft tale and re-spinning it from the perspective of whatever monstrous feminine lay within. So I already knew that with this, I wanted to come at the challenge of writing a Lovecraftian piece the exact opposite way—boil it down for resonances, then proceed with the ones that attracted me most. So this story turned out to be about the sea, a primary Lovecraftian fear/fascination, but also about something I almost never write about (the death of a child) vs. something I’ve wanted to write about for a really long time (the Indonesian folkloric parasite duo known as the polong and the pelesit). The former has the power to twist my knobs immediately, because I’m a mother, which is why I normally keep away from it; the latter is fascinating because there’s so little mention of it (in English, anyway), and because it’s very obviously a metaphor for incurable disease, probably water-borne. Once I found the general method of delivery and an article about Roald Dahl’s daughter’s death from measles, it all came together fairly quickly after that.

  But Only Because I Love You by Molly Tanzer

  The title, “But Only Because I Love You”, came first with this one. That’s rare for me… but the idea of my protagonist being asked to do something terrible, and agreeing to do it for the title reason, that really guided the story. I also wanted to see if I could write a piece about women, but from a male point of view, and with a challenging narrative viewpoint. As for that viewpoint, well, I’m lucky I have two friends who have synesthesia, who
were willing to talk me through their experience of it to help me along. The experience of smelling or hearing colors or numbers seemed like a natural launching point for a story about the color out of space…

  Cthulhu’s Mother by Kelda Crich

  We all come from somewhere. Move back and back through the endless void of time, turn through the strange angles of the past, and you’ll find a beginning. Even the most dreadful creatures, the greatest of Old Ones had to have a mother. And if she’s still around, then Mother knows best. She doesn’t see you the way other people see you. She knows all your little foibles. She’s the beginning and she is the end.

  All Gods Great and Small by Karen Heuler

  The most immediate inspiration for “All Gods Great and Small” was “The Rats in the Walls,” with its restless motion and its harrowing sense of hidden horror. Those biting little insect teeth are direct descendants of Lovecraft’s rats. But I wanted to diverge from some of his trappings. He’s not really respectful to women or natives, is he? So I would rely on old gods who were on the side of women and natives—in fact, women were the priests of the old gods, perhaps indicating they had a higher value than men. Also, Lovecraft’s gods are colossal, and it amused me to step down, to retain a kind of primordial intent but reduce the size.

  Dearest Daddy by Lois H. Gresh

  “Dearest Daddy” draws on personal experiences in the wine and mushroom tunnels of Blois, France. Dark, dreary, claustrophobic, endlessly long and labyrinthine. Given that men hid in the tunnels amongst the mushrooms to escape capture and death, it seemed like a good setting for a twisted tale.

  Eye of the Beholder by Nancy Kilpatrick

  “Eye of the Beholder” arose from my awareness of stereotypes, particularly those relating to how women should look and act in order to find a mate. The common thinking is that men demand this of women, but I believe that women reinforce these stereotypes with one another, and I wanted to create a story that reflects that while still writing what I hope is a good and creepy read.