Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013

by Various Writers

  Do you have a specific writing style?

  I think I have two different styles. When I do reviews or nonfiction pieces, it is very informal and somewhat joking. I want it to sound like the way I talk, so that the reader gets a “two friends just BS-ing” sort of vibe from it. When I write more serious things, like fiction, that changes. It’s hard to classify my style, as it’s just how I do it, but others have pointed out the influences of Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, and Stephen King creeping around the edges of my stories. Since they are all authors I greatly admire and have read a lot of, I can sometimes see that in my work and I’m not too put off by it. But like every author, I just want to be known for writing like myself.

  How do you come up with titles for your work?

  Sometimes one comes to me in a flash and its perfect, but that’s rare. Most of the time I have to bash my head against the keyboard until one shakes loose. Even then, sometimes I come up with one I don’t really like but I can’t think of anything better so it’s the one I use.

  Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

  It depends on what I’m writing. Most of the time I just want them to be entertained. I do think there is a place for good stories that are just good stories and that’s all. There have been some tales where I did have something more in mind when writing them, a deeper meaning of a message, but whatever that is changes with my mood. I don’t think I have an overall message that runs through all my stories.

  How much of your work is realistic?

  Often quite a lot. I like blending the real with the unreal. I think the one strengthens the other. The more real you make things, the more frightening they become, even if the story is very weird and/or supernatural. Give the reader plenty of familiar trappings and when you introduce elements of the other or things from beyond, they are more easily believed.

  What books have most influenced your life most?

  First and foremost, Stephen King’s The Shining. It was the first book I read (at the tender age of 11) for fun and not for school. And it blew me away. It is why I am the lover of dark/horror literature that I am today. It’s one of the major reasons I write what I do. I have since read it five or six times over the years. Every so often I just get the urge to read it, so I pick it back up and dive into it. No matter how many times I do that it is still a great read.

  If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

  I have a few. H.P. Lovecraft for introducing mind-bending ideas to horror. He really did change the game. Robert Bloch for his dark sense of humor. Stephen King for his slice of life approach to characters and setting that makes even the most unbelievable things seem plausible. Joe R. Lansdale for being able to go from dark and gritty to downright silly and playful on a dime. Richard Matheson for out and out amazing story telling. And I can go on and on naming others, but I won’t.

  Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

  All the time, most of them come from working with them in the anthologies I am editing. There’s a bunch of authors I have become a huge fan of in a short period of time. Those that jump right to mind would be Jeffrey Thomas, Peter Rawlik, Christine Morgan, Sam Stone, Mercedes Yardley, Cody Goodfellow, and there are tons more that I’m sure I’m forgetting now. I love the work all these authors do, and there’s a reason you will see their names appear again and again in the anthologies I put out.

  What are your current projects?

  A: I always have a ton of stuff going on at the same time. Currently I am working on a novel, still doing game work for Call of Cthulhu, and co-editing a new anthology for Dark Regions Press. Sadly I can’t go into greater details than that on any of those right now.

  Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members.

  Entity? Cthulhu, I suppose. Besides him, good friends, co-editors, and co-authors Glynn Barrass and David Conyers have always been there for me when I needed them. That’s chiefly why I like working with them on so many various projects.

  If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest work?

  Nope. I was very happy with it. Give me a few years and then have me take a look at it again and yeah, I’ll probably have a few things I want to change. But right now it’s a perfect little baby.

  What was the hardest part of writing?

  Sometimes just finding time to write. Other times pushing through writers block. Mainly those two things are my biggest roadblocks.

  Do you have any advice for other writers?

  Have a thick skin. You will get rejected. A lot. Don’t think you know all there is to know about writing. You can always learn more and you should always be leaning. Never stop that. If you’re not getting better then you’ve flat lined and that’s bad. Learn how to take criticism. Never rest on your laurels and dear god, try to stay humble. There are far too many egomaniacs in this game already.

  Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?

  Hello, thanks for reading my stories, I greatly appreciate each and every one of you. I hope you enjoyed the story.

  Do you have a blog/website? if so, what is it?

  The easiest and best way for people to find me and see that I’m doing is through Facebook. I spend far too much time on there. You can find me at: https://www.facebook.com/brian.m.sammons I do have a webpage that lists most of the things I have done, but I update it rather infrequently. Still for an easy one stop spot for all things me, that’s a good place to start. That you can find here: http://brian_sammons.webs.com/

  Back to Top

  About Brian M. Sammons

  Brian M. Sammons has been writing reviews on all things horror for more years than he’d care to admit. Wanting to give other critics the chance to ravage his work for a change, he has penned a few short stories that have appeared in anthologies such as; Arkham Tales, Horrors Beyond, Monstrous, Dead but Dreaming 2, Horror for the Holidays, Twisted Legends, Mountains of Madness, Deepest, Darkest Eden and others. He has edited the books; Cthulhu Unbound 3, Undead & Unbound, Eldritch Chrome, Edge of Sundown, and Steampunk Cthulhu. For the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game he wrote the book Secrets and has had scenarios in the books; Terrors From Beyond, Secrets of San Francisco, The House of R’lyeh, Strange Aeons 2, Atomic Age Cthulhu, and Doors to Darkness. He is currently far too busy for any sane man. For more about this guy that neighbors describe as “such a nice, quiet man”.

  Also by Brian on Kindle

  Cthulhu Unbound 3 (Editor) (with David Conyers)

  Undead & Unbound (Editor) (with David Conyers)

  Connect with Brian Online

  Website: http://brian_sammons.webs.com

  Twitter: @BrianMSammons

  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/brian.m.sammons

  Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/459839.Brian_M_Sammons

  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00GFT0DCA

  Back to Top

  Memory of the Night

  Peter Rawlik

  This is a stand-alone tale and an original to this collection.

  For the first time in a year I creep up out of the hot earth to bask in the cool night wind and stare at the moon and the stars as they crawl through distant, abstract orbits. Once I would have made my own tunnel, but in this place men have dug great pits where before only natural rents had led to the mineral wealth they so very much desired. There was a town here, but through the years it has slowly vanished. The humans come during the day with their machines and pull the buildings down, eager to remove what evidence they can, desperate to make the place vanish into the dustbins of time. All that remains above ground are a few buildings, some pipes, the crumbling roads and the cemetery. Below the surface, in the abandoned mines, there is the fire that burns the earth itself. Men cannot extinguish that. They have tried, but to no avail. Not all the coal seams are on fire, but those that are have smoldered for years sending wispy smoke and the stink of sulfur into th
e landscape above. There is nothing here to see, and no one to see it. Ashehurst is little more than a memory, except to me, for while men have abandoned the place, tried to wipe it off the map, I have come to call it home.

  Men are like that. Men have always been like that. They build things, monuments, towns, villages, cemeteries, cities, and when they fail, when they go wrong, when the construct turns sour, they walk away. Men refuse to live in such places, they cannot abide them, cannot even suffer to sleep in them. Men cannot stand the sight of their own failures, and so they abandon them, and try to wipe them off the face of the earth. Fire has always been preferred, but when needs be they will take hammers to walls and pummel things into dust if they must. There are places that resist destruction, and such places are useless to Men, and yet they refuse to relinquish them completely. Such strange attitudes Men have. They look on these places with contempt, with uneasy memories, with hopelessness. These places have failed them, but they will not let them go. Monsters find homes in such places, we thrive in them, we cultivate our crops and our families amongst the dead and decay and diseased, but always in secret, for Men never truly abandon anything and they are jealous of those who can thrive where they cannot.

  The cemetery between the village of Innsmouth and the town of Arkham, one of many Men built, used and then abandoned is so old that the place had been nearly forgotten. We built vast tunnels linking the moldering crypts and tombs. We established businesses and temples. We had culture, in our own way: music and dance, theatre and art. We built a refuge for those things of the night that still existed, and the monstrous things that Men made and discarded when they proved to be something other than Men. We had laws, codes of behavior, and we enforced them. We called it home.

  And we knew someday it all had to end.

  The Oracles of Daoloth, the three white sisters, had issued forth their dire prophecies and the artists had added to their mural. We knew some of what would happen, one of the Valusians would be involved. Meetings were called, debate was held, motions were made, and laws were passed. Laws made in an attempt to avoid the inevitable, which only served to frustrate those of Valusia. They left us, migrated away. Only Shtak remained. He scoffed at the prophecy, and at the laws, he stayed to prove the prophecies false.

  Between the laws and Shtak’s defiance of them, the prophecy became self-fulfilling. Outsiders came, and were accepted. Men came looking for them, and then more followed with fire and guns. The Necropolis fell. I remember it. This is my task, my curse, to remember what is important, but in the quarter century that has passed since, it has remained only a memory. I have not committed it to the page. I haven’t yet judged it worthy of being part of our history, the history of the people who are not Men.

  I’ve read the books that Carter wrote but they are more romance and adventure, more hyperbolic fiction than historical fact. I’ve heard the music as well. The story that lurks behind pitiful lyrics and cacophonous noise played on the radio. Those beats hold a secret message for we who know the drumming language that once echoed through the barrow halls. The story has been told, shared, compiled, exaggerated, translated, and repeated in a dozen of the ancient ways we have learned to speak to one another. I can trace a dozen or more authors through the telling I’ve heard or read or seen.

  Simon has written a monologue. Pickman has a diptych in a gallery in SOHO. Geoffrey has composed an opera, Kadath. There are murals in the subways of Philadelphia that I think are the work of Lavinia, or perhaps one of her children. We have found ways to survive, places to hide, and thrive. Some of us have talents that that can be useful to Men, skills that can be marketed.

  There is no market for what I do. No one wants to read the history of monsters, not the true history, not really: Except for other monsters. There are so few of us, and we are scattered, we live in fear of being found again, but when we are lonely we cry out for each other as best we can.

  Mine is a lonely, loathsome task.

  As is that of my children.

  The wind comes up out of the valley carrying with it the rasping sound of one of my brood singing the title of this year’s work - The Scream of a Shoggoth. I smile, a short work, but he is still young. Another, an older sibling echoes back his own accomplishment: Asenath’s Song. The first child responds by passing along the work of a more distant member of my brood. I’m shocked by the title, and I honestly do not know how he came about the subject matter, and I am not sure I want to know, but someday I am sure I shall want to read The Second Life of Doctor West.

  I let the wind play over my body before inhaling and swelling my lungs up to twice their normal size. A long seam along the back of my carapace cracks. It isn’t much, three inches at the most, but it is a start. I exhale, and then straining I try to push air into my lungs. My chest aches as I force the carapace apart. I can feel the seam break lengthen, and one of my new wings squeezes out and slowly unfurls. The other wing follows suit. They are sad, tiny things. I stretch them out, exercising them against the breeze. When I’m sure I have control I reach down and with the claws on the wingtips I grab both sides of my carapace and spread it apart.

  There is a sucking sound as I work my way up and out of my dead shell. It is thin, like rice paper, and I could easily tear through it if I wanted to, but I’ve spent too long on this particular piece to destroy it. It takes me hours to peel the dry rigid carapace off. It is a macabre strip tease, for as I take off each panel, the flesh beneath is not yet dry, and to the untrained eye would appear as nothing more than raw, flayed muscle, moist and glistening. The new flesh swells as I move from limb to limb. It is a dangerous time for me. I am exposed, vulnerable, and unshielded from the elements.

  Even after I remove all the old shell it still takes time for the new flesh to harden. I have to remain in place for hours, only then can I be sure that my new carapace is sufficiently strong enough to carry my weight. It should be a tedious and frightening time, but at the moment I have no desire to watch for intruders. With slow, careful movements I gather up my old skin and wings, and in the moonlight I read what is written on the inside.

  For a year my subconscious has worked on my flesh, inscribing words in blood, invisible to my eyes. Only now, with my annual metamorphosis can I and my children read what we have written. We are books that can only be read when we are opened, books of flesh and blood. When we are finally privileged to read what we have created, what our minds have secreted without our conscious participation, we revel in them.

  As my new body dries I read. It takes me hours, but I have the time. The story is familiar, the characters, the actors, well known, and I know this tale. I’ve heard it before, but the details are slightly different, the hyperbole and exaggerations eliminated, the facts dry, untinged by romanticism or heroics. It is a masterpiece of historical narrative, comparable to anything Terkel or Ellis has written: Were the subject matter not so monstrous, if the author himself not a monster, it would surely be a contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

  Instead, I do the only thing I can do. I raise my wings and bend them together, finding the serrations that allow me to stridulate, to chirrup, to sing. It takes me a moment to tune the newly dried ridges, but only a moment. I fill the air around me with vibrations that quickly form a chorus and then are carried forth on the wind. It is a simple two word phrase, nothing more, but it is as we have always done, as my children have done: I announce the title, and nothing more.

  The night pauses. My children grow quiet. I strain to hear them, but for hundreds of miles there is nothing but silence. It goes on and on for far too long. The time creeps by, and in the few moments that pass I grow despondent. Perhaps my title is too bold, my subject matter to daring. I may be the patriarch of this brood of Alazeef, but I am not infallible, if I show weakness, if I produce inferior work, I can be overthrown, deposed, replaced. I could be executed for poor scholarship.

  The world erupts in a cacophony of sound. My children are screaming, and the sound drives me from my feet, forci
ng me to the ground. I scream back and they stop their maddening calls. They replace them with whispers, murmuring pleas, pleading requests. They are begging me to talk, to read, and to recite from my work. They want to hear it, as much as they can before dawn forces us back underground.

  I rise up and refine my instrument. I send forth a crescendo to silence the whisperers, and then I begin. It will take hours to transmit the entire piece, and if I rush in a few passages, leave out some footnotes, some minor movements, I may finish it before dawn. As always I begin with the title sequence before moving into the body of the work: the tale of Olmsted and Asenath, of Ahab and Obed, of the death of Waite, and of Gilman.

  The overture ends, and the prologue begins, and by its content and composition I either flourish or die. This is the way it is, has been, and always shall be. Here then is my masterpiece Innsmouth Lost, Arkham Unbound.

  Back to Top

  Interview with Peter Rawlik

  Where did Reanimators come from?

  Reanimators was an unexpected book. I had been working on another idea, a kind of League of Lovecraftian Gentlemen and I really wanted to use Herbert West as a character, but his history was too well established, his timeline didn’t mesh with the direction I was going, so I decided to use Dr. Hartwell, Pr. Armitage’s physician in “The Dunwich Horror”. He only has a walk on roll in that book so I could do whatever I wanted with him. Problem was I didn’t know that much about him, or his motivations. To solve this I decided to write a few stories about him, those stories just kept growing and expanded into what I called Shadows Over Arkham, which eventually became Reanimators.