Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013

by Various Writers

  He hadn’t. He followed the pistol through the half-open hatch and into the node, panic-firing once more into Kvant 2. The gyrorocket round smashed into the far wall with a flat smacking sound. Special rocket-propelled needles that crumple on impact, so as not to puncture the hull when putting down a mutiny–or foreign spies.

  He looked around. All was still, but for the grumbling of the oxygen generators and the carbon-dioxide scrubbers. A generous arc of blood drifted past, mingling with the omnipresent globs of coolant. The Guillotine floated by his head, and he grabbed it, but it was impossible to wield with one hand, so he pushed it back into Spektr. He peeked around the corner into the Soyuz capsule. The wires were pulled or cut, neat, severed piles of spaghetti blocking the mouth of the capsule. Only the readiness lights blinked inside, but there was nowhere for anyone to hide. It was like that insipid American movie the Russians gleefully tormented him with, whenever they weren’t ogling Mir’s capacious library of Italian softcore porn. The one where the sole survivor gets into the lifeboat and blasts off, only to find the creature waiting for her in there…

  Gun-first, he dove for the capsule.

  Something swooped down out of Priroda module, directly above his head. A hand clutched his wrist and twisted the gun away. He looked up to see that the “hand” grew out of Ilya’s pants-cuff, where he had until recently had a foot. The leg flexed, wrapped twice around Moxley’s arm, pointed the gun back at his head.

  Moxley looked up. Ilya hung by his hands from the mouth of the hatch, his legs bending all the wrong ways in so many of the wrong places. Moxley tried only to get out of his reach, because touching it meant it was real.

  “Help me, God, please help me—”

  “What’s the situation, Sherman?” asked the American voice.

  Ilya’s other prehensile foot caught Moxley’s wildly flapping free arm and lifted him into Priroda. Ilya threw him across the science module, charged after and pounced on him with all four grasping hands before Moxley’s hurtling body reached the far wall.

  He hit so hard, Moxley was dazed and lost. The headset cracked, his skull rang and grated, but through it all, like a ray of sunlight piercing the darkness of the bottom of a well, he heard the American voice crackling in his ear.

  “Say again, what is the situation up there, Sherman, over?”

  Ilya’s hands clutched his neck, shredding the muscles in an iron grip, but he didn’t choke Moxley. “Tell them, Sherman, explain the situation.”

  “I’m–help, he’s got me, and he’s hurting me–“

  “Where are you, right now, Sherman? And where is he?”

  “We–oh God, oh shit–we’re in Priroda–“

  “You’re both in Priroda, right now? Is the hatch sealed?”

  “No, but–I can’t get to Soyuz, he’s on top of me–“

  “You’ve got to fight him, Sherman. Use the damned gun, for Christ’s sake.”

  He reached out for the gun tumbling end over end just out of his grasp. Ilya grabbed his hair, and every last strand of it just came out and fluttered away, oh God, he was so sick, but he was still alive, he could fight.

  “I can’t—”

  Moxley kicked out from the floor, flying up with Ilya on his back, but the mutant cosmonaut arrested their flight and shoved back, driving him into the floor face-first and bending his legs backwards until he howled.

  “Sherman, this is very important, listen to me, now. Is he the only one who’s–changed?”

  “He and I are the only ones alive–“

  “And you’re both still in the Priroda science module, the one NASA calls R block?”

  “Yes, do something, do something, please, God!”

  “We have a contingency plan in place, Sherman.”

  “Good, do it, please, he’s killing me!”

  “I’m very sorry, Dr. Moxley,” said the American voice, and the headset went dead.

  “How painful, to discover that one is expendable,” Ilya whispered in his ear.

  Moxley thrashed one last time, putting all his strength into getting the gun, but when he pushed off the floor, the whole module shook and seemed to drop out from around him, so that he smashed into the porthole.

  Whatever Ilya said next was lost in the roar of the module being explosively ejected from the Mir station. Rolling out of control from the trajectory set by the tiny explosives in the node’s coupling ports, Priroda was sent spinning like a torpedo at the earth. A blasting wind sucked at Moxley, but he clutched the rim of the porthole and looked out at the unbelievable view of the earth.

  “Do you see me, God?” he screamed into the wind.

  The hatch slammed most of the way shut, but cables clogged the mouth. Ilya leapt off him and tore the cables free, sealed the hatch and turned to smile at Moxley.

  “We still have a few minutes before we burn up, Sherman. How do you propose we pass the time?”

  Moxley pressed his face against the porthole and prayed.

  “That’s right, Sherman. Pray Until Something Happens, yes?”

  He kept on praying, and presently, something happened, but it wasn’t what he’d prayed for, at all.

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  Interview with Cody Goodfellow

  Your first two novels are a modern Lovecraftian epic. How is it connected to the Cthulhu Mythos, and why did you elect to do a novel instead of the traditional short fiction route?

  To take the last one first, I believed that the best way to repay the inspiration and influence Lovecraft’s work had given me was to introduce it to a wider audience. Even in Lovecraft’s lifetime, his friends and acolytes wrote stories to contribute to the Mythos as a kind of inside joke. While horror, and particularly cosmic horror, definitely work best in shorter works, most readers overwhelmingly prefer novels; it’s easier to sit in on an engaging 500-page book than it is to get one’s bearings all over again with the opening of each short piece. I didn’t want to just speak to that select crowd of fellow Lovecraftians, but to find a way to make it as scary and exhilarating for a wider audience as it was for me when I first discovered this stuff, without dumbing it down.

  Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk are not sequels, but created to expand upon the cosmology of the Mythos as laid down explicitly in At The Mountains Of Madness. At a time when Darwin’s theory of natural selection was still seeping into the public consciousness, Lovecraft brilliantly drove an artistic wedge between scientific materialists and their own smug certainty of a godless universe. What if the fossil record led us back to an entirely unacceptable act of creationism, after all? I felt that Lovecraft had spilled a whole canon’s worth of mythology in Mountains; a whole country of tigers and dragons that could be explored without laying bare the whole terrain and thus rendering it commonplace.

  And while so much of the Mythos becomes quaint with repetition and misuse, the subversive natural history of At The Mountains Of Madness cuts to the quick of the furious evolution debate, which is driven by the burning, irrational fear of religious people. Accepting evolution forces people of faith into a cold, accidental universe infinitely older and larger than their clay idols and sacred scriptures, an inimical emptiness where the only meaning is entirely of our own invention. More vitally and poignantly than the philosophical works of Kierkegaard or Sartre, the Cthulhu Mythos puts all of us into that terrifying, fascinating place, not just as escapism, but as a necessary step in our evolution as thinking individuals, and as a somewhat sentient species aspiring to escape its own self-imposed extinction.

  Why did you decide to self-publish your first two novels?

  I managed to sell a book-length game supplement to Chaosium for Call Of Cthulhu right after I graduated college, while I was working at a new-fangled CD-ROM zine some friends had started up. But shortly afterwards, the zine went belly-up, and while Chaosium accepted the book for publication, they didn’t do anything with it for four years. I was working on my first novel by then and becoming rather paranoid that someone might accept my work and go
out of business before they could publish, or simply sit on it until it was no longer relevant. I was having similarly bad luck with the short story market, and what little Mythos fiction there was at the time was rather sad. So I decided I’d throw the books out exactly as I wanted them done, like a proper declaration of war. It didn’t exactly work out that way, but the books continue to overcome new readers as my body of short work grows.

  Radiant Dawn wasn’t your first Lovecraftian work. Tell us about the San Francisco Guidebook, and how the CofC RPG influenced your fiction.

  The San Francisco Guidebook (published as Secrets of San Francisco) was a labor of love committed in 1994, that took over a year and used up two pairs of shoes. I went everywhere from San Jose to Mt. Tamalpais, talked to everyone I could and compared notes with the city’s official and unofficial historians (Gladys Hansen and Dr. Weirde, respectively). Chaosium always did everything on its own inscrutable, glacial scale, so it was almost twelve years before it finally saw release, by which time it had been amended with additional resource material and scenarios by David Conyers, Brian Sammons and some others.

  Far from believing that the game diluted or polluted the Mythos, I think it reintroduced the notion of characters as active protagonists to Lovecraft’s universe. In keeping with his fundamental lack of interest in humanity, his narrators were little more than ciphers and witnesses, if not active, unhinged participants in his malefic plots. While it’s absurd and stupid to indulge in humanistic triumphalism and reduce the Mythos to another league of mundane villains, I think the story-based structure of the game taught enterprising Keepers to build their scenarios as mantraps, knowing perfectly intelligent, highly motivated players would use all their wiles and character’s attributes to solve the mystery without getting killed or going insane. Given how mechanistic most mainstream horror thrillers are, with characters cooperating in their own dismal executions like so many steer in the slaughterhouse, a little gaming experience would be in order for almost anyone who sets out to write a plausible tale of terror.

  Not a single recognizable Mythos entity’s name is dropped, and no concrete Mythos references are made in Radiant Dawn. Why?

  I understand why writers feel the need to establish the bona fides of their Mythos story as soon as possible… but in the rush, quite often the story quickly becomes rote and dull. When one character gravely explains what the Mythos is, usually passing along a convenient forbidden tome (if not a volume of Lovecraft’s fiction itself), or when slabs of exposition give a crabbed history lesson shot through with vowel-challenged formal nouns charged with a forced sense of second-hand menace. Bloch and Campbell struggled with these kinds of juvenile gimmicks to cement their early work into the canon, but quickly outgrew it.

  In order to make the world I was building stand on its own, I wanted to hold back any reference to the Mythos until well into the story so that it would come not as an obligatory infodump but as a great but by no means conclusive piece in a massive puzzle.

  I wanted to create a modern weird tale on a larger scale, using the core formula for the original magazine’s most successful works. At its best, the pulp weird tale freely blended genres and played conventions and clichés off against each other. Lovecraft’s own stories ranged from high fantasy to grim and gory horror, and included startling hybrids that continue to engender new mutations of genre in our isolated backwater of a subculture.

  I wanted to get new people into the cult. I wanted them to think they were getting a military thriller with some sci-fi and conspiracy theory tropes thrown in, and by the time they found themselves deep into this esoteric and largely forgotten body of pulp mythology, they’d be powerless to resist or escape. It would make sense, and it would be scary, at a visceral level, but also at an intellectual level. I wanted to shake to its foundation the way we look at all living things, including… no, especially humans.

  Lovecraftian criticism is pretty unanimous in its dismissal of pastiche, but how do you evoke a Lovecraftian chill using modern prose techniques?

  Modern cosmic horror just can’t get the same kind of effect Lovecraft attained, and shouldn’t try what he did. People don’t get scared the same way, now. A lot of people weren’t going for it in HPL’s time. But Howard, a contemporary and friendly correspondent of Lovecraft’s, was the most successful short story writer of his time, because he wrote action. In one of Howard’s horror-westerns, a rancher returns from sealing off a tunnel leading to a subterranean city of serpent people beneath his spread, and he sits down in his house and blows his brains out.

  I think that action and dynamic characters are important to holding a modern popular audience. A glimpse of the impossible would not render us bereft of our will to survive. But it’s all the more horrifying when the kind of hail Mary heroic nonsense that carries the day in mainstream horror has no traction here. Today’s fiction readers like to think they’re on safari when they’re really on well-trodden paths in their own backyard. How far you can lead them out into the weeds before they notice it’s dark, they’re lost and they hear wolves howling, is entirely up to you.

  What do you see in the future for the Cthulhu Mythos?

  There is a great upwelling currently underway of new Mythos horror, or events and merchandise capitalizing on Lovecraft’s legacy. Its popularity will undoubtedly take away from its mystery, but this is inevitable. There is a very real danger in making Cthulhu into Godzilla and the Mythos into the new zombie milieu. I don’t think either of these things will happen unless the genre is completely ripped away from its philosophical subtext, in which case Cthulhu just becomes an uglier, dumber Devil. It’s an atheist, materialist mythological system, and so long as it speaks to that mindset, it’ll be able to keep reinventing itself and remain relevant.

  I want to believe that the Mythos will continue to instigate deeper probing of the unimaginable dark, both within the constraints of the canon and in mainstream horror and fantasy, where Lovecraft’s influence is much more evanescent, but no less profound.

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  About Cody Goodfellow

  Cody Goodfellow has written four novels––Radiant Dawn, Ravenous Dusk, Perfect Union and Repo Shark––and co-wrote Jake’s Wake, Spore and The Last Goddam Hollywood Movie with splatterpunk godfather John Skipp. His short fiction has been collected in All-Monster Action! and Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, both of which received the Wonderland Book Award for Best Collection. As co-founder and editor of Perilous Press, he has published new Mythos releases by Brian Stableford, David Conyers and Michael Shea. As an anointed minister of the Esoteric Order of Dagon (San Pedro Chapter), he presides over prayer breakfast events across the country. He is powerless to stop living in Los Angeles.

  Also by Cody on Kindle

  Radiant Dawn

  Ravenous Dusk

  Perfect Union

  Jake’s Wake

  Spore

  The Last Goddam Hollywood Movie

  All-Monster Action!

  Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

  Black Wind

  Deepest Darkest Eden (Editor)

  Connect with Cody Online

  Website: http://www.perilouspress.com/

  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Cody-Goodfellow/e/B002KYCE76/

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  Cutter

  David Dunwoody

  The following short story appears in Slices of Flesh and is a prequel to the novel The Harvest Cycle.

  With his thumb and forefinger, he pinned his eyelids shut. He wanted to cover his ears too but he thought the kid would just get louder and that was the very last thing he wanted.

  There was only the occasional tinkle outside, fingers of glass in wet hands. Most of the things seemed to have departed in the early hours. It sounded like there was one, two at the most hanging back. He told himself they didn’t know. If they had, he’d be dead. Him and the kid.

  The kid was sitting in the opposite corner of the cellar, his outline barely visible: spikes of unwashed ha
ir, knees pulled to chest, arms drooping over knees and jiggling in the throes of either boredom or madness. His whisper was almost inaudible, yet to the man it was gravel on steel every time the kid asked, “Can we go up yet?”

  “We can’t go up,” the man whispered. “Listen. There’s still a couple up there.”

  “Just a couple.”

  He knew the kid’s eyes were on his shotgun, and he brought it flush with his leg, the one that was lying flat with a pink bandage above the knee. He told the kid, “Don’t know how far off the others are. Might be miles, might be blocks. Can’t risk shooting.”

  “They probably ain’t gonna come back.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. It was no good glaring in the dark, but he hoped his tone would get the point across. “Do you know how I’ve lasted this long? It wasn’t by the grace of probably.”

  “You know how I lasted?” the kid shot back. Jesus, his balls might not have dropped yet but he was feeling them. The man almost laughed, stifled himself.

  “Kid, you’ve lasted because older folks are willing to get killed for the sake of a little boy. They think there’s a future in you. Folks about as bright as this room.”

  The kid shifted, mumbled under his breath. The man felt bad and let out a sigh.

  They’d been in the cellar about three days. Had managed to make it on a can of lukewarm tomato soup, but that can was good for half a piss now and the ache in the man’s leg had reached the bone. But, but but, they couldn’t go up yet. Even if experience suggested most of the things were three towns away by now, Saint Probably was about as reliable as a wet match.

  It was a two-story house with a screened-in porch and a cellar accessible only by trapdoor. Might be a good place to stay put once the coast was clear, provided there were any supplies left in this ghost town. The man usually hunted his food and sheltered himself within the wilderness but he hadn’t been able to shake this suburban sprawl in weeks. The kid, meanwhile, had apparently never seen two trees side by side. But he’d been hacking it on his own for God knew how long. Hadn’t been accompanied by a kindly stranger (or a hungry one who acted kindly) in months, he said. Had only seen the lurking beasts.