Black Wings of Cthulhu (Volume Two)

Introduction

S. T. JOSHI

WHAT DEFINES A L OVECRAFTIAN STORY ? T HIS SEEMINGLY simple question is in fact full of ambiguities, perplexities, and paradoxes, for the term could encompass everything from the most slavish of pastiches that seek (usually unsuccessfully) to mimic Lovecraft’s dense and flamboyant prose and mechanically replicate his gods, characters, and places, to tales that allusively draw upon Lovecraft’s core themes and imagery, to parodies ranging from the affectionate (Fritz Leiber’s To Arkham and the Stars) to the faintly malicious (Arthur C. Clarke’s At the Mountains of Murkiness). My goal in the Black Wings series has been to avoid the first at all costs and to foster the second and, to a lesser degree, the third. The days when August Derleth or Brian Lumley could invent a new god or forbidden book and therefore declare themselves as working in the Lovecraft tradition are long over. What is now needed is a more searching, penetrating infusion of Lovecraftian elements that can work seamlessly with the author’s own style and outlook.

That being said, it becomes vital for both writers and readers to understand the essence of the Lovecraftian universe, and the literary tools he used to convey his aesthetic and philosophical principles. One of the great triumphs of modern Lovecraft scholarship has been to demonstrate that Lovecraft was an intensely serious writer who, as his letters and essays suggest, continually grappled with the central questions of philosophy and sought to suggest answers to them by means of horror fiction. What is our place in the cosmos? Does a god or gods exist? What is the ultimate fate of the human species? These and other big questions are perennially addressed in Lovecraft’s fiction, and in a manner that conveys his cosmic sensibility—a sensibility that keenly etches humankind’s transience and fragility in a boundless universe that lacks a guiding purpose or direction. At the same time, Lovecraft’s intense devotion to his native soil made him something of a regionalist who vivified the history and topography of Providence, Rhode Island, and all of New England, establishing a foundation of unassailable reality from which his cosmic speculations could take wing.

How contemporary writers have adapted these and other central ideas and motifs into their own work is well demonstrated by the tales in this volume. Cosmic indifferentism is at the heart of Melanie Tem’s Dahlias, which does not require explicit horror, or the supernatural, to convey its effects. The uniquely topographical, even archaeological horror that we find in such a tale as At the Mountains of Madness is powerfully demonstrated in Richard Gavin’s The Abject and Donald Tyson’s The Skinless Face. Tom Fletcher in some sense draws upon the claustrophobic horror that Lovecraft created in The Dreams in the Witch House in his unnerving tale, View. Nicholas Royle’s The Other Man is a searching and terrifying meditation on the theme of identity, a theme is that found in such of Lovecraft’s tales as The Outsider and The Shadow out of Time.

Alien incursion is at the heart of many Lovecraft tales, and John Langan (Bloom) and Jonathan Thomas (The King of Cat Swamp) ring very different but equally engaging changes on this complex theme. Thomas’s story is a clear nod, both in setting and in character, to Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, as are, in a very different manner, Jason C. Eckhardt’s And the Sea Gave Up the Dead and Brian Evenson’s The Wilcox Remainder; Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Houndwife is a tip of the hat to The Hound, and Nick Mamatas’s Dead Media plays a riff on The Whisperer in Darkness. But in all these cases, subtle character development of a sort that Lovecraft generally did not favour raises these tales far above the level of pastiche. A rent in the very fabric of the universe is at the heart of Darrell Schweitzer’s inextricable fusion of fantasy and horror, The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives, while Steve Rasnic Tem’s Waiting at the Crossroads Motel fuses setting and character in a tale whose cosmic backdrop is thoroughly Lovecraftian.

One of the most interesting developments in recent years—perhaps inspired by the mountains of information on Lovecraft’s daily life and character that have emerged through the publication of his letters—is the degree to which Lovecraft himself has become a character, even an icon, in fiction. In very different ways, John Shirley’s When Death Wakes Me to Myself and Rick Dakan’s Correlated Discontents draws upon Lovecraft’s own personal idiosyncrasies to convey terror and weirdness. The proliferation of Lovecraft’s work in the media—especially film and television—is at the heart of Don Webb’s Casting Call and Chet Williamson’s Appointed, tales that skirt the borderland of parody while remaining chillingly terrifying. Jason V Brock takes on Lovecraft’s voluminous letter-writing directly with an epistolary tale that suggests far more than it tells.

The fact that writers of such different stripes have chosen to work, however tangentially, in the Lovecraftian idiom is a testament to the vibrancy and eternal relevance of his central themes and concerns. As he memorably wrote, We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. But it is the very purpose of the writer of fiction to venture, in imagination, beyond that placid island, and very often the result is a harrowing sense of our appalling isolation in the cosmic drift. Lovecraft himself spent a lifetime seeking to probe beyond the limitations of the human senses toward the vast cosmos-at-large, and it is evident that a growing cadre of writers are eager to follow him.

S. T. Joshi

When Death Wakes Me to Myself

JOHN SHIRLEY

John Shirley is the author of numerous novels, collections of stories—including the Bram Stoker Award-winning Black Butterflies—and scripts. His screenplays include The Crow. His newest novels are Demons (Del Rey, 2007), Black Glass (Elder Signs Press, 2008), Bleak History (Simon & Schuster, 2009), Bioshock: Rapture (Tor, 2011), and Everything Is Broken (Prime Books, 2011).

SOMEONE’S BROKEN INTO THE HOUSE, DOCTOR ."

Fyodor saw no fear in Leah’s gray eyes. But he’d never seen her afraid, and she’d worked closely with him in psychiatrics for almost eight years—ever since he’d finished his internship. She brushed auburn hair from her pale forehead, adjusted her glasses, and went on, The window latch is broken in your office—and I think I heard someone moving around down in the basement.

Did you call the police? Fyodor asked, glancing toward the basement door. His mouth felt dry.

They stood in the front hallway of the old house, by the open arch to the waiting room. I did. I was about to call you, when you walked in.

They didn’t speak for a long moment, both of them listening for the burglar. Wintry morning light angled through the bay windows of the waiting room, casting intricate shadows from the lace curtains across the braided rug. A dog barked down the street; a foghorn hooted. Just the sounds of Providence, Rhode Island…

Then a peal of happy laughter rippled up through the hardwood floorboards. It cut short so abruptly he wondered if he’d really understood the sound. That sound like laughter to you?

Yes. She glanced at the window. The police are in no hurry…

You should wait out front, Leah. He was thinking he should try to see to it that whoever this was, they weren’t setting a fire, vandalizing, doing serious damage to the house. He was negotiating to buy it, planning to expand it into a suite of offices with various health services—especially bad timing for vandalism. It was a big house, built in 1825, most of it not in use at the moment. The ground-floor den was ideal for receiving patients; the front living room had been converted into a waiting room.

Fyodor took a step through the archway, into the hall—and then the basement door burst open. A slender young man stood there, a few paces away, holding a bottle in his hand, toothy grin fading. Oh! I seem to have lost all track of time. How indiscreet of me, said the young man, in an accent that sounded Deep South. He wore a neat dark suit with a rather antiquated blazer, thin blue tie, starched white shirt, silver cufflinks, polished black shoes. His fingernails were immaculately manicured, his straight black hair neatly combed back. Fyodor noted all this with a professional detachment, but also a little surprise—he’d expected the burglar to be scruffier, more like the sullen young men he sometimes counseled at Juvenile Detention. The young man’s dark brown eyes met his—the gaze was frank, the smile seemed genuine. Still, the strict neatness might place him in a recognizable spectrum of personality disorders.

You seem lost, Fyodor said—gesturing, with his hand at his side, for Leah to go outside. Foolish protective instinct—she was athletic, probably more formidable in a fight than he was. In fact, young man, you seem to have lost your way right through one of our windows…

Ah, yes. His mouth twitched. But look what I found for you, Dr. Cheski! He raised the dusty bottle in his hand. It was an old, unlabeled wine bottle. I never used to drink. I wanted to take it up, starting with something old and fine. I want a new life. I desire to do things differently. Live! I bet you didn’t know there was any wine down there.