Cthulhurotica (27 page)

This time, I will not kneel.

Great Rift
by Galen Dara

ASTROPHOBOS,
conclusion…

Thus I mus’d, when o’er the vision
Crept a red delirious change;
Hope dissolving to derision,
Beauty to distortion strange;
Hymnic chords in weird collision,
Spectral sights in endless range.

Crimson burn’d the star of sadness
As behind the beams I peer’d;
All was woe that seem’d but gladness
Ere my gaze with truth was sear’d;
Cacodaemons, mir’d with madness,
Thro’ the fever’d flick’ring leer’d.

Now I know the fiendish fable
That the golden glitter bore;
Now I shun the spangled sable
That I watch’d and lov’d before;
But the horror, set and stable,
Haunts my soul for evermore.

H.P. Lovecraft

Originally published in
The United Amateur
, 17, No. 3 (January 1918), 38.

Kenneth Hite
CTHULHU’S POLYMORPHOUS PERVERSITY

 
The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.

– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

For $19.95, you can buy a foot-tall plush toy Cthulhu from ToyVault. You can also buy a plush “Mini Cthulhu” (only 8 inches tall), or a plush Cthulhu in a Santa Claus outfit. Plush Cthulhu also comes in variant color schemes (red-black, black-silver, and “wicked”), or with mounted suction cups for window-clinging action, and in the form of slippers, gloves, fanny packs, hats, dice bags, backpacks, pillows, and Christmas wreaths. Or you can buy small plastic Cthulhu collectible “action figures” called Mythos Buddies in blind packaging: will you get My Little Cthulhu, Goth ‘Thulhu, Coolthulhu, Matrixthulhu, Ninjathulhu, Ghost ‘Thulhu, or “Buddy ‘Thulhu”? (That last Mythos Buddy, a parody of director Kevin Smith’s satire of the modern Church’s “Buddy Christ” travesty of Jesus, may be so semiotically weightless that it actually floats away of its own accord.) What’s that? You don’t want Great Cthulhu in collectible toy form?

Not a problem. You can also get Cthulhu in comic books (
The Fall of Cthulhu
or
Cthulhu Tales
), card games (
Mythos
or
Unspeakable Words
or
Munchkin Cthulhu
), or board games (
Arkham Horror, Do You Worship Cthulhu?, The Stars Are Right!
), not to mention refrigerator magnets, bumper stickers, pendants, Tarot decks, poker decks, and rub-on tattoos that proclaim your allegiance to the Dreamer in the Deep. You can mount a “Campus Crusade for Cthulhu” or sport a “Cthulhu For President” button. (“Why settle for the lesser of two evils?”) Cthulhu or his ilk inspire music from Metallica (“The Call of Ktulu”), Fields of the Nephilim (“Kthulhu”), Deicide (“Dead but Dreaming”), and Blue Öyster Cult (“The Old Gods Return”), plus an entire Canadian ska-punk surf-rock band, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. (To say nothing of the 60s psychedelic quasi-rockers The H.P. Lovecraft. Of whom, “to say nothing” is exactly the thing to say.) Perhaps appropriately, Cthulhu appears as a bass player in the comic book
Savage Henry
, as well as in episodes of
South Park
and in
Donald Duck
comics, in the massively multiplayer online game
World of Warcraft
(under the risible alias “C’Thun”) and in an Expressionist silent film – albeit one shot in 2005. Cthulhu is everywhere. He is the King of All Media.

What’s that? You only want Cthulhu stories? Actual fiction? Words on a page?

No problem. You can get Cthulhu stories by everyone from Neil Gaiman to Nick Mamatas, from Michael Chabon to Stephen King, or by the standard litany of Cthulhu Mythos authors: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Lin Carter, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Willum Hopfrog Pugmire … Enough of that. By now, the standard litany goes on longer even than Lovecraft’s lists of eldritch names. Or perhaps you’d prefer to browse by genre? There are Cthulhoid novels of espionage, mystery, adventure, sword-and-sorcery, splatter-and-crime, and office politics. Cthulhu has crossed over into novels starring Godzilla, Doctor Who, and Jack Kerouac. There are anthologies of Cthulhoid Westerns, sea stories, Sherlockian pastiches, post-apocalyptic tales, school stories, hardboiled detective tales, Japanese Cthulhu Mythos fiction, “literary” fiction, and now (ahem) erotica.

Cthulhu, and his titular Mythos, have increasingly come to resemble another of Lovecraft’s creations: the protean shoggoths from the novel
At the Mountains of Madness
. The rational, calculating Antarctic crinoid creatures created shoggoths as slaves, but the ever-shifting, formless things proved impossible to keep penned in their original role. They rebelled, and eventually came to replace their creators, slowly exterminating even the few pure rational remnants that survived. So, too, the purist Lovecraft scholars seem to feel about the wave of pastiches, mashups, and “Cthulhu kitsch” that by now outweighs Lovecraft’s original work by orders of magnitude in words read, dollars earned, or Warholian minutes of fame. Worse, this tsunami of “infantile” cultism (in the words of Edmund Wilson, one of the first major critics to engage with Lovecraft) seems to swamp, or even drown out, the legitimate literary merits of Lovecraft’s original story. Nobody worth reading, the serious-minded Lovecraftian frets, wants to read about Cthulhu, for fear of being swallowed up in the accompanying detritus. “If only Cthulhu were less popular,” goes the lament, “then he’d be much more popular.”

But Cthulhu is not unique in this. Everything that can be sold in the modern age will be sold, and in every form possible. Count Dracula, after all, not content with great movies, novels, mediocre movies, nonfiction tie-ins to novels, debunkings of non-fiction tie-ins to novels, worse movies, superb comic books, and the entire Romanian tourist industry, appears thinly disguised as a fictional children’s rabbit (Bunnicula) and a molar-corroding breakfast cereal (Count Chocula). There are bobble-heads, and illiterate T-shirts, and clever board-games, and plastic toys, and ridiculous cameo appearances devoted to Dracula, and James Bond, and Batman, and every other figure of modern myth. (You can also get a plush Cthulhu dressed as Dracula or James Bond.) No, John Updike’s “Rabbit” doesn’t have a video game or a plush toy – but who really thinks Harry Angstrom will outlive Dracula?

Not only does the necromancy of modern marketing summon them up in many forms, all the great monsters are polysemic; they are symbols with more than one meaning. Vampires, for example, have been read as the plague, rabies, tuberculosis, syphilis, and AIDS; as the fear of heresy, of foreigners, of the aristocracy, of juvenile delinquency, of religion, of atheism, and of sexual degeneracy caused by any or all of those things. Authors, directors, and critics have created vampiric metaphors for drug addiction, Communism, capitalism, fascism, feminism, black power, rock music, opera, cults, Catholicism, and anarchy. Vampires have represented perversion, sterility, temptation, homosexuality, adolescent love unleashed, and adolescent love restrained. By comparison, Cthulhu seems almost ascetic.

Partly this is a factor of time: vampires have been in Western culture’s bloodstream since 1732 (the first use of the word “vampire” in English), and have erupted in chronic outbreaks from 1819 (Polidori’s novel
The Vampyre
) onward. There have been at least six waves of best-selling vampire novels since then, as well as feature films (over 100 films alone starring Dracula) and two wildly popular television series. Cthulhu has broken out of his undersea mansion with none of these advantages. He was created (or rather, revealed to us mere mortals) barely a lifetime ago, in a low-selling niche publication in a despised marketing category. (If there were “respectable” pulps, which there weren’t,
Weird Tales
was not one of them.) There has never been a best-selling novel, or a mainstream blockbuster film, or a TV series featuring Cthulhu or his Mythos. Even Cthulhu’s comics are late, marginal additions to the field: his first (and so far only) continuing title,
The Fall of Cthulhu
, only began in 2007. The most successful pop-culture Cthulhu product is probably the
Call of Cthulhu
tabletop roleplaying game (speaking of despised marketing categories), which has sold well over 300,000 copies since 1981, and which contributed to the return of Lovecraft’s work in mass-market American paperback form. “The Call of Cthulhu” received little attention when it was published in 1928, but it has not been out of print in America since the year after the roleplaying game appeared, when Ballantine/Del Rey released
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre,
a collection that flies off bookstore shelves (physical and virtual) to this day.

“God in heaven! – the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form …”

“The Call of Cthulhu”

Why Cthulhu? Why is Cthulhu the global icon, the “blasphemous soul-symbol,” of the New Weird? Why, given his unaccountable absence from the main feeder lines of popular culture – movies, TV, novels – is he everywhere visible in popular culture? Why have tentacles replaced talons as the universal signifier for Evil? Why Cthulhu? Why not William Hope Hodgson’s “Hog” or M.R. James’ “thing with a face of crumpled linen”? Why not some forgotten demon invented by Nictzin Dyalhis or Seabury Quinn? Why not Robert E. Howard’s Gol-Goroth, or C.L. Moore’s Yvala?

To begin with, Cthulhu began as a cross-genre figure. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft first masters the art of combining science fiction, fantasy, and horror into something new. (“The Shunned House,” written the year before, is an earlier Lovecraftian experiment in that line, combining “Crookes tubes” and “lines of force” with werewolves, vampires, and ghosts.) Cthulhu is an alien, a being from another star. If he violates physical law, it is because his native planet (or dimension) operates under different, vaster laws than the local ones perceived by Earthlings. But he is also a magician and a “priest,” casting “spells” of suspended animation, and a primordial god worshipped when the earth was young. And he is a monster, a ravening entity driven by a desire to rule his ancient domain and to bring down the tottering structures of human law and reason in the process. This plastic extension across genres is mirrored almost precisely in Cthulhu’s iconic description: “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.” The result? Cthulhu’s influence now extends down three lines of descent: SF authors (James Blish, David Drake, Charles Stross), fantasy authors (Lawrence Watt-Evans, Neil Gaiman), and horror authors (Robert Bloch, Stephen King), fruiting luridly in all three gardens at once. With the rise of postmodern, cross-genre marketing, Cthulhu re-emerges as both a contemporary figure and an archetypal prefigure in the works of Michael Chabon, China Miéville, and other “slipstream” authors.

Cthulhu silently suborns another genre, although this time adapting it to his own ends rather than seeding himself across it: mystery fiction. Lovecraft’s stories are structurally mysteries, as S.T. Joshi has noted in explicit connection with
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
. Specifically, “The Call of Cthulhu” begins with a mysterious death, and involves a detective-like hunt for clues across two continents and three decades. The reader of a Cthulhu Mythos tale, like the reader of a mystery story, stays alert for hints and indications and derives much of the frisson (in both cases) from either solving the mystery ahead of the protagonist – or from the sheer unexpected jolt of the final revelation. Given that Edgar Allan Poe invented (or at least pioneered) both the detective and horror genres, and given the strong similarities, thematic and structural, between mysteries and Gothic fiction (explicit in such works as Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White
), the observation is elementary. It was, however, almost completely neglected until Sandy Petersen pointed it out in the pages of his roleplaying game,
Call of Cthulhu
; and only with the 2008 roleplaying game
Trail of Cthulhu
(written by your humble author) were the connections between “solving mysteries” and “uncovering horrors” made fully manifest in the game’s rules and structure.

It is this sense, of teasing out a hidden truth from the seemingly mundane pages of, e.g., artistic trends, archaeology, anthropology, shipping news, and criminology (to select only the fields investigated by Francis Thurston in “The Call of Cthulhu”) that makes Cthulhu especially attractive to a certain kind of artist. Creators who find themselves drawn to Cthulhu are those likewise (like Thurston) drawn to teasing out hidden, subversive, even terrifying meanings from the bland corpus of modern life. Not always “counter-cultural” creators, they are nonetheless “cult-cultural” ones: creating art for self-selected outsider audiences (like the weird pulp fans of the 1920s or the Goths of the 1980s), for those predisposed to reject the bourgeois, mass-market concerns of the culture at large in favor of the hidden, the outré, the Weird.