Cthulhurotica (28 page)

Hence, Cthulhu’s great popularity with heavy metal musicians (never the mainstream face of popular music), comics artists (never the acceptable image of great art), and roleplaying gamers (never the cool kids in high school). Cthulhu appeals to those constructing anti-narratives against the received and accepted truth, from French literary critics (Gilles Deleuze and Michel Houellebecq are Lovecraft devotees) to Swiss surrealists (H.R. Giger called three of his collections
Necronomicon
) to ritual magicians. Lovecraft is quoted and alluded to respectfully in Pauwels and Bergier’s vastly influential 1960 counter-culture text
Morning of the Magicians
(a seminal document for everything from UFOs to ancient astronauts to New Age spirituality), in Anton LaVey’s
Satanic Bible
, and in numerous magickal textbooks by Aleister Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant. Comics writer and magician Alan Moore has designed a Cthulhoid Kabbalah; a New York occultist calling himself “Simon” attempted to merge Crowley and Lovecraft in a paperback
Necronomicon
in 1980; Phil Hine’s text of “chaos magick” is called the
Pseudonomicon
, after Lovecraft’s pseudo-gospel; a quick Googling points to any number of Cthulhu cults defying all Lovecraftian logic in the attempt to contact the Great Old Ones.

But the act of digging up the “real truth about the world” is not just a creative act, but almost always a fundamentally reactionary one. The “real truth” is, by definition, deeper, older, truer. (If postmodernism says “there is no real truth,” then that must surely apply to postmodernism itself. And in this context, note that Lovecraft got there before Derrida.) As contradictory as it may seem, I think that Cthulhu must draw some large part of his polymorphous power from his connection to this single realization: that the modern consensus world is wrong. Michel Houellebecq calls Lovecraft’s great tales works of “rage against the world.” One can keep more of Lovecraft’s cool, rational demeanor in mind and still notice that Cthulhu does not merely refute the modern world, his existence demolishes it in fire and flood and chaos. He is simultaneously all that is wrong with modernity and all that will destroy it.

Lovecraft created Cthulhu as a new kind of monster, one for an age in which the sciences “each so far striving in their own direction” had demonstrated that mankind was irrelevant and meaningless: Einstein’s physics, Hubble and Shapley’s astronomy, Rutherford’s geology, and Haeckel’s biology all showed that mankind was a brief, accidental flyspeck in an unfeeling, insensate cosmos. By discovering that our creation is meaningless, we reveal that the end is likewise unimportant. Lovecraft realized, or discovered, or revealed, that horror no longer comes from mankind or his parochial myths; it comes from off Earth, from the universe at large, from Outside. (Fritz Leiber famously called this Lovecraft’s “Copernican Revolution of horror.”) And the Outside doesn’t care. It doesn’t even care enough to hate us; it will destroy us at the moment of impact. Cthulhu is that nihilistic realization given form, the inevitable modern science that will destroy the modern world. Cthulhu drowns us in that realization; he embodies our rage at our own inability to matter. The Cthulhu Mythos is, in John Clute’s words, pre-apocalyptic fiction.

Lovecraft embodied Cthulhu with any number of his own apocalyptic fears and hatreds: not only the vast implications of 20th-century science, but the “yellow peril” that would destroy the white race (Cthulhu’s Pacific cult is run by “deathless Chinamen”), the blasphemous vandalism of modern architecture (R’lyeh’s “Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths” are explicitly described as “Futurist”), the collapse of Anglo-Saxon mores and culture (Cthulhu’s coming will be heralded with “laws and morals thrown aside”), and even his own distaste for seafood. Other critics have intimated that Cthulhu represents Lovecraft’s fear of his own creative powers, or Lovecraft’s hatred of women, or any number of other personal apocalypses.

Other authors have attached Cthulhu to their own hatreds of the modern world, from Robert Bloch echoing Lovecraft’s concern with social decay in
Strange Eons
to William Browning Spencer’s
Resumé With Monsters
casting the Cthulhu Mythos as representative of the anti-human office culture of the corporate world. In
Move Under Ground
Nick Mamatas opposes square Cthulhu to the doomed, liberatory Beats; in “The Deep Ones” James Wade indicts the counter-culture as Cthulhu-spawn; in “Recrudescence” Leonard Carpenter points up the eerie similarities between Cthulhu and petroleum. Thomas Ligotti ingeniously makes Cthulhu (under the transparent disguise of “Nethescurial”) represent the insidious collapse of originality in cosmic horror, while lesser lights from Michael Slade to Joseph Pulver have paralleled Lovecraftian fandom and serial murder in murky attempts to personalize and ironically examine the Cthulhoid apocalypse. In short, there has been surprisingly little push-back against Cthulhu’s main symbolic meaning of the horrific Modern. But then, it’s only been a lifetime.

A few of Lovecraft’s successors have teased out another thread in Lovecraft’s work: Cthulhu as “strange attractor,” as the Faustian rapture of knowing what man was not meant to know. The discoveries of the modern will, it is true, unmake and devastate our humanity – but is that such a bad thing if human concerns are purely parochial? Lovecraft, in this light, prefigures “posthuman” science fiction and ideology. Thomas Olney in “The Strange High House in the Mist,” Robert Olmstead in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Randolph Carter in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and Henry Akeley in “The Whisperer in Darkness” all give in to the Mythos, to the seductive power of the Outside. Robert Blake seemingly joins with Nyarlathotep in “The Haunter of the Dark,” and there is some ecstasy blended with horror in his final apotheosis. Certainly the seductive allure of Cthulhu runs under his popularity as well, from Giger’s artistic lustmord to Japanese hentai to the paeans to the uncanny in Willum Hopfrog Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley story sequence.

Vampires, after all, spent a hundred years as stinking corpses before they joined the Gothic seducer and got cleaned up. The journey from Stoker’s foreign rapist to Anne Rice’s cruising rock star took less than a century, culminating in Stephenie Meyer’s teen crush object. Now, the erotic – even the romantic – and the vampiric blend inextricably. Is it time, likewise, to embrace Cthulhu? For those worried for Cthulhu’s integrity as a horror icon, frightened that love conquers fear, they can be reassured that
Near Dark
and
Let the Right One In
remain both terrifying vampire stories
and
terrifying love stories. No matter how scattered his plasticity, Cthulhu will inevitably recombine in his “hateful original form.” That cannot be killed, that can eternal lie. Where he lies for now, and with whom, is up to us, his acolytes, his stalkers, his devotees.

Cthulhu fhtagn.

Jennifer Brozek
THE SEXUAL ATTRACTION OF THE LOVECRAFTIAN UNIVERSE

At first glance, there is nothing sexually arousing about the universe created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. His writing is filled with horrific creatures, other-worldly dangers, and indescribable gods whose very presence drives men mad. None of his tales have depictions of a blatantly sexual nature, and there are almost no female characters. Those few that are mentioned are sad things, servants or pitiful creatures twisted by their contact with the Old Ones. Even in
The Dunwich Horror,
where it is clear that some sort of sexual contact has happened, the event is glossed over in a single paragraph, allowing only that other characters in the story wondered about the event as much as the story’s readers did:

“Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might – and did – speculate as widely as they chose.”

– “The Dunwich Horror,”
Weird Tales
, 1929

The stories Lovecraft told were not ones that incited arousal or encouraged promiscuity between mortals, mortals and servitors or mortals and the Old Ones. And yet,
Cthulhurotica
is not the first book that explores the sexual nature of this universe. There are other books (both anthologies and novels), role-playing games, movies and even (dare I mention it?) Lovecraftian porn
[1]
.

At first blush, this seems incomprehensible. However, after taking a closer look at the issue, the reasoning behind the link between Lovecraft’s creation and erotica becomes clear. There are four main reasons that I will discuss: first is the attraction to the forbidden, second is the lush and image-filled atmosphere created by most of Lovecraft’s works, next is ability to lose control of oneself within the world, confronted by 
“
that which man should not know,” and, finally, sex in the Lovecraft universe is the ultimate challenge – one that many cannot turn away from.

The Attraction of the Forbidden

“It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.”

 
– “The Festival,”
Weird Tales
, 1925

Since the dawn of the written word, stories have been written in which the forbidden is attractive. Because it is forbidden, it is worthy of being desired, for why would something unimportant be purposefully hidden or off-limits? When Lovecraft set up a universe with antagonists that have secret powers and information, he set up a universe in which mortals would constantly be craving, and searching for, that knowledge. The Old Ones and their servitors represent that which man should not know, and Lovecraft’s mortals are often depicted as suffering the consequences of trying to gain access to the unspeakable, the unknowable, and the dangerous. Why would they risk their lives and their very sanity for something they understand is inhumanly wrong?

It is natural for readers of Lovecraft to want to do more than just toe the line and dabble in the forbidden, because Lovecraft’s writings are all about those who challenge the norm – cultists who study forbidden knowledge and people who fight overwhelming monsters to save this world. Readers are already attracted to rule breakers and often want to ramp up the breaking of the rules. This frequently means sex as sex is one of the most taboo-filled topics out there. Sex with the forbidden. Sex with the dangerous. Sex with that which can kill or make you crazy. Being sexually attracted to those on the wrong side of the tracks (or, in this case, the wrong side of reality) is an age old story that has been told again and again in a myriad of mediums. This is why authors, such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, as well as filmmakers, like Daniel Haller and Leigh Scott, enjoy working in this universe. It is a much more provocative way of telling a familiar story.

One of the first Lovecraft movies I saw was
The Dunwich Horror
. I was very young when I saw it on TV. While it was frightening, there were a couple bits I could not get out of my head. Namely, the near naked actress, Sandra Dee, writhing on a stone altar and moaning as if she were in the throes of some hellaciously good sex. The director, Daniel Haller, in his instructions to the actors, added eroticism to the previously unsexy story. Sandra Dee was well known for playing America’s Sweetheart, Gidget, and wanted to expand her repertoire. She brought an amazing sensuality to the character of Nancy Wagner. Between Haller’s direction and Dee’s acting, the previously unseen eroticism in
The Dunwich Horror
was unmistakable. In my opinion, not many could look at all those prehensile tentacles and the writhing, sexy Sandra Dee without thinking of penises and sex.

Atmosphere, Baby

“Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods – the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.”

– “Nyarlathotep,”
United Amateur
, 1920

Like the desire to date the local bad boy or bad girl, very little attracts the young and foolish or old and experienced like an atmospheric setting. Lighting, location, music, dress, food – all of it makes a difference when it comes to a seduction. Each person is different in their tastes. Those who like a darker atmosphere, one that treads on the dangerous, creepy, or possible profane, know that Lovecraft, and those who follow Lovecraft’s literary aesthetic, has the goods.

Lovecraft was a technical master at setting a scene, describing the countryside and building the creepy "Lovecraftian" atmosphere he was famous for. Lovecraft’s tales range from such settings as dusty libraries, dilapidated townships, hidden ruins, deep forests, and all the way to mountain tops. These clear images allow Lovecraft’s readers to imagine more than just the action taking place. With such well-formed descriptions, Lovecraft’s stories laid the foundation for the kind of universe that other authors could built upon. Not only can the reader imagine the locations in great detail, they can imagine new stories in them – with their own characters in starring role.

And nothing says that this starring role can’t be the bad guy.

Lovecraft’s atmospheric tales lend their settings well to allowing the creator of a new, more sexually-charged, Lovecraftian tale to create the part of an enviable bad guy. The cult leader can get all the girls (or guys) in the cult and for the sacrifice. The servitor can uses its powers to horrify and overcome its quarry; to take them as it will. There is a deep attraction to playing with our darker natures; to garner power and to use it for our own pleasures
[2]
– as long as they please our master, of course, because every good cultist knows that there is an Elder God out there allowing them to do as they will.