Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (54 page)

The Woman in the Hill
by by Tamsyn Muir

I grew up a few kilometres away from Waikopua Creek in what is today known as Whitford, and consider the New Zealand bushlands and rural existence very evocative of Lovecraftian horror: beautiful, but also isolating and impenetrable. "The Woman In The Hill" takes place in the landscape of Whitford and Turanga, in a time when that isolation would have been much more pronounced than it is today. For the sake of accuracy, the original New Zealand language and spelling has been maintained in this letter.

The Face of Jarry
by by Cat Hellisen

I walk my dogs along a fairly untouched stretch of coastline, and storms often leave great tangles of kelp along the shore. I started wondering if the gnarls and lines of sepia kelp on white sand were messages from another world. Jarry and the Long Road are elements from several other stories I've written, where Jarry is a space between worlds, a no-land where dream-detritus gathers. Between dreams and seaweed and purgatory, I had my story.

Our Lady of Arsia Mons
by Caitlín R. Kiernan

"Our Lady of Arsia Mons" grew out of a conversation I had with artist Lee Moyer, when we first met in Portland at the 2010 HPL Film Festival. He was very excited to show me photos of the Henry Clews sculptures, and he wanted to talk about the possibility that either Lovecraft influenced Clews or Clews influenced Lovecraft, because there's some eerie similarities between their work. Clews was born in Newport, Rhode Island, after all, and maybe Lovecraft had seen an exhibition of his work before he left the states. Something like that. Ultimately, we couldn't find any evidence one way or the other, but it was an exciting possibility, and this story is an expression of gratitude to Lee for introducing me to Clews' magnificently bizarre work.

The Body Electric
by Lucy Brady

I had wanted to explore the concept of demonology in cyberspace for some time when I came to write “The Body Electric”, and had been reading around the subject of artificial intelligence. The inspiration for the story itself came when I was reminded of a news story I'd read some years ago about the Large Hadron Collider. At the time, the LHC was undergoing a series of unexplained malfunctions. Two theoretical physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, proposed a theory that a godlike intelligence that exists in the future (possibly the LHC, or the Higgs Boson itself) was retroactively sabotaging the systems in order to prevent the potentially destructive power of the Higgs Boson from being unleashed. Though probably conceived primarily as a joke, this seemed like an interesting basis for exploring other questions about philosophy and technology, and I thought about how a similar model of an entity outside of time could exist in the field of artificial intelligence. It was this that formed the basis of Eugenia Clarke's computerized nemesis. Bech Nielsen's interview can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOI8byIV_GI

The Child and the Night Gaunts
by Marly Youmans

The tiny tales of “The Child and the Night Gaunts” were written at night—
naturellement!
—on the tiptop of a mountain and in a house with glass walls, surrounded on all sides by great crevasses of mist and cold streams. Lovecraft is in these tales (bits of his biography and his creations), along with memories of walking on the paths through Swan Point Cemetery, where he is buried (though his monument keeps vanishing), and many strange things—the recollection of a little gold saltcellar of a boat, the fantastically guised and jeweled catacomb and church skeletons that Paul Koudounaris photographed for his
Heavenly Bodies
, the weird red light of Poe, and even a simple thought that occurred to me on a night 18 years ago, when toxemia pulled me close to the edge of death. Such oddnesses are flecks of color in these Lovecraftian tinies, written as I sat by a dark glass wall, through which I could barely discern the distant mountains, lit by a moon ringed with a moon bow and backed by cloud. Now and then the breeze made tall-flowering pokeweed (edible poke salad when shoots and leaves are young, though dangerous if not properly prepared, and, when mature, poisonous in the root, the leaves, the red stems, and the purple-black berries) brush against the glass wall of the house, startling me with its white heads of blossom.

All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts
by Sonya Taaffe

I have had an affinity for the sea all my life. My coastline is the cold Atlantic; I jumped into the high tides of the winter sea when I was less than two years old. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is the first Lovecraft story I can remember reading and I loved it for all the wrong reasons, at least from Lovecraft’s perspective: sea-change, sea-cities, the eternal ocean waiting. I have neither gills nor fins. When I lie in a bathtub, my skin does not crinkle into scales. When I was invited to participate in this anthology, my first idea was, “I want to write about the people Y’ha-nthlei throws back.” I am indebted to Amal El-Mohtar for inspiring the title. One of the characters looks like a dream I had in October 2014.

Every Hole in the Earth We Will Claim As Our Own
by Gemma Files

I came into this project having just done my story for Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles's all-female Lovecraft anthology,
She Walks in Shadows
, which involved selecting a specific Lovecraft tale and re-spinning it from the perspective of whatever monstrous feminine lay within. So I already knew that with this, I wanted to come at the challenge of writing a Lovecraftian piece the exact opposite way—boil it down for resonances, then proceed with the ones that attracted me most. So this story turned out to be about the sea, a primary Lovecraftian fear/fascination, but also about something I almost never write about (the death of a child) vs. something I've wanted to write about for a really long time (the Indonesian folkloric parasite duo known as the
polong
and the
pelesit
). The former has the power to twist my knobs immediately, because I'm a mother, which is why I normally keep away from it; the latter is fascinating because there's so little mention of it (in English, anyway), and because it's very obviously a metaphor for incurable disease, probably water-borne. Once I found the general method of delivery and an article about Roald Dahl's daughter's death from measles, it all came together fairly quickly after that.

But Only Because I Love You
by Molly Tanzer

The title, "But Only Because I Love You", came first with this one. That's rare for me… but the idea of my protagonist being asked to do something terrible, and agreeing to do it for the title reason, that really guided the story. I also wanted to see if I could write a piece about women, but from a male point of view, and with a challenging narrative viewpoint. As for that viewpoint, well, I'm lucky I have two friends who have synesthesia, who were willing to talk me through their experience of it to help me along. The experience of smelling or hearing colors or numbers seemed like a natural launching point for a story about the color out of space…

Cthulhu's Mother
by Kelda Crich

We all come from somewhere. Move back and back through the endless void of time, turn through the strange angles of the past, and you'll find a beginning. Even the most dreadful creatures, the greatest of Old Ones had to have a mother. And if she's still around, then Mother knows best. She doesn't see you the way other people see you. She knows all your little foibles. She's the beginning and she is the end.

All Gods Great and Small
by Karen Heuler

The most immediate inspiration for “All Gods Great and Small” was "The Rats in the Walls," with its restless motion and its harrowing sense of hidden horror. Those biting little insect teeth are direct descendants of Lovecraft's rats. But I wanted to diverge from some of his trappings. He's not really respectful to women or natives, is he? So I would rely on old gods who were on the side of women and natives—in fact, women were the priests of the old gods, perhaps indicating they had a higher value than men. Also, Lovecraft's gods are colossal, and it amused me to step down, to retain a kind of primordial intent but reduce the size.

Dearest Daddy
by Lois H. Gresh

“Dearest Daddy” draws on personal experiences in the wine and mushroom tunnels of Blois, France. Dark, dreary, claustrophobic, endlessly long and labyrinthine. Given that men hid in the tunnels amongst the mushrooms to escape capture and death, it seemed like a good setting for a twisted tale.

Eye of the Beholder
by Nancy Kilpatrick

“Eye of the Beholder” arose from my awareness of stereotypes, particularly those relating to how women should look and act in order to find a mate. The common thinking is that men demand this of women, but I believe that women reinforce these stereotypes with one another, and I wanted to create a story that reflects that while still writing what I hope is a good and creepy read.

Down at the Bottom of Everything
by E.R. Knightsbridge

I wrote this when I'd just come back from spending a few months living on the biggest and wildest of the Bahamian islands, Andros. In Andros, there are surreal natural phenomena called “Blue Holes” which are inland, water-filled, vertical caves that appear just like lakes when you stumble across them in the woods and forests but they're actually hundreds of metres deep. There's also a local legend about a giant sea monster called a Lusca. I suspect that those two things combined inside my mind to form the basis of the story.

Spore
by Amanda Downum

The original seed of "Spore" (sorry) came from watching nature documentaries and thinking of
Fungi from Yuggoth
, but it wasn't until Orrin Grey asked the world for fungus stories that it started to grow a plot (sorry) and characters. It took a few more years and many conversations about the chemistry of emotions before it germinated fully (I give up).

Pippa's Crayons
by Christine Morgan

I think the inspiration for "Pippa's Crayons" started with a random thought, something about "the coloring book out of space." That got me musing about Lovecraftian stories from a child's perspective. Then I wondered about the interesting challenge of approaching it only through dialogue; from there, the weird and creepy conversation just sort of fell into place.

The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward
by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

"The Wreck of the
Charles Dexter Ward
" is the third of a series of stories we have written in this universe (the other two being "Boojum" and "Mongoose"), which seems to be half Lewis Carroll and half H. P. Lovecraft with a side of Frank Belknap Long, served on a bed of space opera. We hope our love for Lovecraft shows, as well as our efforts to reimagine his universe into something where women have voices, subject positions, stories of their own. Where women, too, can be Mad Scientists, with all that entails. Also, this universe has giant living ships that are sort of like an interdimensional cross between a pufferfish and an octopus. Neither one of us has ever been able to see the bad in that.

From the Cold Dark Sea
by Storm Constantine

One of the aspects of Lovecraft's work I've always found intriguing is that of mysterious denizens of the sea interacting with unsuspecting land-dwellers, and in some cases interbreeding with them. All the Cornish words in my story are “made up” in that I simply used a Cornish-English dictionary to create new words, such as Morbenyn Farm, a term that roughly means
sea-woman
, and the village Mordarras, which is
Gate of the Sea
. Lovecraft was also fond of writing about powerful, ancient books that affect humanity, so my story had to have one of its own. However, I did want to turn the Cthulhu genre on its head a little, which I can't really explain without giving spoilers. I'll just say that the outcome isn't typically Lovecraftian.

Mnemeros
by R.A. Kaelin

When I was a child, I hitched a ride with our neighbor, a withered old rancher with enormous glasses. He pointed out into a field where a rotting farmhouse leaned against a tree.

"That's where I grew up," he said.

I was deeply disturbed. I couldn't imagine watching a meaningful place die away. Surely every time he saw it he compared it to the mental image of what it had been initially. Worse, there was a point where he had to realize that it couldn't ever be put back together again. Horrified, I suddenly realized that my own home would befall the same fate. Someday I would be the one sitting in the rancher's seat. This story pays homage to that memory.

The supporters in this list are the reason Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror contains an original color illustration by Daniele Serra to accompany every story.

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