In any collection of stories based on an author’s prior work, artists experiment with the original form and apply it to new ends. Cthulhurotica is no exception. This new offshoot of stories of the “Cthulhu Mythos,” what we might otherwise call the Lovecraft School of writing, has as its inspirational material many of Lovecraft’s original tales. Starting points or inspiration for many of the stories in this collection have included “Dagon,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” Nyarlathotep,” “The Silver Key,” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” to name a few. Like others who carried on the Mythos tales after the author’s death, the contributors to this volume have made the material their own and have responded to the literary and cultural influences of our own age. In combining the transformative experience of literary erotica with the cosmic terror of the Mythos tale, the stories in this collection have created worlds that are at once familiar and estranged; ordinary, and surreal. As its characters undergo a transformation in relation to cultural norms and embracing cosmic horror, they do not do so in a macabre otherworld. The transformation remains anchored in, and interweaves with, the ordinary and common. It is this difference from Lovecraft’s original work, and the Mythos stories that followed, that separates Cthulhurotica from its predecessors and places at least some of the stories within the contemporary genre known as New Weird.
What we now know as the “Cthulhu Mythos” is a collection of tales that began with the “Lovecraft Circle.” Writing primarily for Weird Tales, in the words of editor Farnsworth Wright, “the unique magazine,” Lovecraft entered in correspondence with other writers of what was then termed “weird fiction.” This magazine, largely ignored by literary criticism, is particularly important not only for the authors it published but also because it served as a nursery for new forms of experimental fiction that either did not fit in with, or were too extreme for, the adventure pulps that grew out of the dime novel tradition. In his essay “The Supernatural Horror in Literature,” first drafted in 1927 and expanded in 1933-34, Lovecraft argues that weird fiction must go beyond the usual parameters of murder mystery or gothic horror:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
The weird tale may contain elements of horror, fantasy, and science fiction based on the assumption that, as Brian Stableford has put it, “the vast universe revealed by astronomical science diminished humankind to the status of a mere plaything of vast alien entities” (35). Though this notion would be largely rejected by mainstream Science Fiction, the atmospheric richness of and cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s tales would live on after his death. However, the Mythos tradition might not have ever begun had it not been for his voluminous correspondence with his fellow Weird Tales writers and other contemporaries. Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Leiber would all craft stories in the Mythos tradition. In the decades that followed, these names would be joined by Colin Wilson, Joanna Russ, Philip José Farmer, and Stephen King. Most of these writers stayed ensconced within Lovecraft’s enclosure of horror within a secondary story world either separated from, or isolated within, our own. This enclosure–in a haunted house, on an island, on another planet–envelops the story world and isolates it from our own, allowing it to operate by its own rules. What separates the Cthulhurotica stories (for the most part; “The Assistant from Innsmouth,” for example, follows the traditional microworld formula) and what characterizes many tales associated with the New Weird is removing the isolation of the story world from our own, interweaving the rules of the Weird with the contemporary world, and creating a funhouse reflection of reality that is, for lack of a better word, weird.
According to New Weird author and critic Jeff VanderMeer, New Weird may be characterized as:
…secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects… As a part of their awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies on for its visionary power on a “surrender to the weird” that isn’t, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house, on the moors or a cave in Antarctica. (xvi)
The stories in Cthulhurotica share the blending of the ordinary and extraordinary, elements of fantasy and horror, and the subversion of place by blending the laws of secondary reality with the contemporary world. However, because the stories in this collection are a part of the Mythos, they are not isolated in a secondary world; they are a part of our world. The horror Lovecraft inserted into his original tales resulted from the sudden awareness that the universe was not as it seemed; the universe had a deeper history than anyone could imagine, in which humankind is but a plaything of much older and more intelligent, and malignant beings. In the original Mythos, the result of this realization is almost always horror and madness. Not so for Cthulhurotica.
Lovecraft appropriated Gothic literary forms and applied them to the subject matter of science fiction. This reaction was much different than that of much mainstream SF, and particularly the galactic adventures of Lovecraft’s contemporaries. Eventually, SF would form two reactions to the problems of deep time and the irrelevance of man in the wider universe. One would gaze at the stars in wonder; the other would lay its head into its hands in despair. The first approach we can associate with the form of fantasy defined by literary critic Farah Mendlesohn as the portal quest. This type of fantasy is mostly, though not universally, optimistic and involves passage from our world (or the protagonist’s world) into a new reality that operates by different rules, with the usual result of returning to our world enlightened. The secondary world remains contained and does not infiltrate our world.
The second approach we can associate with what Mendlesohn defines as intrusion fantasy, in which “the fantastic is the bringer of chaos” (Mendlesohn xxi). In this form, the fantastic “leaks” into our world and infests it. She puts traditional horror, the New Weird, and Lovecraft in the intrusion fantasy class. This form, she argues, relies “on the naïveté of the protagonist and her awareness of the permeability of the world–a distrust of what is known in favor of what is sensed” (115). In this reality, “[t]he trajectory of the intrusion fantasy is from denial to acceptance” (115; emphasis in original).