Literary erotica might be said to blend the qualities of the portal quest and intrusion fantasy. Though erotica need not be associated with the fantastic, it often involves the passage into a secondary world with return from that world. The protagonist moves from innocence to experience, and usually returns wiser than when she departed. Like intrusion fantasy, the protagonist in literary erotica moves from denial to acceptance. Once in the erotic setting, her sense of social norms, morality, gender, patriarchy and power may be challenged. As a result she undergoes enlightenment or transformation. In literary erotica, when she returns (if she chooses to) she is not only wiser, but fundamentally different in nature than when the story began.
The stories of Cthulhurotica, by blending the forms of intrusion fantasy and the transformational experience of literary erotica result in a magnification of the transformative experience. The protagonist moves from denial to acceptance along the double trajectories of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and the sexual liberation of the female, who may or may not be the story’s protagonist. In many of the stories in this collection, the female protagonist often experiences transformation and sexual liberation, though this may occur outside of the story’s narrative. This liberation inverts the patriarchy–the rules of “our” world where the male dominates and controls the female. The intrusion of Lovecraftian horror into our world not only moves the protagonist from innocence to experience with knowledge of the vastness of the cosmos and the insignificance of humankind, but often inverts the patriarchy by empowering the female who has “crossed over” and embraced the new reality. For the empowered female, this is an act of joy, not horror, punctuated by orgasm, fertility, and the dominance of the female over the male. For the male protagonist, this transformation often results in horror as his grasp on, and control of, the female is lost. In the end, the female may gain power over the male and ultimately destroy or discard him. This analysis is an admitted overgeneralization, and is not meant as a blanket characterization of all stories presented in this volume, but as a common characteristic of those discussed in the following analysis.
The first tale in this collection, “Descent of the Wayward Sister” by Gabrielle Harbowy, suggests the potential for liberation through sexual transformation. As a woman on one of the lowest rungs of the social order — she is presumably a Victorian-era thief and prostitute — she represents the disempowerment of the female in a male-dominated society. The reader soon learns that this powerlessness is in part illusory. As someone who has “seen too much of the lively underbelly of the world to be content sitting still,” she takes it upon herself to pick the lock to the basement, where she finds a naked girl lashed to an altar. Immediately gothic motifs are invoked for the reader and subverted as the victim rejects freedom in favor of a different kind of release. Following the erotic scene, the author momentarily invokes horror through her description of the tentacled intruder, who is left largely in shadow, leaving the details to the reader’s imagination. This suggestion of horror is soon released, placing emphasis on the protagonist’s desire as well as the monster’s. While this story is largely tongue-in-cheek, its presentation of a self-empowered female allows her to move quickly from denial to acceptance. Having already seen the worst of the patriarchy, she reacts not with horror, but curiosity and desire to the Lovecraftian intrusion into our world. Instead of recoiling from the creature she accepts the tentacled beast as yet another man (I think) and one supposes that she will do well.
Cody Goodfellow’s “Infernal Attractors” is also a tale of a sexual adventuress. In this story Marc is a man both outclassed and dominated by the powerful Shirley, for whom Marc’s presence in the story is almost irrelevant except to operate a piece of Lovecraftian machinery for opening a portal to the other world. This tale is as much about the emptiness of multiple-partner sexual experimentation and fetishism as it is about Mythos. This effect is further emphasized by Shirley’s empowerment from the story’s opening. She has long completed the arc from innocence to experience and has moved beyond denial to acceptance. Her prior casting off of traditional roles and expectations has made possible the final step of transcendence via copulation with — from the reader’s perspective — a vile entity from the other side. The entity is more intricately described than in most of the other tales, contributing perhaps to the sense of Marc’s helplessness in knowing that he is not only a witness to his girlfriend’s copulation with, and dominance of, this creature, but that he has also been forced to into the role of willing participant. One is left to wonder how often Marc has been forced arrange and watch Shirley’s trysts with other unimaginable entities. Indeed, Shirley’s possession of the gun at the beginning of the story further empowers and emasculates her while emphasizing Marc’s helplessness. When Shirley is finished with the act, the fearful beast with which she copulated is left an empty shell. As she has destroyed this creature, she has destroyed Marc as well.
Other stories of female empowerment in this collection are told from the perspective of a male character who loses control of his female counterpart. “The Cry in the Darkness” by Richard Baron is one such story that emphasizes the all-too-common fear of estrangement from one’s spouse. This story begins by invoking “The Dunwich Horror,” and the fear of degeneration inspired by Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for eugenics and fear of racial mixing. In the original story, the race is truly alien, as emphasized by the half-human progeny of the Whateley’s. In Baron’s story, Mamie Bishop’s unknown history at the Whateley house, and her desire for a child that Earl cannot provide, once again invokes the ghost of Lovecraft’s eugenics and the fear that “pure” blood would be thinned by the proliferation of other races. The story connects Earl’s infertility with the infertility of the land; the tragedy is doubled as he fails to provide for his wife or impregnate her. His fears regarding his own masculinity are further accentuated by his inability to make a decision. Further, the signs that Earl finds of her nocturnal wanderings — mud on her feet and a gelatin-like substance on her body that is suggestive of sperm — confirm an implied fear that his wife may leave him. This is not a story about Lovecraftian horror as much as it is a testimony to one man’s self-doubt. Earl’s lack of masculinity and unwillingness to act may be seen to enable and encourage Mamie’s transcendence as well as her indifference to him.
Other Cthulhurotica tales take the theme of female empowerment further. “The C-Word” by Don Pizarro is interesting both for its contemporary themes and its modernization of Innsmouth as integrated into, rather than isolated from, the modern world. Elliot is not only younger and less experienced than Anna, but seems emotionally dependent on her, whereas Anna is aloof and independent of him. This story is a narrative of their relationship with Elliot in a dependent, feminized position as he attempts to convince her that the gap in their ages makes little difference to him. The irony of the story is provided by the reader’s own knowledge of Innsmouth. To a reader unschooled in Mythos tales, the final scene would be puzzling. What the informed reader knows, and Elliot does not, is that the true difference between the two is not a matter of a couple of decades, but one of degeneration and race. The Weird element of the story does not enter the tale at all, except for the words that Anna speaks at the story’s end. The reader is left to envision the transformation and imagine what will become of Elliot once he leaves Innsmouth and steps into the sea.