The domination of the female over the male achieves its most extreme form in three stories: “The Assistant from Innsmouth” by Steven James Scearce; “The Lake at Roopkund” by Andrew Scearce; and “Between a Rock and an Elder Goddess” by Mae Empson. While in all three of these stories the men are but objects to their empowered mates, in the first two follow an arc more typical of Lovecraftian horror. Investigation is the plot device by which the men in the story begin to uncover the histories of their female counterparts. As they move from denial to acceptance, in the first two tales acceptance comes at the price of horror. In the last tale, more typical of the transformation experienced in literary erotica, the protagonist moves gradually through stages of initiation, like an adept proceeding toward priesthood, preparing himself for the reality he will find when he enters the inner sanctum. In the first two tales, horror results because the males are not prepared to accept the dominance of the female; in the last story, Dennis’ more gradual preparation leads him to embrace the Weird, and his feminized role with it, just as Gabrielle Harbowy’s wayward sister embraces the sexual extremes for which she has long been prepared.
“The Assistant from Innsmouth” is perhaps one of the most Lovecraftian stories in this collection in terms of tone and setting. The plot of the story is reminiscent of “The Silver Key,” with a visit to an isolated mansion, though elements of “The Dunwich Horror” are invoked in the story’s opening. Set in the Whateley mansion, the reader eagerly anticipates the eventual appearance of the Whateley progeny. Anna first enters the story as an “assistant” to Mr. Combs, but her knowledge of the arcane materials places her in a position of superior knowledge that the reader anticipates extends beyond her ability to catalogue property. The Weird and erotic elements enter the story simultaneously. Anna’s distant formality up to the point of their encounter in the bedroom fail to prepare the reader for what is to follow. When she disrobes, she becomes almost vampiric in this scene, entrapping Combs with both her body and her gaze. She fails to respond to Combs’ weak attempt at seduction, further empowering her as she climbs on top of him and orders him to open his mouth. What transpires next feminizes Combs:
Anna’s knees closed quickly against my hips, holding me firm. With a swift movement, she rotated her hands and pressed her thumbs into my cheeks and held my jaw painfully open. I jerked once in surprise and went tense. Anna opened her mouth frighteningly wide and leaned forward. Her tongue extended and her eyes snapped shut.
What happened next, I could scarcely believe; from Anna’s mouth and tongue ran a foul, stinging, salty fluid that filled my mouth and ran cold down my throat. It tasted of bile and seawater and dark venom.
Anna’s superior strength feminizes Combs even more. She makes of his mouth a vagina, and the liquid within her flows into him like semen. By the story’s end, this act of rape seems to have been to prepare him for food. Whether or not something else gestates inside him is left for the reader to decide.
Similarly, “The Lake of Roopkund” makes of Isha’s husband Jaswinder little more than a vessel for the story’s transcended, empowered women. He enters this tale, as Combs enters his, as an investigator — a common motif in Mythos stories. However, his destruction is more profound than Combs’s because he begins the story in a position of traditional masculine dominance over his wife Isha. Enraged when he believes he discovers that his wife is planning to engage in a lesbian affair with her old college roommate Heather, he confronts the two of them, opening Heather’s bag to discover a “fertility idol” that the reader had been led to believe might be a sex toy. When Jas is told that the three of them are to participate in a fertility rite to help Isha conceive, he relents. Jaswinder’s double standard becomes evident as the story progresses. He was infuriated when he thought his wife was having an affair, yet becomes cooperative when it appears the “fertility rite” may lead to a threesome at Lake Roopkund. At the story’s climax, Jaswinder’s fate at Heather’s hands mirrors that of Combs. She overpowers him physically and pins him like the victim of a rape. The greater shock comes with the reader’s realization that the marriage was likely no marriage at all, but part of a long-term plot by Heather and Isha. Jaswinder’s assumptions about the world constitute denial of the story’s supernatural elements until the very end. At that point acceptance comes too late — literally at the moment of death. At that juncture, his patriarchal view of male-female roles is inverted as Heather begins to wring his neck.
The last story of female domination I shall discuss in this essay is “Between a Rock and an Elder Goddess.” This story lacks the element of horror of the previous two stories because the dominating female, Circe, does not bring upon Dennis acceptance in a sudden realization, but allows him to be gradually seduced by it through his study of the Dervini Papyrus. This story is also particularly clever in its interweaving of myth, history, and fiction in a way that represents the interlacing of the ordinary and fantastic. This makes the story’s Weird elements not seem “weird” at all, but a normal part of the fictional world. In the New Weird, Miéville’s New Crobuzon invokes London as easily as it does its secondary world setting. The “intrusion” in this novel cannot be easily identified in terms of its directionality (as we can with Dracula, whose intrusion comes from a single castle and invades London) but weaves into it from many directions as the familiar and the unfamiliar twine in and out of each other. Empson’s story, through the interlacing of the story’s timelines, characters, and narratives provides the reader with a sense of the interweaving of the Weird and the mundane. Circe seduces Dennis through the very ordinary activity of his study of the papyrus just as surely as she seduced Anaximander in real life. Through the manuscript she leads him to her dwelling, where he has been prepared for what he will see. To us, the half-woman, half-monster would be an abomination; however, because Dennis has been prepared, acceptance of the Weird is met not with revulsion, but pleasure.
Though themes of female dominance and the subversion of patriarchy are by no means the only literary elements to be found within these tales (as well as those I have not analyzed), it runs as a dominant theme through many that are collected here. By merging the erotic with the Cthulhu Mythos, these stories afford the opportunity to examine gender and patriarchy in a way that allows them to remain anchored in their contemporary contexts while magnifying the themes of empowerment and transformation through the metaphor of the Cthulhu Mythos. For Lovecraft, the Mythos represented the impersonal, indifferent, and ultimately unknowable elements of the universe that terrified him. These elements extended from the sea itself — personified by Innsmouth and Dagon — to the terrors that modern science would uncover, as he made clear in the first paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.” Over the years, Cthulhu Mythos stories have both underscored and subverted this fear. The stories in this collection have viewed Lovecraft’s insight from both angles. The unknown can be feared or embraced.
In Cthulhurotica, this apprehension is not as much a terror of the universe’s vastness and the insignificance of man as it is the dread of social change. Literary erotica has long confronted such fears through the plot motif of initiation and transformation, illustrated above in the discussion of Empson’s story. (This theme is also present in many of the stories discussed above, in addition to “The Summoned” and “Song of the Catherine Clark,” which I sadly could not fit in to this essay’s discussion). What these stories confront instead are the social rules and the enclosures that govern our lives and prevent us from engaging in behaviors that are at once enticing and self-destructive. As the roles and relationships of men and women have changed since Lovecraft’s time, what these stories permit us to do is question the limitations placed upon us by marriage, gender-identity, gender-dominance, and even pair bonding itself. This does not mean we should surrender those rules of conduct, but we should enter a discussion about them and confront our own long-buried fears associated with issues of sex and power.