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NEW CTHULHU 2:
MORE RECENT WEIRD
PAULA GURAN
Copy right © 2015 by Paula Guran.
Cover design by Jason Gurley.
Cover art by Nikita Veprikov.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
All stories are copy righted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission. An
extension of this copy right page can be found
here.
ISBN: 978-1-60701-459-1 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-450-8 (trade paperback)
PRIME BOOKS
www.prime-books.com
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise,
without first obtaining the permission of the copy right holder.
For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.
In Memory of Michael Shea,
1946-2014.
Shine on.
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Contents
Introduction 2.0 by Paula Guran
The Same Deep Waters As You by Brian Hodge
My sterium Tremendum by Laird Barron
The Transition of Elizabeth Haskings by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Bloom by John Langan
At Home With Azathoth by John Shirley
The Litany of Earth by Ruthanna Emry s
Necrotic Cove by Lois Gresh
On Ice by Simon Strantzas
The Wreck of the
Charles Dexter Ward
by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
All My Love, A Fishhook by Helen Marshall
The Doom That Came to Devil Reef by Don Webb
Momma Durtt by Michael Shea
They Smell of Thunder by W. H. Pugmire
The Song of Sighs by Angela Slatter
Fishwife by Carrie Vaughn
In the House of the Hummingbirds by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Who Looks Back? by Ky la Ward
Equoid by Charles Stross
The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft by Marc Laidlaw
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
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INTRODUCTION 2.0
Not even five y ears ago I wrote the introduction for
New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird,
an
anthology that showcased some of the best “New Lovecraftian” short fiction of the first decade
of the twenty -first century. Now we’re back with a sequel of equally excellent “recent weird”
published from 2010 through 2014. (Although this is only a sampling. My Year’ Best Dark
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Fantasy and Horror series covering the same period, for just one example, reprints a dozen or so
New Lovecraftian stories by some of the authors included here and others.)
I’ll recap some of that earlier introduction here, but also provide some newer opinion toward
the end. (The earlier introduction can be found at paulaguran.com/new-cthulhu-intro.)
It took close to seventy y ears for Howard Phillip Lovecraft’ fiction to be deemed respectable.
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His influence on horror, fantasy, and science fiction may have been established decades ago, but
his place in the literary canon had no conformtion until 2005 when The Library of America
series recognized his significance with
H. P. Lovecraft: Tales,
edited by Peter Straub. And, even
thus “canonized,” his respectability is still being debated.
During his life Lovecraft did “not expect to become a serious competitor” of his “favorite
weird authors.” After his death in 1937 he was usually dismissed, outside of genre and often
within, as nothing more than a pulp fictionist who wrote outdated florid prose.
Respectable or not, Lovecraft’ fiction and the fictional universe he established have provided
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inspiration not only for writers, but for creators of film, television, music, graphic arts, comics,
manga, gaming, and theatre as well. And it continues to do so. Even if y ou’ve never read a word
of H. P. Lovecraft’ fiction, y ou have been introduced to his imagination without realizing its
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origin.
Born in 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was little known to the general public while alive and
never saw a book of his work professionally published. Brilliant and eccentric, he was also
decidedly odd.
His father, probably a victim of untreated sy philis, went mad before his son reached age
three. The elder Lovecraft died in an insane asy lum in 1898. (It is highly doubtful that HPL was
aware of his father’ disease.) Young Howard was raised by his mother; two of her sisters; and his
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maternal grandfather, a successful Providence, Rhode Island, businessman. His controlling
mother smothered him with maternal affection while also inflecting devastating emotional
cruelty.
Sickly (probably due more to psy chological factors more than phy sical ailments) and
precocious, Lovecraft read the
Arabian Nights
and
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
at an early age, then
developed an intense interest in ancient Greece and Rome. His grandfather often entertained him
with tales in the gothic mode. HPL started writing around age six or seven.
Lovecraft started school in 1889, but attended erratically due to his supposed ill health. After
his grandfather’ death in 1904, the family —already financially challenged—was even less well
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off. Lovecraft and his mother moved to a far less comfortable domicile and the adolescent
Howard no longer had access to his grandfather’ extensive library. He attended a public high
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school, but a phy sical and mental breakdown kept him from graduating.
He became reclusive, rarely venturing out during the day. At night, he walked the streets of
Providence, drinking in its atmosphere.
He read, studied astronomy, and, in his early twenties, began writing poetry, essay s, short
stories, and eventually longer works. He also began reading Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and pulp
magazines like
The Argosy, The Cavalier,
and
All-Story Magazine.
Lovecraft became involved in amateur writing and publishing, a salvation of sorts. HPL
himself wrote: “In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as
close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be . . . ”
His story, “The Alchemist” (written in 1908 when he was 18), was published in
United
Amateur
in 1916. Other stories soon appeared in other amateur publications.
Lovecraft’ mother suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to the same
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hospital in which her husband had died. Her death, in 1921, was the result of a bungled gall
bladder operation.
“Dagon” was published in the October 1923 issue of
Weird Tales,
which became a regular
market for his stories. He also began what became his prolific letter-writing with a continuously
broadening group of correspondents.
Shortly thereafter, Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene—a Russian Jew seven y ears his senior—
at a writers convention. They married in 1924. As
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy,
edited by John
Clute and John Grant, puts it, “ . . . the marriage lasted only until 1926, breaking up largely
because HPL disliked sex; the fact that she was Jewish and he was prone to anti-Semitic rants
cannot have helped.” After two y ears of married life in New York City (which he abhorred and
where he became an even more intolerant racist) he returned to his beloved Providence.
In the next decade, he traveled widely around the eastern seaboard, wrote what is considered
to be his finest fiction, and continued his immense—estimated at 100,000 letters—correspondence
through which he often nurtured y oung writers.
Lovecraft’ literary significance today can be at least partially credited to this network with
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other contemporary writers. Letter writing was the “social media” of his time, and he was a
master of it. Although he seldom met those who became members of the “Lovecraft Circle” in
person, he knew them well—just as, these day s, we have friends we know only through email or
Facebook.
H. P. Lovecraft was probably the first author to create what we would now term an open-
source fictional universe that any writer could make use of. Other authors, with Lovecraft’
s
blessing, began superficially referencing his dabblers in the arcane, mentioning his unhallowed
imaginary New England towns and their strange citizens, writing of cosmic horror, alluding to his
godlike ancient extraterrestrials with strange names, and citing his fictional forbidden books of the
occult (primarily the
Necronomicon
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred): the Lovecraft My thos—
or, rather, anti-my thology —was born.
There were certainly “better” writers of science fiction and fantasy of roughly the same era
—like Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Olaf Stapledon—whose work
may be influential, but is now mostly ignored by the general public. Lovecraft’ survival, current
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