Cthulhurotica (29 page)

This leads me to the next level in the sexual attraction of the Lovecraftian universe.

The Lack of Personal Responsibility

“When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind remembering what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding more; yet curiosity overmastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within the castle walls?”

– “The Alchemist,”
United Amateur
, 1916

Power means many things to different people. Numerous books on consensual BDSM play
[3]
talk about why people are attracted to power and those in power. They speak of how, for some people, authority is an aphrodisiac, along with physical strength and, depending on the fantasy, magical strength. A similar fantasy involves being taken by force by something stronger than yourself, which absolves you of the responsibility. On the side of the "victim" is the fact that they were overwhelmed by the mere presence of that which man should not know. They could not help themselves. They were tied down. They were helpless to stop what was happening. While on the side of the "perpetrator" is the fact that they are merely doing what their deity wants and needs them to do. They are almost as helpless as their victim to stop what is happening.

In the submissive sense, there is an extreme sexual attraction to being taken by force especially by an otherworldly entity or someone possessed of an otherworldly entity. There are reams of papers that discuss and examine the submissive role in such a consensual or non-consensual scene. Why people want to take this role, how it sexually arouses them and how the non-human aspect of the perpetrator heightens the experience. When one is imagining such a scene, it is attractive because it is only within the mind. The imaginer has control over how the victim – a substitute for themselves – is either willingly or not willingly taken advantage of.

In the dominant sense, there is an extreme sexual attraction to taking a victim forcefully (or by force) especially if it is at the behest of a greater entity. The perpetrator takes part in the sexual ritual not only for their own pleasure but because it will bring about something greater than themselves: giving the Old One something they need, initiating the victim into the cult for a greater purpose or for making the victim into a portal for next step in the plan. Again, when one is imagining such a scene, it is attractive because it is only within the imagination. The creator has the control. They control how the perpetrator acts and how the victim reacts.

Finally, there is the ultimate lack of personal responsibility on both sides of the ritual (victim and perpetrator) because any contact with the Old One – that which man should not know – almost certainly causes madness of one sort or another. This madness can include amnesia, false memories, catatonia and a myriad of other mental illnesses that allow the victim and/or the perpetrator to forget what happened or to lay the blame for it at another’s feet.

The Ultimate Challenge

“There was a formula – a sort of list of things to say and do – which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe’s guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb.”

– “The Book,”
Leaves
, 1938

The Lovecraftian universe is a universe where the rules for survival include “don’t read the books,” “don’t go to the creepy New England town,” “don’t follow the clues,” and “run away.” This presents the ultimate big, shiny, red button with the giant sign next to it that says, “Don’t Push.” There are so many rules that it is more attractive to break them than to follow them, because strict rules are a huge challenge thrown in the metaphorical faces of the heroes – and thus, the readers. No self-respecting adventurer will obey such rules. If they did, there would be no story.

Because of this, the Lovecraftian universe is set up as the ultimate challenge to break all the rules – including the ones about sex and sex with non-humans. I seriously doubt that Lovecraft did this on purpose. Based on his writings, he seems repressed and uncertain about what to do with his sexual feelings. I have no doubt that he is rolling over in his grave at all of the Mythos-inspired erotica and porn that has been created in his name.

No matter how a creator’s journey into the world of Lovecraftian eroticism began, there are a myriad of reasons for entering it willingly: the attraction of the forbidden, the delightfully creepy atmosphere that lends itself well to rule breaking and sexual encounters, plausible deniability and the option to avoid personal responsibility, or just a need to face the ultimate challenge. Lovecraft invited other authors to play in his sandbox, and play they have. In the 1920s, there were authors, such as August Derleth, who were part of the  “Lovecraft Circle;” authors who all freely exchanged and shared parts of Lovecraft’s universe
[4]
in their stories. Later authors took that as an open invitation to keep the Mythos moving and expanding, reaching into dark corners and unintended places. With movies, books, and role-playing games, purveyors of the Lovecraft universe have shown themselves willing and able to face the challenges set up for them by this Universe. Taboos have been examined, broached and enjoyed.

And we, as readers and watchers of all things Lovecraftian, can appreciate these modern incarnations for they are: titillating, provocative and ultimately, very enjoyable.

Justin Everett, PhD
CTHULHUROTICA, FEMALE EMPOWERMENT, AND THE NEW WEIRD

 When I was initially invited to write an essay for a volume provocatively titled
Cthulhurotica
, I admit I approached the task with some degree of trepidation. Though I have long been familiar with Lovecraft’s work, I had never considered the strange and wonderful marriage that might occur were the two genres of Lovecraftian horror and literary erotica to be combined. While this merging of traditions may seem odd at first, upon further examination it makes perfect sense. Both genres are about crossing boundaries and moving from innocence to experience. Such tales commonly feature naïve characters who believe they understand the rules and limits of the worlds they inhabit. When those boundaries are crossed the rules that govern the worlds they know are set aside. The protagonist is usually faced with the choice of learning the ways of the new world and embracing it, and as a part of this process becoming forever changed, or rejecting the new reality, often fleeing from it in terror. In Lovecraftian horror the adept is faced with a new understanding of the order of the cosmos; in erotica, the rules are often social, requiring the adept to confront their preconceived notions of sexuality, gender and relationship dominance. When the two are combined, the effect is powerful. The subversion of social norms is magnified through the transformation of self on a literally cosmic scale.

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).