Cthulhurotica (30 page)

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.

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.