elanya

morbane asked me to write a review of something! I debated what to pick, as she left that up to me. I considered some alteratives ( a game, a knitting pattern, an album, a piece of technology, a movie...), but I settled on a book, since I've finished one relatively lately.

The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft is a book I picked out to buy for myself, because marthawells had a story in it, and I love her work, and I love the mythos, as previously discussed.

Cthulhu (Adam Nevill) - Call the Name
Yog-Sothoth (Martha Wells) - The Dark Gates
Azathoth (Laird Barron) - We Smoke the Northern Lights
Nyarlathotep (Bentley Little) - Petohtalrayn
Shub-Niggurath (David Liss) - The Doors that Never Close and the Doors that are Always Open
Tsathoggua (Brett Talley) - The Apotheosis of a Rodeo Clown
The Mi-Go (Christopher Golden & James A. Moore) - In Their Presence
Night-gaunts (Jonathan Maberry) - Drean a Little Dream of Me
Elder Things (Joe Lansdale) - In the Mad Mountains
Great Race of Yith (Rachel Caine) - A Dying of the Light
Yig (Douglas Wynne) - Rattled
The Deep Ones (Seanan McGuire) - Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves

The concept of the book is that the stories each focus on one of the elder gods - this mostly works, though I think that some of the beings chosen as 'gods' are stretching it a bit. Between each of the stories is a section, written by Donald Tyson, talking about the gods the previous story was about. There are also several black and white drawings of the various gods, they don't relate to the stories.

I think the weakest link was definitely the write ups of the gods. For one, I didn't like the interpretations for the most part, for another - I think defining them too closely at all strips away a lot of the mystery and is exactly the kind of thing I really don't like about some mythos stories. Also, they were pretty poorly written - I didn't like the style, sure, but one of the write ups included the phrase 'The black tribes of Africa' and for that Donald Tyson pretty much needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot. It is 2015, what the hell. The one thing we don't need to take from Lovecraft is the really gross racism, thanks.

As for the stories, there were some common elements between them. Several are set in pre-existing world or story continuities or series from their authors (Martha Well's story, for example, is an Ile Rien story, and it was great!) Several use the pretext that Lovecraft's stories exist within continuity, and that he was channeling some kind of external power.

I liked a lot of the stories - many of them had strong characters and interesting developments and interpretations. Some of them were pretty disappointing. Laird Baron's story was particularly gross - it read like the Venture Bros written by Garth Marenghi. I don't mind gore, but like more substance to my stories and I can really do without gratuitous underage sex, especially when it involves pre-teen boys having a gun-toting standoff over older teen-early 20s girls. So gross. Joe R. Landsdale's story was interesting conceptually but the pacing was not great and he can't write natural sounding dialogue to save his life - or at least he didn't here. Maybe he does better with longer stories? The characters could have been good if they had talked more like normal people. It was more than the actual lines though, it was the pacing and how they were integrated into the description, etc. Some of the other stories did some really painfully bad stuff with women, the worst of which was Bentley Little's. I was super disappointed because it started out pretty strong and just got terrible in that regard.

Most of them were pretty solid of not fascinating, though there were some stand-outs. I really liked Martha Well's piece, which is maybe confirmation bias, as I love Ile Rien, but she really excels at tight pacing and clean action. Seanan McGuire's piece (actually the first thing of hers I have read) was interesting as it was the only one that took things from the perspective of the "gods" in questions (*cough*deeponesarenotgods*cough*). And Rachel Caine's was also quite good. All of them had female protagonists, which I thin helped the material feel fresher. The opening Story did as well, and it was very good once it got going - I think the beginning of it is a little bogged down with trying to *sound* Lovecraftian when it didn't really fit the voice of the character that developed throughout the rest of it. The Tsathoggua one was really good too, but it was way more a Clark Ashton Smith-Tsathoggua story than a Lovecraft one.

On the whole, the book is worth buying if you like mythos stuff, but don't bother reading the stuff between them, and definitely there are some stories you can skip.

Today, naryrising asked me to talk about the Cthulhu Mythos.

I have a lot of things to say, but I have spend a lot of Brain today already, so I make no promises.

I find the concept of cosmic horror really appealing, but it is difficult to engage with it without running up against Lovecraft's Cthuhu Mythos. He was not the first, but at this point it is really hard to write 'unknown horrors from beyond our scope of understanding that the mind can't process and keep hold of itself' without people assuming you are drawing on Lovecraft directly. Ask the Night Vale writers about this.

A lot of the stuff Lovecraft wrote was problematic as all get out. It was incredibly racist and anti-immigrant, written very much from a fear of the loss of white power to the unfamiliar - and to Lovecraft, culture so unfathomably unfamiliar he couldn't even recognize it as civilized or entirely human. He was terrible, and it is in the work, and there is no getting around that.

But some of the terrors he created that went truly beyond man, like Cthulhu, Azathoth, Yog-sothoth, were just really cool. He wasn't always the best writter from a technical standpoint, and a lot of people can't stand his style, but I feel like the obfuscating language works with reference to the unknowable. It's atmospheric. The cosmic entities are interesting (some more than others). And it is vague - so vague. A lot of it had to do with exploring the last frontiers, space and the sea, and we are still exploring those today in new and different ways.

Later writers did a lot to crystallize things that were obtuse in the original stories, drawing specific relationships between the gods, making their roles explicit. Making them knowable. It is a lot less interesting to me that way.

I think there is still a lot of stuff to play with in what he left us, and that stripping away the racism and sexism and bigotry leaves us with things that are even more interesting to work with, so when I'm playing with mythos concepts, that's what I like to do. Where do these things fit into a modern world and/or a contemporary setting? What effects and meaning do they have for people other than white cis men? What are other perspectives and contexts than can complicate a world in which these forces have an effect?

There are other authors out these still playing with this stuff - no less than three collections of Lovecraftian stories have come out in the last year *that I know of* and two of them centered explicitly on women (characters and authors). Some follow up on things I think are cool, some.... do not. But it is encouraging to me that there is still a market for these sorts of things.... maybe, someday, I will ever sell another story >.>