February 09, 2005

In Dead R'lyeh ...

Posted by Henry

Carl Zimmer has a nice piece on the voracity of star-nosed moles in the NYT today. But am I the only one to think they look like escapees from the Cthulhu mythos? If I found one poking its snout up through my lawn, I’d be distinctly unnerved …

Update: by popular demand, I’ve moved the disturbing cthonic entity beneath the fold. Here’s an old kitten photo instead (Aoife is now 2 years older and 7 pounds tubbier than she was then).

(picture found via BoingBoing).

September 28, 2004

Strange Aeons

Posted by Henry

Teresa Nielsen Hayden reminds us that Charlie Stross has a strong claim to the title of Supreme Cthonic Entity of the Order of the Shrill for his Oliver-North-discovers-the-Cthulhu-mythos-and-likes-what-he-finds short story, A Colder War, available in its entirety online. Stross describes it as a dry run for his novel, The Atrocity Archives but the two are very different in tone - A Colder War is chill and disturbing, while “Atrocity Archives” is jaunty and irreverent - British bureaucratic incompetence battles against eldritch powers and survives, just about. It’s quite amazing how adaptable H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre is, and how well it has survived as a set of cultural tropes, despite its dodgy politics and dodgier prose style. To name a few other unorthodox contemporary riffs on Lovecraft: P.H. Cannon’s Scream for Jeeves (Lovecraftiana redescribed by P.G. Wodehouse), Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground, which has Jack Kerouac going up against the Great Old Ones,1 and my personal favourite, William Browning Spencer’s Resume with Monsters, which blends the Cthulhu mythos with the misery and drudgery of dead-end jobs in a sharp, funny and effective romantic comedy. Really. As it happens, I came across two copies of “RwM” in a second-hand bookshop yesterday - will happily send one each to the first two people to ask for them in comments.

1 I started reading this a couple of months ago and still haven’t finished thanks to other books and work commitments; Matt Cheney gives it a good rating here).