Straight Talk

Straight Talk
by
Bobby Derie



The writer met her fan at the bar. They ordered separately. The fan allowed themselves a slight smiles as the cocktail arrived. Just like in the books.



"You don't owe me," the writer said, taking a first sip. "And I don't owe you. That isn't how this works."



The fan quietly tasted her how drink.



"I write, and you read. You get what you pay for. That's the extant that either of us owe each other. I can't promise more than that in this kind of relationship. Do you understand?"



The fan smiled, and nodded. Then finished her drink. She slid a book across the bar, and the writer signed it. The fan left. The writer held up a finger to the bartender, and took out a pencil. The tip had broken off in her purse.

"A writer casts blood into the abyss. Whatever she wants to communicate, whatever intent she has, must go out all at once, or it is lost." She sharpened the pencil with the care of Van Helsing whittling a stake. "And the readers for their part are no blank slates; they bring themselves to the story, with all the baggage of their experiences. It is what makes each reading unique."


She blew off a curl of lead-tinged wood. "You can't prepare the readers, you see. You have to take them as they are." The writer looked at him suddenly. "Do you think she heard me? Do you think she understood?" The bartender didn't meet her eyes.



"Fans read what they want to read. They bring their own understanding. Writers can't control that."



The writer knocked the second cocktail back. "Something harder, next time."



###

Drawing Down

Drawing Down
by
Bobby Derie


Every time brings me back to that first time. Alone in a darkened basement with all the props and trappings of the old ritual. The stale smell of sage covering hemp and other inhalants. The music was a droning beat of heavy metal noise through cracking speakers. The tump-tump-tumping seemed synched to me heart. All alone in my private space. The posters on the wall a circle of protection. Cannibals. Corpses. Slayers. The kiddie pool of Satanism standing vanguard as I made that initial descent. To write the sigils into my own flesh with a kitchen knife and a ballpoint pen. Tighten the belt just a little. One notch beyond the choking game. Cock hard and quivering with something besides sexual excitement. I found myself falling backwards.


Down through the sea. As the light faded from my vision from blue-green to grey to black. Pressure pain in my ears as I worked my jaw. Things swam past me. Real but unseen. Their bodies created motions in the water. Patterns against the currents. I was falling with a rain of shit. The detritus of all the things that had died above me suspended in the water. Fish that had just stopped swimming one day. Bits of seaweed. Flakes of shark skin. All the crap of the upper waters in an endless grey settling. Its where these things lived. What they fed on. What they swam in. The first realization: just like us.


I was past the point of buoyancy. Lungs screamed as the weight fell on me. Dragging me deeper. Into the abyss.


Low oxygen near the ocean floor. The light of the sun blocked by all the crap from above. Cold but not lifeless. Far from lifeless. Strange things flourish unseen in the sediments. No plants. Eat or be eaten. You will be eaten anyway. Someday. The second realization: this is why it lives here. This is the most alien place on the planet. The closest thing it has to home on that distant star.


Then I see it. Vast and impossible. My vision is dim. It doesn't move like I thought it would. No endoskeleton or exoskeleton. The mountain doesn't walk towards me. Churning up the ocean bottom. Filtering the strange life down there to fuel its own needs. The mountain squirms and heaves. Tentacles. It's made of tentacles. One of them reaches out towards me. Looking for an entrance into my skin. I open my mouth - to scream or pray - and it takes the welcoming orifice. Swallows me from the inside out.


These days I know better. No more mucking about with oxygen deprivation and drugs. The tattoos on my wrists have faded to grey-blue blobs. My co-workers barely register them against my smile. Maintain eye contact. Nod. Ask about the kids. Turn their interest back towards their selves. It's easy for them to forget.


But now I can reach R'lyeh in seconds. Center myself. Close my eyes. Find my way back. Empty myself to be filled again. When these eyes open again it is not my staring back through them. Just the tentacle. The smallest pseudopod of his majesty dressed in a skin suit. An alien predator among all the pink screaming blobs.  The perfect camouflage. Smile and nod. They don't recognize the threat display. Senses on the lookout for prey. The tentacle gets a reputation for having an eye for detail. Thinking outside the box but practical. A certain underhint of ruthlessness that solicits noises of approval from management. Scavengers who think themselves predators who recognize the carrion-scent of its thoughts.


When the day is done. The tentacle withdraws. Leaving me empty once again. Just a shell. Hollowed out a little more. Waiting to be ridden again.

###

The Sayings of Succo

The Sayings of Succo
by
Bobby Derie

"There is no idea so sacred as to be beyond question." -Succo, Sayings

Gaius Gallus Succo (b.134, d.79? BCE) was a scholar of Roman Greece. Little known even during his own life, Succo was virtually unknown in post-antiquity until rediscovered in the twentieth century when six copies of his Discourses on Prostitution were discovered in the Villa of the Papyri during the excavation of Herculaneum. This sexually explicit scroll, still unavailable in English except for excerpts, prompted a more thorough search of surviving ancient sources for references to this ancient scholar, and turned up a number of quotations and glosses in contemporary texts in and around Corinth, where Succo is presumed to have been from. These quotes have been compiled from several sources, and scholars are in general agreement that they represent three distinct works - the Discourses, the Sayings, and an unknown (and possibly banned) philosophical and religious work attested to only in a rebuttal from an unknown pontiff, retained in the Vatican Library.

"I do not see why there must be something sacred about sex that precludes it as a profession; certainly there are many who pursue that employment without joy, but only for the income it brings, and in that they are no different than the vast majority of the employed. For those rare few that are paid for doing what they find pleasure in - well, then your definition of 'whore' must be extended to every artist, writer, professional and tradesman that pursues their craft." -Succo, Discourses on Prostitution

Opinion remains divided on The Lost Book, which shows some clear influence from Greek mystery religions and Greco-Buddhism; based on the arguments of the pontiff decrying it, the text seems to have been written in response to the social tensions in Corinth in the generation following the Roman conquest, the pull between Greek nationalist interests, the sometimes harsh administration of alien Romans, and the wider world of learning afforded by contact with Rome.

"I would I had an empty page, to pour out my heart upon it; to wrap in words vain and bereft ambitions, and friendships lost to neglect, and all the weight of ennui that builds from things left unspoken, undone, unrealized. To recount small sins and small penances, and common dramas and tragedies of vulgar people who all dance together toward ultimate destruction, engulfed in petty things. Yet it would be incomplete, without an audience, and perhaps 'tis better not to unload on those who carry their own burdens, but to set the page in the fire, and with a blank sheet, try again." -Succo, The Lost Book

"It is a long road and I have set my foot upon it, and though I race at no pace other than my own I grow weary with the days and miles, but would not count myself content if I were to rest. Better then to finish on this path, and work through the bitter stretch, and know I have accomplished something for all I've done." -Succo, The Lost Book

"The great downfall of every religion is the acceptance by the masses. For any group of individuals, whose needs and wants are so diverse and different, the message must be so altered or watered down that the religion is either destroyed or the masses pay only lip service to its tenants, going about their daily business. Fanaticism, it must be understood, is a lonely preoccupation - and thankfully so." -Succo, The Lost Book

"I will not live a life without regret, for every action has its price and consequence, and many are irreversible. But I also will not let regret stop me from living my life. My god, what I have done? Damn god, I have done what I have done, and if I shed any tears it will be while doing something else." -Succo, The Lost Book
"To have the courage of your convictions means much more than being willing to die for what you believe; you must also be willing to live by the same tenets you ascribe, to know your philosophy well enough that you know its weaknesses as well as its strengths, to answer the questions of hesitant converts and ardent detractors. And if in examining that your beliefs are false, it also means you have the strength of character to shed the errant convictions - for while some may ardently fight to support what they know to be a lie, only a coward could try to live a lie." -Succo, The Lost Book

"Some find joy in achievement, and others in the process; these I understand well. Yet I never could conceive those who take joy in doing nothing, in accomplishing nothing, to wile away the hours and days without purpose and be content." -Succo, The Lost Book

"There's a part of music where the singer stops trying to express themselves in words, and you pass into a place where regular human language fails - and they sing screaming, wailing, moaning, howling, growling, purring, mewling. Wordless songs, but songs nonetheless. How marvelous." -Succo, The Lost Book

The Sayings, by contrast, appear to be simply a collection of common wisdom attributed to Succo, or else excerpts from his work or an oral tradition related to his speech and writings, and have been discovered, often in mutated form, in texts from late antiquity, though often without attribution, and only identifiable when compared to documents that quote Succo more directly. A few of the Sayings have been argued to actually be direct excerpts from The Lost Book or the Discourses.

"Life is in media res." -Succo, Sayings

"Gaze not too deep in shallow pools." -Succo, Sayings

"You are not required to complete the task, yet you are not free to withdraw from it." -Succo, Sayings

"Ignorance is not the same as innocence, nor is it any protection against the world." -Succo, Sayings

"The greatest leap is from competent to good." -Succo, Sayings

"Obscenity is technical language. It's usage must be controlled, or else it loses its efficacy and meaning." -Succo, Sayings

"It's good to have a temptation close at hand, just in case you need it." -Succo, Sayings

"I spend a great many words very carefully not saying certain things." -Succo, Sayings

"A snake is still a snake after it sheds." -Succo, Sayings

"A book is not fully enjoyed until it is shared." -Succo, Sayings

"To define a thing is to change it." -Succo, Sayings

"Foolish decisions should be made while young enough for the wounds to heal up in time for the next one." -Succo, Sayings

According to the Vatican manuscript, the two major works of Succo were suppressed, his religio-philosophical work more successfully than the Discourses, as the very act of banning it appeared to assure its continued popularity. Succo himself is thought to have survived until the destruction of Herculaneum, where he had fled to avoid persecution in his native land.

###

Mapping Lovecraft Country

Mapping Lovecraft Country
by
Bobby Derie

Blackened words scribbled in darkness, calling back to the mad scratching of a time-lost monk in an age of small-minded theology, black marks on vellum that echoed (or would echo) the wind-swept and tide-washed runestones on the shores of New England, curious artifacts without provenance, that did not exist yesterday and yet tomorrow will have been there for centuries so that Indians may scratch their heads over them new antiquities deposited on their shores from some future time. In another time white-bearded scholars rub leather elbow patches to debate the etymology of Shub-Niggurath, alien chrononauts driving their failing meat-sacks, the original intellects encased a hundred million years earlier to record their mundane secrets, only to return at some later date with nothing to mark their sojourn except an inexplicable fetish for rugose clones. Where once the worms and moles were masters of the primeval forests of Maine and Vermont (another construct of contemporary newthink; the pilgrims wandered through gardens of cleared fields left by the millions wiped out by plague, and feasted on the corn of the dead) now there lurk pits with strange amoeboid children crying out their first (and last) words, the echoing TEKELI-LI dribbling up through the floorboards mistaken for the mumbling of devils and the settling of the earth by those who find comfort in superstition and science. Saint Brendan on his leather-hulled canoe will brave the tides only to hear the Call of Cuitiliú in his dreams as he floats, with dry and bitten lips over the deep city of Y'ha-nthlei, caught in fever-dreamlands of islands beneath the sea twisted with the half-pagan imagery of a tortured Christ in the pale robes of Adonis and Osiris. What Old World ghouls left their ancestral cemeteries for the broken mounds of Lovecraft Country? Perhaps the strange wendigo, their cousin, put them up as Boston spread over the salt marshes, and cannibal vintages matured (slate markers in place of labels) to their tastes, the old Arab ghuls wiling the midnight hours away debating which grave to pop open tonight. For certainly there is a strange gravity that draws all these things into its orbit, a quaint and forbidden country squished into the geography, the Miskatonic carving a riverbed through time and space and imagination, sinking ever deeper into the sub-strata of myth and reality, so that even now tourists wandering through middle Massachusetts keep out a sign on the highway, hoping to see some weed-choked pull-off and a hand-lettered sign for Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth. Physical existence is just a skein to be drawn aside, walking tours of Marblehead and Newburyport and Salem dragging the eager seekers behind the scenes to the desolate and decrepit docks, the witch-haunted lanes with the odd attics and forbidden corners, the somber university which houses in its moldy bricks horrors that more ancient and authentic institutions cannot match - what is Oxford and Cambridge to the dark glory of Miskatonic, no matter how more grand their catalogues? Miskatonic is the university as dreamed by he who never went to university, a grail of all possibilities unaccomplished, shelves stocked with the secrets of the universe denied by frail body and pitiful mind, and so its shelves stretch out in non-Euclidean dimensions, poor Dewey running out of decimals and resorting to arcane runes to map the twists in that collection, where sorcerous ourangutans flit in the deeps between literary universes, and somewhere poor Borges set down his book and never did see it again. Like a tumorous colour from out of space has that strange region metastasized beyond the Aylesbury Pike, colonist spores spreading through the Severn and Sesqua Valleys, creeping eerily into the edges of Weird Westerns and Nazi Occultism, until ancient Sumerians sang hymns of Sentinel Hill atop their ziggurats, and worshipped unseen (and unseeable) Xoth with grim sacrifices. From one corner of the globe to another archaeologists spades clink against the remnant of a thousand ancient races, turning over the soil to reveal the latest octopoid carving and tentacled idol to set next to the others in their crowded secret museums. (What did they unearth at Herculaneum, that so set in motion the Victorian censors - and so spurred a tide of pornography and taboo lore that has never quite abated? How pale and quaint a scene as the satyr mounting the she-goat, compared to the six-breasted goat-women, vaginas dilating in strange rhythms, that dance through Machen-hills, among the druidic standing stones which must have been erected before even St. Brendan made his journey, a thousand years old as of last week.) Like the prisoner of R'lyeh the tentacles of that strange country reach out to past, present, and future - ever outward do cold mechanical eyes probe into the darkest reaches of space, and ever new dark planet in our system is a whispered Yuggoth on the lips of the many disciples, as was foretold with the discovery of the Ghooric Zone in in 2337 (1977).

###

Dear Kamog

Dear Kamog
by
Bobby Derie

Dear Kamog,

While following up on some additional sources on “Sex & the Lovecraftian Occult,’” I came across references to a supposed Lovecraftian occult text or work called The Book of the Forgotten Ones while browsing through the chapter on Lovecraftian magick in Robert North’s New Flesh Palladium (2006, 4th edition), which in turn appears based on some extensive quotes from the work in Kenneth Grant’s Outside the Circles of Time (1980), both referring to the Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, a mid-to-late 70s publication of the ‘Bates Cabal,’ a group of thelemic practitioners in the area.

Supposedly, The Book of the Forgotten Ones is a received text by Soror Andahadna, AKA Nema, a priestess of Maat. The first chapter is published in the CJoCM vol. 1, no. 2 (1977) as “The Forgotten Ones”; Nema then expanded on this with “Return of the Elder Gods” in CJoCM vol. 1, no. 3 (1978) - a ritual discussed in The Necronomicon Files (2003, 120-1) (the paragraph in The Book of Lies 145 seems based directly on The Necronomicon Files). The brief second chapter was published as “The Second Book of the Forgotten Ones” in The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick vol. 1, no. 6 (1979), with a much longer exegesis by magician-artist Allen Holub, and it is this which Grant quotes from fairly extensively and is of the most interest as it goes into greater detail about the beliefs and practices involved with this group and their workings.

In content, these snippets of The Book of the Forgotten Ones are both disappointing and interesting. Yes, it is OTO/Kenneth Grant-style sex magic - refreshingly clearly discussed in Holub’s piece - but despite the similarity of names these are expressly not Lovecraft’s creations set in a magical framework. There influence of Grant’s The Magical Revival (1972) and Cults of the Shadow (1975) seems quite strong and obvious, and the sex magick rites described by Holub seem to be taken more or less directly from standard thelemic practices. It curiously parallels some bits in Donald Tyson’s Necronomicon series, though I take that more as sharing similar sources than any direct borrowing.

Curiously, I have found some correspondences for the Book in the oddest of places: Lovecraft's letters concerning William Lumley, the aged and deluded seeker who, like Grant, thought that Lovecraft's fictions touched on occult truth. Consider this fragment, from a letter I purchased online at an exorbitant sum:

Perhaps I’ve mentioned him—William Lumley of Buffalo, N.Y. He is very crude in some ways, though amazingly erudite in the lore of mediaeval magic, & possessed of a keen & genuine sense of the fantastic. He is slowly evolving a strange tale of mystical adventure to be called “The City of Dim Faces”, & what he has quoted of it to me sounds astonishingly promising. There is a place in art and literature for the delination of reality in its sternest phases, but that does not detract from the value of phantasy—the literature of escape. Some writers take naturally to the one phase, while others inclined toward the other. It I always the unreal and the marvelous—the vague and expectancy-fraught world of dream, wherein anything is possible—which have primarily fascinated me. The idea of a land of darkness is excellent, and one footnote telling of ancient MSS. Which even the Egyptian priests could not read excited my imagination tremendously. That kind of thing resembles my own (purely mythical) “Pnakotic Manuscripts”; which are supposed to be the work of “Elder Ones” preceding the human race on this planet, and handed down through an early human civilization which once existed around the north pole. We may think we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry. Indeed—Bill tells me that he has fully identified my Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep He also speaks often of a mysterious friend of his—“The Oriental Ancient”—who is going to get him a forbidden book (as a loan, and not to be touched without certain ceremonies of mystical purification) from some hidden and unnamed monastery in India. I shall try to straighten out the text, & may type some of it—but I think I’ll ask for charitable cooperation in the latter process. Lumley has no machine.

That is the end of the relevant portion. Needless to say, "The City of Dim Faces" was never published and the manuscript is non-extant, but the bare hints have strong correspondences with the places described in the Book. I know you and I have argued many times on the truth of Lovecraft's occult abilities and education - whether he was as he claimed the dedicated materialist, a mere dreamer on the nightside, or a conscious or unconscious adept of mysteries older than Egypt and Atlantis. We know from his grandfather's masonic connections that some material transmission was at least theoretically possible, and the circumstances of his conception were never satisfactorily explained - you've seen the horoscopes that Price and the others cast. 

I don't mind telling you that Grant was scared of him, and not just at the end. All that stuff he wrote, the truths buried in the numbers that never added up, wrapped up in doggerel and traps that only one reader in ten thousand could decipher...yet at the end, he made the same claim that Lumley had made forty years before; and Soror Nema channeled the same current after that...well, I may not be ready to believe, but I will keep an open mind. Even after all these decades, all that has been written of him, Lovecraft retains some of his secrets.

Yrs. in anticipation of the New Aeon,

Frater Typer

Et in Arkham ego

Et in Arkham ego
by
Bobby Derie

We met at last in witch country. I found him on Flint Street, discoursing with a solid black cat of the old line, who might have been burned as a familiar in another century. He was cordial in his greetings rather than warm, but then I had known him only through his writings. As the midnight tom took his leave, we wandered down the tree-lined avenues of the Federal houses, and made our ambit of the old places. Down Charter Street to the Pickman House, and not far from there to pay our respects at the Memorial, and took a stroll through the lovely old boneyard. The Jonathan Corwin House was out of season, but we peeked through the windows at the museum, and he made light of how the house had been moved since last he saw it, and the gambrel roof which sheltered that terrible room had changed. Then we moved on.

There were other houses, and some museums still open. We paused for a moment before one display of an accused witch being pressed to death, the waxen head grimacing in frozen agony. He looked wistful at the sight, and I laid a penny on the rail next to his hand, which occasioned a smile.

“These poor unfortunates,” he said “They are only victims now. Yet once they were inspirations of holy terror, the devil’s lieutenants clothed in flesh, walking unseen among their neighbors. Then later they became initiates to that Old Religion, martyrs to a strange primeval faith handed down among secret families, the last of the virtuous pagans keeping alive the mysteries of the Horned God and the Triple Goddess, magicians whose powers came down from the stunted troglodyte race that had preceded true mankind, and which still dwelt for a little while in seclusion during the period of his dominance, and by rude custom joined with man, and so their alien powers might survive in strange, hybrid generations. Now we know better; Scratch seeded no serpents in this city on a hill, and the old Faith was no more than the daydreams of a silly woman. Yet look here,”

He pointed surreptitiously at two young women, in fishnets and tall heels, streaks of false silver in their hair, mass-market talismans on finger and wrist and breast. They were quiet, if not somber, and their eyes drank up the displays, and read every line of every placard.

“They acknowledge something greater than the weight of history, cloaked as it may be in hokum and mummery. They see these victims as their ancestors in the Craft, witches in truth if not in fact. For them, it is the story that is important. Not the people.”

So saying he slipped the penny in his pocket, and we went out into the sun once more.

We visited the graves then, the strange faded old tablets and obelisks in their uneven rows, smelled wet grass and new-turned earth, and joked of the ghouls’ larder left beneath the tumbled hills, where a consumptive virgin might be aged for a century before she was ripe enough for a refined palate. As the afternoon came to twilight we found a devil’s seat, as even in death some pour soul felt the need to contribute some small comfort to his fellow creatures, and I stopped to rest my weary legs, and fetch the vial from my pants pocket.

His eyes hardened at the sight, and I wondered at the story they used to tell of him in Brooklyn. He dropped an antique round of steel into my hand, that gleamed like silver in the darkness, with Liberty and One Cent on its face.

“Cancer.” I told him. “Of the pancreas. Not long ago, but the rates of recovery…”

He only nodded. “The illness is long, and painful?”

“Yes.” My voice fell as the word came out, like I had stifled a sigh.

We looked for Gallow’s Hill, but could not find it from where I sat and where he stood, and the light slowly failed us. There were no lamps here, only a pale sliver of moon and the aura of the city, which lit the horizon in a hazy glow.

“Where do we go, from here?”

“I can only speak for myself,” he said after a moment. “But I will walk down that path there, and out through the lichgate to witch-haunted streets with strange names, past houses with gabled roofs going slowly to ruin, torn down to make way for modern apartments to house the teeming multitudes, and along a dark river that drains into the sea. There are churches there older than this country, whose doors I never darken on a Sunday, but whose yards and burial grounds are well familiar to me. There is a campus there for the university, and a library that has received as gifts many old and strange books that I have learnt to read. It is a living place, where battles are fought in city chambers over raising up new buildings and razing others, to preserve a certain character about certain streets which have come to be beloved for the charm and quaintness that comes with age, and always there are those that come there as strangers, and fall in love with it, so they come back again and again, wishing they could stay.”

I laid the empty vial in the grass.

“I wish I could walk those streets with you.”

He smiled then, so like a cat in the darkness, like a piece of the night had come and bound itself to him forever.

“You already have, and will again.”

###

My Name is Hank

My Name is Hank
by
Bobby Derie

“…and I beat my wife.”

The other six men looked at him, without speaking. The hulking psychologist with the green ponytail hid his lap with his clipboard.

“It was…years ago. I wasn’t quite myself that night. I mean, I…” Hank gritted his teeth, ran a big hand through his blond Harvard clip. “I don’t want to excuse it. I don’t want to say it wasn’t my fault. It was. I hit Jan. I hit her. I just wasn’t…it’s complicated.”

Hank stopped to breath, felt his heart beat, looked around again. The man on the far left looked like a shaved gibbon, sad eyes deep set in a head full of pink scar tissue. When he leaned forward you could see the radio bracelet around his ankle.

The green ponytail harrumphed, nudged his glasses farther up his nose.

“Go on, Hank.”

Hank gripped the podium, careful not to break it.

“I think, looking back on it, there was a lot of things working on me. I have a high-stress job, and I had been feeling inadequate for quite some time. Working together in a close-knit team, all sorts of danger, you get a good feel for how everyone contributes. The thing is, I may not be a slouch, but the other people on the team were something else. I tried…different things, y’know, to compensate. Bulked up you might say. Started dressing and acting more aggressively, tried to work harder to prove I could pull my weight.”

“Jan was supportive. Really, she was great. Went along with everything, just to keep me happy. But she…everything had come so easier to her. She was an heiress, never had to work for much of anything in her life, but she was also brilliant in her own way, when she put her mind to it. She spent more on shoes than I spent on my entire wardrobe, but when she wants something she goes for it. Like her dad, really. And for a while she wanted me, and so…”

Hank felt his face flush, the heat burning from his cheeks.

“She pursued me. All that money, all that energy, and she came after me hard. Then she had me and…she was satisfied. That was it. I was like another possession to her. So I had my research, and she had me. Literally, had me. Her daddy’s money paid for everything. So when I started my work with the team, really trying to make a difference, that caught her attention. She came along, and she did well at it. As well as I did at it.”

“And that was…I think there were things there we weren’t telling each other, even then. Maybe she liked the adventure of it all. Maybe she wanted to make a different, or just to stay close to me. But I was struggling so hard, to keep up, to prove myself to the group, and there she was, doing just as well as I was, and…I was jealous. I started to hate her a little bit. I mean, really I hated me. I hated that I was so weak, and I looked at her, doing so well, without going through what I was doing, not making the mistakes I was making…and I loved her, but I was tied to her, her money, her daddy’s money which paid for everything. I wasn’t with her because of her money, but it wasn’t like I was bringing in enough to support us.”

Next to the scarred ape-face there was a carrot-top, dark sunglasses and a cane. He looked meticulously clean; dressed down in jeans and a polo shirt and high tops, but the tan lines were wrong—high collars and low sleeves that spoke of long days in suits. Hank looked at the scarred hands, the cane. Wondered which he might have used against her.

“So I had…a break. It’s hard to really describe it, even now. I wasn’t acting like myself, but I was doing the sort of things that I wanted to do. I was still me. I was still doing me things. I was also outside of me, looking on, criticizing myself. Jan took it well—the arrogance, the self-confidence. She knew something was wrong, but she knew it was me too, I think. I’d never been so sure of myself, never been so reckless. We got married then. A spur of the moment thing, surprised everybody, but I think Jan had really wanted it. She loved me, she’d waited…maybe she’d been waiting a long time, for me to propose.”

“The thing is though, the break, I wasn’t really as confident as I projected. I was still me. All those little insecurities, blossoming in my skull. I wasn’t getting better, the stress was building up, because I had this whole new…new self I was trying to sell everyone on, and I was still just fucking up, you can’t just put on a new set of clothes and call yourself by a new name and become someone else, and everyone else, I don’t know if they knew but I knew, and Jan came to me…”

Hank felt the hot tears behind his eyes and blinked them back.

“It was a bad moment. I was out of control, I knew it then. She came to me in the middle of my work, just walking sex, worried about me, wanted me to stop, and I…I just lashed out at her. Verbally. Physically.”

He held up one meaty hand, gripped in a loose fist. Opened it, to stare at the palms.

“That was years ago. Years. I’ve never…really gotten over it. She forgave me. I couldn’t. I couldn’t really. Other people, when they find out, they treat me like a pariah. Which I deserve, you know. I don’t want to excuse it, anymore. I think I was in denial for a long time. Mad a the world, mad at myself, for what I’d done, how stupid I’d been. People call me a genius, but I was just so…stupid, to do that. The whole thing about being bigger and stronger than someone, you need control. No excuses. Too easy to hurt someone.”

Hank stepped back from the podium, cheeks burning, eyes on the floor as the green ponytail’s pen nub scritched across the paper.

“Thank you Hank,” the psychologist said, looking around. “Who would like to share next?”

###

Dear HPL, Cordially REH

Dear HPL, Cordially REH

by Bobby Derie

The following letter, apparently Robert E. Howard’s answer to H. P. Lovecraft’s meandering missive rescued from Derleth’s typewriter ribbon, was finally pieced together from several fragments and scraps sold by a particularly shrewd and mercenary dealer in California, who rightly reasoned that he could fetch a better price for the whole if they were sold piecemeal. Now, thanks to the generosity of individual purchasers of various fragments, this lost piece of correspondence may be presented whole for the edification of fans and scholars of REH and HPL.

- BD

Dear HPL:

I have finally found time to answer your (as always) interesting letter. Recalling off-hand the charges you have made against me, I remember that at various times you have accused me of being: Exalter-of-the-Physical-Above-the-Mental; Enemy of Humanity; Foe of Mankind; Apostle of Prejudice; Distorter of Fact; Repudiator of Evolutionary Standards; Over-Emphasizer of Ethics; Sympathizer of Criminals (that one broke all altitude records); Egotist; Poseur; Emotionalist; Defender of Ignorance; Sentimentalist; Romanticist. Memory of my heresy is mingled in every attack you make on me and my ideas. Concerning the clippings about the police, etc., I didn’t present them in an effort to show these things were typical. I’m afraid a written statement of affairs wouldn’t do much good, unless signed by some one in authority; even if I dared to publish such a paper.

One market I tried was Spicy Adventure, a sex magazine to which Ed is the star contributor. He’s a good deal bigger than I am—taller and heavier—and only a few months older, but I am beginning to fear that he doesn’t have the stamina and endurance that a man of his age ought to have. They say that the aforesaid giant and I, after the smoke cleared away, sallied forth to visit a young lady, that we got into the wrong front yard, and that I got sick.

I’ve also taken a short run into Central East Texas (to talk to the surgeon who operated [on] my mother last spring) and one into South Texas (to buy some German wine for my mother from Ludwig Borauer who makes the best in the world); I’ve learned to mix a dozen or so new drinks, have renewed an old love affair and broken it off again, developed a new set of exercises with sledge-hammers, read some new books, made some more enemies, learned how to take care of milch goats, so altogether the year that brings me into middle age has been a rather stormy one. That was four days ago, and still the water is gushing over the spillway, in spite of the fact that all flood-gates are being kept wide open, to take care of the surplus.

We are not farmers. Water, brought from dams built on the Pecos, is the reason for the town’s existence. It doesn’t have, for instance, or at least we didn’t see any of those dives so popular in Mexican border towns, where naked prostitutes of both sexes and various Latin races first dance before the customers, then copulate with each other, and then indulge in various revolting perversions for the entertainment of the crowd, which is generally made up of tourists.

I like your “Festival” reprint in the current Weird Tales. I hope you decide to collaborate on the proposed musical drama.

Typical letter from the postoak country.

Cordially,

REH

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From Ech-Pi-El to Ar-I-Ech

From Ech-Pi-El to Ar-I-Ech
by
Bobby Derie

The following is transcript of a letter from Howard Phillips Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, believed by internal evidence to have been sent and received in April or May of 1935, recovered from a typewriter carbon in August Derleth’s home, The Place of Hawks. Supplementary letters suggest the missing missive was originally transcribed by Donald Wandrei and intended for volume four or five of the Selected Letters by Arkham House, but both the transcription and the original of the letter remain missing, so only the carbon remains. It is presented here in a direct translation from the carbon, and so it retains the gaps from Wandrei or Derleth’s editing, with no additional annotation.

- B. D.

Kadath in the Cold Waste

—Hour of the Night-Gaunts

Dear Ar-I-Ech:—

Blessings of the Prophet, and of the Elder Ones, upon you. Proceeding to answer the questions in your letter (& trusting perhaps overconfidently that the foregoing garrulous & egocentric comment has left you with enough patience & consciousness to hear the not-quite-so-garrulous (I hope)* replies thereto)—I may say that (a) I haven’t any especial claims to the title of “student”, being not even a university graduate (health broken down during years which should have been collegiate), & being more or less superficial & fragmentary about everything. Don’t let the Einstein-twisters catch you here! Lest you assign to me an excess of credit for conscious ascetisicm, let me say that perhaps the chief factor in my abstinence from the beguiling weed is that I detest the d——d stuff most cordially!

I had been hearing from Robert at irregular intervals for a period which must add up to three years or more. It seems to have taken Belknap completely by surprise—& I fancy he is properly grateful to little Bobby. My card sent from Salem last month attempted in a feeble way to express the delirious delight & unboundedly enthusiastic admiration which Ebony & Crystal aroused in me. Trust you’ll decide to take both Xexes & Artabanus to the trans-lacustrine hermitage. You’ll have to specialise in “The …. of the ……..” titles if they form such consistent passports to good luck!

About my own attitude toward ethics—I thought I made it plain that I object only to (a) grotesquely disproportionate indignations and enthusiasms, (b) illogical extremes involving a reduction ad absurdum, and (c) the nonsensical notion that “right” and “wrong” involve any principles more mystical and universal than those of immediate expediency (with the individual’s comfort as a criterion) on the one hand, and those of aesthetic harmony and symmetry (with the individual’s emotional-imaginative pleasure as a criterion) on the other hand. I realise that this kind of idealistic impersonality is not the same as the other sort of impersonality—arising from scale, distance, and mechanical media, and definitely inferior in ethical status—which I mentioned previously. You belong to the school of thought (to which, incidentally, I myself belonged at one period—for my beliefs constantly change as new evidence presents itself) which believes that pleasure or richness of experience is purely a balance between desire and fulfilment, so that a cat basking comfortably in the sun is just as happy and rich in experience as a scientist verifying a discovery, or poet capturing a mood, or philosopher grasping a value-concept. As for standards—see how your beloved force of telepathy has brought the public press to my aid!

As for occasional controversial topicks—I am acutely sensible that our differences rest upon a divergence in premises, & indeed believe that most profound controversies are similarly animated. Any vestigial philosophic resemblance I may have to the bygone Puritan is perhaps contained in my general belief (a mere personal opinion, whose application by force I would violently oppose) that a contemplative and imaginative life is of somewhat more evolved quality, and likely to confer richer ultimate rewards upon persons of highly organised sensibilities, than is a more elemental life with its concentration on the primitive, the more simply emotional, and the orgiastic. All this belongs to positive physical knowledge—as positive as the knowledge that an inkstand will fall if you drop it from the window to the ground, or that a rat will die if you keep it under water fifteen minutes.

The play, which deals with the marriage of a low Irish girl to an educated negro, went off very smoothly and capably—save that the mayor had forbidden the performance of the first act, which involved the participation of small children and the use by them of low language. Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. Of course they can’t let niggers use the beach at a Southern resort—can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of greasy chimpanzees? Indeed, the extraordinary thing is that homo sapiens has become as differentiated from other organic species as he has become. But that’s not saying that all times and companies are equally suitable for the airing of a hairy-chested vocabulary—or that all the current extremes of racy diction are of equal aesthetick value.

This is an experiment in really artistic fantasy weaving, just a word-picture with no plot, no climax, and no specific ending. It was the most vivid dream I have had in a decade, & involved subconscious use of odd scraps of boyhood reading long forgotten by my waking mind. We were, for some terrible yet unknown reason, in a very strange and very ancient cemetery—which I could not identify. The town was fairly sizable, with one or two streets paved (there were high sidewalks, and stepping stones at crossings) and considerable crowds of soldiers, colonists, Romanised natives of Iberian physiognomy, and wild tribesmen from the plains surging past the white-washed dead-walls of houses and gardens. Strolling south from Dexter’s mansion, Edgar & I noted the ancient churchyard & the new church going up with it. When we see such a thing we do not thrill with the illusion of recognizing a fragment of life. Something of spring’s intangible atmosphere was abroad—and at dusk an exquisitely slender crescent moon hung in the western sky not far from the blazing beacon of Venus. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. … Gawd knows what they are—…—a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose, and imagination—would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogens could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place.

It seems to need rounding-out—& unless it explains why the narrator is exempted from the general death, it out to record his fear of coming death as he writes. Decay links the horror more closely to the familiar world around us, & to the beings of that world.  The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. There is a difference between mere originality and delicate symbolism, or hideously nebulous adumbration. Art is not the devising of artificial things to say, but the mere saying of something already formulated inside the artists’ imagination & automatically clamouring to be said. It is easy to imagine with what genuine regret the editors to whom it was submitted declined to print it.

I have now a third trip to Boston to chronicle—probably a final trip for this year, since winter is a season of drear blankness and indisposition. O let me not lie in the frozen waste…rescue my congealed corpse & give it a decent cremation…

The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation. Were any child to be reared in isolation, and surrounded from infancy with the religious precepts of Tsathoggua, YOG-SOTHOTH, or the Doles, his inner emotions would all through life inform him positively of the truth of Tsathogguanism, Yog-Sothothery, or Dolatry, as the case may be.

Yrs in the Brotherhood of the Djinni—

Ech-Pi-El

* Later—how vain are the hopes of mankind!

Introduction to Spicy Weird Stories

Introduction to Spicy Weird Stories
by
Bobby Derie

This remarkable collection presents the best of the short-lived Spicy Weird Stories magazine, published by Culture Publications from 1936 to 1942. During its heyday, Spicy Weird Stories attracted the greatest weird fictioneers of the day, including the three leading lights of Weird Tales: Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as other notable pulpsters including E. Hoffmann Price, Robert Leslie Bellem, Howard Wandrei, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, and Hugh B. Cave, though many of them were published under pseudonyms like Sam Walser, Hamlin Daly, and Wade Wells.

As detailed by Will Murray in “An Informal History of the Spicy Pulps,” the sizzling “spicies” line began with Spicy Detective Stories in April 1934, an endeavor funded by Harry Donenfield, some say, to launder money from his bootlegging operation. While there had been previous titillating magazines on the rack and under the counter, the Spicies were the first line to cater to the pulp genres, and soon Donenfield’s Culture Publications was also producing Spicy-Adventure Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Snappy Adventure Stories, Snappy Detective Stories, and Snappy Mystery Stories—and in 1936 rounded out the lot with Spicy Western Stories and Spicy Weird Stories.

The creation of Spicy Weird Stories is the result of a letter from E. Hoffmann Price to Spicy Stories editor Frank Armer in 1935, in response to Armer rejecting two of Price’s tales for containing science fiction and fantasy elements. While early issues of Spicy-Adventure Stories had included a few sci-fi tales, and Spicy Mystery Stories was willing to accept stories with a supernatural element provided it was resolved as mundane at the end, by 1935 Armer was cracking down on both of these sort of tales. Price’s suggestion was that rather than reject this sort of material outright, Armer should open up a new Spicy version of Weird Tales or Astounding.

Armer was doubtful, as he was unfamiliar with the horror, fantasy, and science-fiction market, but responded to Price’s letter by asking if he thought any other weird writers would be interested in submitting stories, particularly under their own names. Price had already been something of an evangelist for the spicies among his friend, convincing both Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith to submit stories for the spicies. Howard succeeded, landing several stories in Spicy-Adventure under the pen-name Sam Walser; Clark Ashton Smith had failed, his story “Mother of Toads” being rejected by Spicy Mystery as too fantastic and too hot for their magazine. Now with the possibility of a new market for weird fiction, Price put out the call to his friends and colleagues.

The first issue of Spicy Weird Stories in August 1936 featured a daring cover painting by house artist H. J. Ward of a nude woman in a sarcophagus, at the feet of which lay prostrate a man in modern garb, the leering faces of Egyptian gods in the background, for the story “Tarbis of the Lake” by E. Hoffmann Price; a version of Clark Ashton Smith’s “Mother of Toads” published under his own name, lightly expurgated to comply with editorial guidelines; “Blades of Khartum” by Robert E. Howard, a rejected Spicy-Adventure tale re-written as a sword & sorcery tale; “The Ghost Gal” by Spicy regular Robert Leslie Bellem and starring his private detective Dan Turner; and finally a comic strip “The Adventures of Olga Mesmer,” continuing her adventures from Spicy Mystery. It was an excellent and ambitious start, and which completely sold out of its small first run.

For the entirety of its six-year run, Spicy Weird Stories received a flood of mail both praising and condemning it. Many fans were happy with the contents of the magazine; others decried the pollution of serious literature. Writers from Weird Tales quickly learned they could take stories rejected by the prudish Farnsworth Wright, and resubmit them to Spicy Weird. Established Spicy Stories authors had much less success producing weird spicies, but as all science-fiction and horror submissions were now funneled to Spicy Weird, they picked up the slack filling up the other Spicy titles. Wright quickly took note of this, and contacted Culture Publications in 1937 threatening legal action.

The case never went to trial; Wright and Armer secretly reached an agreement where Wright would forward likely rejected stories directly to Armer in exchange for a small finder’s fee if the story was accepted. Both magazines profited from the arrangement, as Weird Tales could retain its high standards and Spicy Weird would get a more literary crop of submissions than typical for a Spicy pulp. Weird artists got in on the act too—Margaret Brundage submitted black-and-white line drawings of nudes from Chicago under the house name W. Lovett; Virgil Finlay did seventeen covers for the magazine near the end of its run, taking over from H. J. Ward, but never signed them; Wayne Francis Woodard, known to WT fans as Hannes Bok, took over the Olga Mesmer comic strip in 1939, and continued to draw it for three years until Spicy Weird folded in 1942.

Spicy Weird Stories lasted until the end of the Spicy line, when New York City Mayor Fiorello Le Guardia’s crackdown on lurid covers; but unlike the other spicies was not revived when Culture Publications re-organized along slightly different lines and began putting out essentially the same magazines in 1943. Whatever deal Armer had with Farnsworth Wright was null when Dorothy McIlwraith became editor of Weird Tales in 1940, and the quality of the magazine notably declined, relying more heavily on regular authors quickly pumping out stories under pseudonyms, and even reprints of Robert E. Howard tales printed under his real name and original titles in an effort to drive up sales.

The stories in this collection represent the best that Spicy Weird had to offer, from their most talented and illustrious contributors, several of which have never before been reprinted. The success of these stories lies neither in being solely weird or spicy, but in how the two themes were wedded together and complement one another, in a way that was rarely achieved before, and would not be seen again until long after the post-war years when publishing let its hair down and science fiction openly addressed questions of gender and sexuality, among other social issues.

“Tarbis of the Lake” was an early story by E. Hoffmann Price, lost and then recreated in collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft during the legendary 25-hour visit to Price’s quarters in New Orleans. The story did not sell for years, despite Price submitting and resubmitting it to Weird Tales and a host of other magazines, but finally found placement in the premiere issue of Spicy Weird Stories. The published version lacks HPL’s byline, according to prior agreement. Price had further revised it to increase the spicy element, mainly involving the complete nudity of Tarbis in her sarcophagus, but according to a recently discovered 1936 postcard, Price did send along a percentage of the proceeds to HPL, along with a letter of thanks.

“Mother of Toads” by Clark Ashton Smith failed to land at either Weird Tales or Spicy Mystery when first submitted, being too erotic for either publisher to print, but with Price’s encouragement a slightly expurgated version appeared in the inaugural Spicy Weird as “Among the Lily-Pads.” Years later, after Arnem and Wright had forged their agreement, a more heavily edited version appeared in Weird Tales under Smith’s original title. The full, uncensored version would not be published until Necronomicon Press published it in 1987.

“The Witchcraft of Ulua” was another of Clark Ashton Smith’s tales that was censored when it first appeared in Weird Tales; Wright dug the unexpurgated version out of the archives and sent it on to Armer during a slow month for submissions in 1938, and the two later received permission from Smith to reprint it almost unaltered. This began a tradition of the same weird fiction appearing in both magazines; Wright would publish the “clean” version of a tale, and a month or two later Armer would publish the “spicy” version. There is some internal evidence that a few such tales were actually “spiced up” by house writers before seeing print, rather than having been edited clean by Farnsworth Wright.

“House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord” were both written by Clark Ashton Smith, but having failed to place them in other magazines Smith gave them to Price to revise and sell to the spicies, and they appeared under Price’s pseudonym “Hamlin Daly.” The original stories, reprinted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith, are neither very spicy nor very weird, though they still contain some of CAS’ beautiful and evocative language. Price’s revised versions contain heavy doses of Egyptian and Theosophical mysticism, as well as plenty of heaving bosoms and pale naked flesh, and combine something of the best of both authors’ style.

“The Black Kiss” by “Michael Leigh” is actually a collaboration between Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, and an early story of the Cthulhu Mythos. First featured in the June 1937 issue of Weird Tales, where it lost out the Brundage cover to “The Carnal God” by Speer and Schnitzer, the story yet managed to score several lavish black-and-white nudes by Mrs. Brundage in the August 1937 issue of Spicy Weird. Bloch never took to writing for the spicies, or at least if he has never admitted to it, but Kuttner continued to publish, mainly in Spicy Mystery.

“Blades of Khartoum” and “Ship in Mutiny” by Robert E. Howard writing as Sam Walser and were initially submitted to and rejected by Spicy-Adventure. Undeterred, Howard rewrote them as sword-and-sorcery fantasies starring a Conan-esque hero, and submitted them to Spicy Weird, and Armer snapped them up. They were the last of Howard’s stories to be bought by the magazine before he took his own life in July 1936, and did not appear in print until August and September of that year.

Another Robert E. Howard spicy submitted before his death as “Daughters of Feud.” This tale, originally set in the American backwoods country, was far too explicit for the average spicy due to its heavy sadomasochistic scenes of bare-bottom spanking. However, rather than returning the manuscript immediately it lurked in the files, until Armer became aware of Howard’s death. Knowing no other Howard stories would be coming this way, Armer paid a house writer to turn it into an acceptable weird spicy, and mailed Howard’s father a check as if the story had been submitted and accepted normally. The deception was not discovered for some years, until the Robert E. Howard Foundation reprinted the unadulterated versions of REH’s spicy stories in the 2011 Spicy Adventures collection.

Robert Leslie Bellem was one of the stars of the Spicy line, and the prolific creator of private detective Dan Turner for Spicy Detective, who would one day get spun off in his own magazine. Among the hundreds of cases Bellem wrote for Turner over the years, it is easy to forget that in the first three issues of Spicy Weird Bellem attempted to combine his jaunty, hardboiled prose to making Turner a kind of occult detective. The resulting trilogy of tales produced were “The Ghost Gal,” “The Ghoul’s Girl,” and “Dead Damsels in Distress,” the latter of which was reprinted much later in Super Detective as “Girls Don’t Bite.” Bellem took particular advantage of one of Armer’s peculiar editorial rules, which allowed that “a nude female corpse is allowable”—as a consequence, Turner spends several pages over the three issues tripping over a veritable harem of dead and undead girl-flesh.

“I Wore the Brassiere of Doom” was a confessions-style story credited to “Sally Theobold,” a transparent penname for Weird Tales veteran Howard Phillips Lovecraft, though most bibliographies failed to credit HPL with this story until Robert M. Price reprinted it in Lurid Confessions #1 in 1986. While most readers and critics might express surprise that HPL might attempt a spicy story, citing L. Sprague de Camp’s biography and many memoirs regarding Lovecraft’s prudish attitudes towards sex, S. T. Joshi’s more recent biography I Am Providence and more recent research suggests that this proclivity was overstated, as anyone who has read HPL’s short story “Sweet Ermengarde” or the poem “Sir Wilful Wildrake” will attest, and recently horror author Edward Lee tracked down an erotic novella that Lovecraft had written under commission for a private gentleman’s magazine under a pseudonym, which was republished with a fictional framing device of Lee’s own creation in 2010 as Trolley No. 1852.

A hallmark of the Spicy line were the regular comic serials that ran in the pages, often featuring and starring women who entered into various states of undress. One of the strangest, as chronicled by Will Murray in “The Spicy Strips” (Risque Stories #5, 1987) was “The Adventures of Olga Mesmer,” which began in Spicy Mystery. Olga Mesmer’s strange origin and powers, which included super-strength and x-ray vision, took her to hidden civilizations beneath the earth and to the outer planets of the solar system before her serial was abruptly summed up and canceled—possibly to avoid conflict with the Superman comic book, under another of Harry Donenfeld’s companies. However, Armer revived the strip almost immediately for Spicy Weird, as the strange character and attitude seemed to fit the “almost-unique” magazine. Hannes Bok picked up the story from where it had let off and Olga Mesmer continued her planetary adventures on Mars, Yuggoth (Pluto), Cykranosh (Saturn), and Sfanomoë (Venus). There is much speculation that Bok merely drew the comics while another writer or writers, perhaps Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, actually scripted the adventures, but both writer and artist on the strip remained uncredited. I am pleased to present here the full run of Olga Mesmer strips from Spicy Weird, reprinted here for the first time anywhere.

This anthology would not have been possible without the tremendous assistance of Will Murray and Robert M. Price. As well I would like to thank, in no particular order, S. T. Joshi, Rusty Burke, Darrell Schweitzer, Edward Lee, the Robert E. Howard Foundation, the staff at Arkham House, the Estate of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and Daniel Harms for their help, scholarship, and guidance.

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