Wonder and Glory Forever Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Nick Mamatas

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors and are used here with their permission.“Weird Tales,” by Fred Chappell, is reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.“Ghost Story,” from Slapboxing with Jesus by Victor D. LaValle, copyright © 1999 by Victor D. LaValle. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division ofPenguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction is a new anthology of stories, selected and with an Introduction by Nick Mamatas, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2020. Nick Mamatas also has written the introductions to the stories.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mamatas, Nick, editor, writer of introduction.

  Title: Wonder & glory forever: awe-inspiring Lovecraftian fiction / edited and with with an introduction by Nick Mamatas.

  Description: Garden City, New York; Dover Publications, Inc., 2020 |Summary”H.P. Lovecraft’s body of work maintains a visceral influence over a host of contemporary writers. Inspired by themes of awe and and wonder, this unique collection spotlights the weird works of twelve horror and fantasy authors,including Michael Cisco, Livia Llewellyn, Victor LaValle, Molly Tanzer, and Masahiko Inoue. Also includes Clark Aston Smith’s 1931 ‘The City of the Singling Flame and Lovecraft's own 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ as well as an extensive introduction by Nick Mamatas—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020034786 | ISBN 9780486845302 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales, American. | Fantasy fiction, American.

  Classification: LCC PS648.H6 W66 2020 | DDC 813/.0873808—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034786

  Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

  84530301

  www.doverpublications.com

  24681097531

  2020

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION - Nick Mamatas

  THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH - H. P. Lovecraft

  SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN - Nadia Bulkin

  VASTATION - Laird Barron

  YOU WILL NEVER BE THE SAME - Erica L. Satifka

  NIGHT VOICES, NIGHT JOURNEY - Masahiko Imoue

  FAREWELL PERFORMANCE - Nick Mamatas

  TRANSLATION - Michael Cisco

  WEIRD TALES - Fred Chappell

  BRIGHT CROWN OF JOY - Livia Llewellyn

  GHOST STORY- Victor LaValle

  GO, GO, GO, SAID THE BYAKEE - Molly Tanzer

  THE CITY OF THE SINGING FLAME - Clark Ashton Smith

  CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

  PUBLICATION INFORMATION

  INTRODUCTION - Nick Mamatas

  “Hello there, little winged being in the brain of the consumer!

  Thank you for coming!”

  WHERE DOES one even begin with H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), the once obscure and now ubiquitous author of cosmic horror and science fiction? In the decades since his death, Lovecraft’s work has entered the public domain. The motifs and themes he used in his work are as commonplace as the vampire or the starship. You can read about, and even read a bit of, Lovecraftian fiction in The New Yorker, or saddle-stitched fanzines, or the subtitles of your favorite video game’s cut scenes.

  Despite the truckloads of Lovecraftian fiction, comics, games, bumper stickers, memes, etc., out there, the tendency is for the stuff to express one of two things: either a sense of inescapable, inevitable doom . . . or light humor. These two extremes should come as no surprise: ultimately, Lovecraftian fiction is a type of cult fiction. Cult fiction inspires devotion in its readers due to its exploration of alienation, articulation of existential angst, and its offer of some level of ego gratification. You, reader, are one of the ones who get it, and thus you are special.

  What’s to get is that society, life, and perhaps the universe itself is fundamentally absurd. Cult fiction is fiction that reveals this truth, regardless of genre—thus high and low modernism, SF and noir, and visionary novels and gutter fictions can all be properly labeled “cult.” Lovecraft explores the absurdity of creation in spades, overturning the divine order and revealing it to all be the willful delusions of our puny human brains. It wouldn’t be an introduction to a volume of Lovecraftian fiction without this quote: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all ts contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

  Lovecraft’s vision naturally lends itself to a sense of what critic John Clute calls “vastation”: “[t]o experience the malice of the made or revealed cosmos.” However, Lovecraft’s own personal fears and phobias—everything from non-“Aryan” races to whatever one might find washed up on the shore while strolling any New England beach at low tide—opened the door for nerdish guffaws and bad jokes. Another critic, Edmund Wilson, dismissed Lovecraft’s soul-shattering horror, Cthulhu, as an “invisible whistling squid.” Direct hit! But humor in the face of absurdity is also part and parcel of cult fiction. What Lovecraft made ridiculous, Lovecraftians have made whimsical, even charming. A now-famous author I helped first get published promised me a pair of Cthulhu slippers as a thank-you gift. They never arrived.

  Interestingly, the once prominent Wilson is now only read thanks to cult networks: people who are interested in Lovecraft read his New Yorker article “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” and grow intrigued with his style even as they disagree with his claims. Others find their way to Wilson via Frederick Exley, whose “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes is a cult classic—his second, less good book, Pages from a Cold Island, is about his obsession with Wilson. Wilson’s own remaining title that is read at all, To the Finland Station, is about that cult phenomenon Marxism, which has few adherents these days, but they (we!) are all voracious readers.

  Though cult fictions are given to themes of existential despair, and are easy to both ridicule and reify as goofy pastiche, we just keep reading them, and there’s a reason for that: Along with that experience of the malice of the made or revealed cosmos comes the experience of the sublime.

  Most of us, most of the time, barring religious ecstasy, head injury, or the exact right kind of drug use, experience only a tiny sliver of the universe. We never get to see more than our senses, memory, and highly limited rationality can construct for the little homunculi riding in our skulls. Cult fiction of various sorts, and the work of H. P. Lovecraft in particular, changes that, and gives us a glimpse of what might truly be at the end of our forks. Yes, there is no invisible whistling octopus at the end of the universe, and Lovecraft knew that—he was a “mechanistic materialist” as noted by Lovecraft critic S. T. Joshi and others. The Great Old Ones are not meant to be “real” in the sense that we should believe in them, or even that they should make mimetic sense within the stories in which they appear;they represent the sublime, the marvelous, and the eternal.

  Exposure and experience of the sublime is the third major thematic element of cult fiction in general, and specifically of Lovecraft’s fiction. It’s not as common as existential despair or absurdist humor, because it is very difficult to impress a homunculus. We are hardwired to be afraid, and hardwired to giggle inappropriately, but it takes work to get us to experience the universe in all
its grandeur and appreciate it.

  Because, the universe, that big ol’ beast we’re trapped in, is always trying to kill us. And it always succeeds. The audacity of the cosmos, with its endless efforts to tear us apart through earthquakes that make mountains, radiation we cannot perceive except for the thin sliver that is the rainbow, microorganisms that use us as continents even as we feel ourselves to be minute specks of flesh and time floating within the infinite, and roiling seas under which we cannot live unless we are the Robert Olmstead of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”—oh, ho, and here we are, at the title of this anthology, Wonder and Glory Forever. As in, “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst.” …Yeah, that’s the stuff.

  The selections in this volume are all about finding the awe, the marvelous, and the world-shaking amidst the horror, the dark, and the degradation. So open your eyes wide and give the homunculus who surreptitiously controls your every thought and behavior a bookful of the most merciless of infinities.

  —Nick Mamatas

  Oakland, California

  March 2020, just as the plague hit

  THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH - H. P. Lovecraft

  Lovecraft’s emergence from cult author to mainstream phenomenon is a continuing process, so I don’t think it odd to include here his novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, from which the book you hold in your hands draws its name and inspiration.

  My own introduction to Lovecraft wasn’t any of his original work, but The Real Ghostbusters episode “The Collect Call of Cathulhu,” written by Michael Graves. Lovecraft is mentioned by one of the characters, and of course an ersatz Cthulhu and The Necronomicon play a role in the story. Something about it made me think, This is real. This show is referring to something outside of itself, not just making stuff up. When I got older, I still directly avoided Lovecraft’s work, instead finding myself enamored of the British anthology The Starry Wisdom, which included work by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Swans front man Michael Gira, all of whom I liked at the time. (I’ve always had a thing for cult fiction.) I didn’t sit down with Lovecraft until the late 1990s, almost fifteen years after first coming across his name.

  So while you, my educated Lovecraftian pal, may have over a dozen books that feature The Shadow Over Innsmouth in all its very damp glory, there are other readers for whom this will be their first exposure to the work after finding this title on a store shelf, or after watching Lovecraft Country on HBO, or or or . . . any number of twisted paths through the New England woods to find this doomed town.

  I

  DURING THE winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under suitable precautions—of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

  Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

  Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end. Only one paper—a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy—mentioned the deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

  People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.

  But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

  It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

  I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and—so far—last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England—sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical—and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.

  “You could take that old bus, I suppose,” he said with a certain hesitation, “but it ain’t thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth—you may have heard about that—and so the people don’t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow—Joe Sargent—but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s’pose it’s cheap enough, but I never see more’n two or three people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks. Leaves the Square—front of Hammond’s Drug Store—at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they’ve changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap—I’ve never ben on it.”

  That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books would have interested me, and the agent’s odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist’s attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there—and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and
spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.

  “Innsmouth? Well, it’s a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city—quite a port before the War of 1812—but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now—B. & M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.

  “More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing’s left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

  “That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and Old Man Marsh, who owns it, must be richer’n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He’s supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems to’ve ben some kind of foreigner—they say a South Sea islander—so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in ’em. But Marsh’s children and grandchildren look just like anyone else so far’s I can see. I’ve had ’em pointed out to me here—though, come to think of it, the elder children don’t seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

  “And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn’t take too much stock in what people around here say. They’re hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They’ve ben telling things about Innsmouth—whispering ’em, mostly—for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they’re more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh—about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts—but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don’t go down with me.