Shoggoth.net

Jordan Hofer reminds us in this dread-full tale that sanity is a gift easily stolen.

“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”

Werner Herzog, April 30, 1999

Judd Farmer feared the sea. He more than respected the ancient and indifferent nature of its forces. The relentless crashing surf could not care if he were caught in its fury and dashed upon the lacerating coral. When the ocean did care about him he was the object of hunger, food to be devoured by abysmal jaws with rows of serrated teeth. And then there was its incomprehensible vastness, the open and endless depths that concealed fears formed of shadow and dream, of memories so old they had no name and could not be recovered in full conscious form from the primordial sleep.

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Psst! Yeah, over here. Do you want to read something REALLY disgusting? Of course you do, you little scamp. Well, read what we got below and tell all your friends where you got it, all right? And don’t say nuthin to your parents!”

Since my retirement from the force, I make my weekly pilgrimage to the supermarket and pick up eggs, bread, cheese for my wife, and one copy of each of the supermarket tabloids. I’m not much into the weight loss miracles or reports of Tony Curtis’ brave final days, but the last case I ever handled is one that’s haunted me ever since I slapped the cuffs on Hubert Hubert as he lay buck naked in bed and took his young companion away from him six years ago.

Every week since then I scour the Weekly World News, the Sun, the Star, the Globe, all of them, for some trace of the life I destroyed, some sign that I can make things right.

But today, after giving Marie a sponge bath and getting her down for her morning nap, I found it.

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“Pastiche” is usually a dirty word in Lovecraftian circles. Memories of August Derleth classifying Cthulhu as a “water elemental” in his attempts at Christianizing the Old Gents’ work make today’s reader shudder in entirely the wrong kind of horror.

However.

Robert DeFrank calls “The Mythos Path” a “pastiche,” and it does have elements of a Robert Bloch or other master’s technique at producing palimpsests of the Old Gent’s work. Like Bloch or Wandrei or others, he uses the names of the old “forbidden” books in a quick list, writes in a style reminiscent of HPL with its precise wording and its protagonist who has learned too much! but also like those writers, he has taken this pastiche style and made it something all his own. His treatment of the shoggoth idea in particular is astounding.

This is a longer work, and every word is worth reading.

I

(From the journal of Dr. Arthur Murphy, alienist on staff at the Canton Hospital for the Insane.)

I am a rational man.

This may come as a surprise to some of my acquaintances, considering my unconcealed love of weird literature, poetry and a near-obsession with the Hellenic myths, the traditions of which are the foundation of Western thought. But like the most canny of Greeks I eschew reliance on mysticism and see the imaginative works purely as a rich source of analogy for the human condition.

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