Lovecraftian Fiction Recommendations

Winter Tide, The Ballad of Black Tom, A Study in Emerald, Shambleau, The Door in the Wall

Even while he was alive, H. P. Lovecraft encouraged other writers to play in his sandbox, and afterward fanfiction of the Cthulhu Mythos became its own subgenre. But it’s no secret that a lot of Lovecraftian fiction is… bad, replacing Lovecraft’s wild inventiveness with the usual round of mad cultists and tomes bound in human skin. So I thought I’d save everyone else some trouble and link to the things I’ve read which are actually worth reading.

Winter Tide: This is probably my most cliche recommendation. As soon as you tell anyone that you like Lovecraft, the next sentence out of their mouth will be “have you read Ruthanna Emrys’s Winter Tide?” Even people who have never read anything by Lovecraft or Emrys will do this. People will say “oh, have you read, uh, the book, by” and then you can respond with “yes, I have read Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys” and then they will look at you like you have been granted powers man was not meant to know by Nyarlathotep.

Repetitive book recommendations aside, Winter Tide is absolutely worth its phenomenal popularity (at least phenomenal for the tiny pond that is Lovecraftian fiction).

Canonically, The Shadow over Innsmouth ends with a genocide. The FBI arrests all of the Deep One hybrids and takes them to a concentration camp. Happy ending! The protagonist of Winter Tide is Aphra Marsh, one of the last two survivors of the genocide. She agrees to work with the U.S government to track down a sorcerer in return for access to the books stolen from Innsmouth by Miskatonic University, the last records of her family.

One of the things I always look for in Lovecraftian fiction is exploration of the themes implied by Lovecraft’s worldbuilding which he himself never dug into. Winter Tide is, at its core, about diaspora feelings, about being one of the last of your culture. Aphra are paralleled by other characters with experiences both real-world (a Japanese survivor of the internment camps, a New York Jew only a few years after the Holocaust) and fantastical (a long-lost descendant of the mad K’n-yan subspecies of humans). There are themes of memory and what survives when a culture is destroyed, from the Innsmouth books to Aphra teaching others magic as a way of preserving her family culture to the Yithian archives which preserve human history even once the sun has burned out. And there are themes of family, blood and chosen and forced together by circumstance and situations more complicated than these, and the way it relates to the preservation of one’s culture in the face of loss.

Winter Tide is also clearly written by someone who likes Lovecraft (while, like all Lovecraft fans, having a complicated relationship with the man). Her glee at Richard Upton and Yithians, Miskatonic University and the smallness of humanity in the face of the universe, is palpable. Winter Tide fills the reader with the awe and wonder which is so characteristic of Lovecraft and so absent from his lesser imitators, especially in the magic. The description of the eponymous ritual made me gasp.

If you’re curious about whether you’d like Winter Tide, I’d recommend checking out the original novella, Litany of Earth, which I’ll probably write a review of at some point.

The Ballad of Black Tom: Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a perspective-flipped retelling of The Horror at Red Hook, Lovecraft’s most infamously racist short story. (Fortunately, you don’t have to read Red Hook to appreciate it.)

One of the questions I find most fascinating about the Cthulhu Mythos is the psychology of cultists. Why would a person choose to worship, perhaps even to summon, a being incomprehensibly vaster than us, a being whose immeasurable indifference would crush human civilization as thoughtlessly as I swat a fly? The Ballad of Black Tom offers one very satisfying answer to that question.

Both of The Ballad of Black Tom’s protagonists—Black Tom and Malone, the racist police officer trying to stop him—are kind of terrible people. I was struck by how profoundly sympathetic the narrative is to both protagonists. The narrative has a clear-eyed awareness of its protagonists’ flaws, yes, but it also likes them. On some level it’s rooting for both of them. I really appreciated that about two characters (racist police officers and mad cultists) who are rounded off by so many authors as simply and uncomplicatedly evil.

At its core, The Ballad of Black Tom is a book profoundly concerned with what it’s like—”what is it like to be a black man in Harlem in the 1920s?” or “what is it like to be a racist police officer?” as much as “what is it like to be a cultist of the Great Old Ones?” After reading it, I felt like I had a much better empathy for people very different from me—who lived in a different time and who don’t share my skin color and values.

A Study in Emerald: Neil Gaiman’s delightful Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover fanfic. In a world where the Great Old Ones have risen and rule the world, everyone’s favorite consulting detective must solve a murder. A Study in Emerald rewards close reading: it is only on my most recent reread that I caught that the moonlight makes the narrator’s skin look pinkish (because, of course, the rise of the Great Old Ones made the moon red as blood). Much is left to implication, and this creates a sense of a much bigger world than appears in the story—not to mention the little “oh!” of “that’s Shub-Niggurath!” or “oh, hey! Dracula!”

Shambleau: Is this Lovecraftian fiction? It might not be. But C. L. Moore was part of the Lovecraft Circle, so I feel like it counts.

Shambleau is a genuine, authentic piece of mind control tentacle rape porn from 1933. It would not be out of place on mcstories.com, except that Shambleau is significantly better written and somewhat more unclear about the causes of the waves of ecstasy which fill the protagonist with mingled desire and revulsion. Slightly. A little bit. It is really not a very ambiguous story.

I hadn’t previously been aware that mind control tentacle rape porn was a thing in the 1930s, much less openly published in magazines anyone could purchase. Apparently this kink is at least ninety years old! Yes, yes, Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, but it’s one thing to know about Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife and quite another to read a story where I recognize every single one of the plot beats. It’s so easy to assume that the past was this unitary time of repression and missionary-position sex with the lights off, and I’m pleased that Shambleau has corrected my error.

Women’s role in fandom hasn’t changed in the past ninety years. They’re all about the degenerate pornography! They’ve carried down this tradition from their foremothers since the beginning of science fiction fandom itself. It brings a tear to your eye, it really does.

The Door in the Wall: One of Lovecraft’s recurring Very Specific Plots is that the protagonist encounters some beautiful architecture as a child, gets older and is no longer allowed to see the architecture, and kills himself from grief. It’s a very specific story and Lovecraft tells it maybe a dozen times, mostly in the Dream Cycle. I love it and will read it nonstop.

The Door in the Wall, by H. G. Wells, is the only instance I’m aware of of someone other than Lovecraft telling this very specific story, and it’s a really good instance of it—Wells’s comparative skill at characterization really sells the protagonist’s internal conflict. I’d say it’s skippable unless, like me, you want to read another dozen iterations of this plotline and tragically Lovecraft only wrote it so often. But it’s interesting to me that there was an independent invention of it.