AROUND ELDRITCH CORNERS

THE SECRET SPEECH OF THE UNIVERSE:

 A Review of Christine Morgan's AROUND ELDRITCH CORNERS

Author: Christine Morgan

Publisher: Word Horde

Price: $18.99 (US)

Isbn: 978-1956252088

I’ve always been fascinated by how H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology has morphed and evolved over the decades, reflecting the obsessions, fears, and mores of each passing generation. For example, an early Lovecraft homage, Donald Wandrei’s The Web of Easter Island (1948), mirrored the public’s intense anxiety over UFOs, which had only recently begun haunting the skies of the United States. These “odd looking craft” (as Wandrei describes them) were spectral enigmas from the heavens that lent themselves to Lovecraft’s cosmicism and therefore fit perfectly within a Mythos-inspired novel. Wandrei’s centuries-spanning narrative also exploited America’s newfound fascination with the Rapa Nui moai statues made iconic in the realm of midcentury pop culture by Thor Heyerdahl’s highly publicized 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition to the South Sea Islands.

Colin Wilson’s “The Return of the Lloigor” (1969) used Lovecraft’s “Great Old Ones” as a paranormal explanation for the shocking rise of “[m]urder, cruelty, rape, [and] every possible kind of sexual perversion” (in the portentous words of Colonel Lionel Urquart, one of the main characters of the novella, who’s clearly intended to be a parody of Colonel James Churchward, author of the 1926 pseudoscientific book, The Mysteries of Mu) that many distraught Americans believed to be flourishing amidst the chaotic social milieu of the late 1960s. Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (1977) wove various urban anxieties and New Age reinterpretations of geomancy into a phantasmogoria about an alcoholic fantasy writer who uncovers ancient systems of magic inextricably connected to large cities. Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons (1978) also drew upon 1970s pop metaphysics such as pyramid power, the ancient astronaut theory made famous by Erich Van Daniken’s bestselling nonfiction (?) books, and Kenneth Grant’s chimerical notion—first proposed in his 1972 book, The Magical Revival—that Lovecraft’s mythology was rooted in occult truths. Unlike the reverent pastiches written by members of the original Lovecraft Circle (e.g., August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, et al.), more recent works of horror fiction, such as Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016), and Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence (2015-2017), effectively confront and deconstruct the misogyny and racism embedded in Lovecraft’s worldview.

Similarly, Christine Morgan’s Around Eldritch Corners bends and warps Lovecraft’s Mythos to better reflect the present age. This collection includes several standout stories that make it more than worthy of sitting on the same bookshelf beside classic Lovecraftian works by Wandrei, Wilson, Leiber, etc. The first entry in the book, “The Arkham-Town Musicians,” may at first appear to be a lighthearted sequel to one of Lovecraft’s most famous tales, “The Dunwich Horror,” but in truth the story is an absurdist meditation on marginalization, highlighting the fact that even the most alienated outsiders can overcome powerful forces when they choose to band together. “Pippa’s Crayons” is a deceptively simple and yet elegant dark fantasy that, despite its extreme brevity, packs as much cosmic horror into three pages as an entire epic novel written by some of Lovecraft’s more literal-minded devotees. The story that best encapsulates Morgan’s alchemical approach to Lovecraft’s fiction might very well be “At the Crossroads,” in which an old woman suffering from technology-induced nightmares undergoes a sudden, enigmatic, almost shamanic initiation that enables her to reinterpret her fears through a revelatory lens.

“The Mindhouse,” in which a taciturn psychiatrist named Dr. Hasturn seems to have a mysterious plan for his patient’s dreams, is a disturbing deconstruction of the very concept of madness itself, blurring the always thin line between therapist and patient, sanity and insanity, dream and reality, insideness and outsideness. There’s a distinct meta level to this story that reflects on the power of the imagination itself, conflating dreamers with the emotionally unbalanced:

“Dreams, according to Doctor Hasturn, are the secret speech of the universe. They aren’t to be analyzed with trite symbolism, nothing so new age or Jungian as that. They are deeper messages, far deeper than the sub- or unconscious. They are from beyond, from outside, from the primal currents of the underpsyche.

“In the dreams, sometimes, the nonsense syllables of our glossolalic therapy chants aren’t such nonsense after all. They begin to seem like words, like a language just beyond our comprehension. I’ve asked the others and we all agree… they’re almost within grasp. Almost.

“And sometimes—when Doctor Hasturn has cots brought into the mindhouse, to conduct sleep-studies on us there—sometimes the dreams become much more than dreams. Much other than dreams…”

It’s almost as if Morgan is commenting on the power of storytelling itself, when mere yarns transcend themselves and rise to the elevation of literature. Certainly the tales included in Around Eldritch Corners accomplish that rare level of magic. The unpredictable and uncontrollable effects of genuine imagination—magic, by any other name—recur throughout the collection. The paradoxical love and fear of magic appears to be intertwined with this particular cycle of stories. “She Walks in Tatters,” for example, turns this love of magic upside down and inside out by juxtaposing unrestrained bibliophilia with the eternal, religious obsession to discover unknowable truths through ancient words of arcane power.

Like Fritz Leiber’s Night’s Black Agents (1947), Ray Bradbury’s Dark Carnival (1947), Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories (1975), Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), Joe Hill’s 20^th Century Ghosts (2005), and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s To Charles Fort, With Love (2005), several of the stories in Around Eldritch Corners succeed in reinterpreting ancient myths and folklore, updating them for a whole new generation. Arthurian myths are twisted and repurposed in “The Hounds of Tintagel,” the urban legend of Bloody Mary is transmogrified in “Mary in the Mirror,” and Revelation-level, apocalyptic prophecies are taken to their logical (and darkly humorous) conclusions in “Keeper of Memory,” the tale that closes out this essential new addition to Lovecraftiana.

Since the idea of alchemy recurs in several of Lovecraft’s most important tales such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” and “The Alchemist,” perhaps it’s appropriate that the core concepts of his neo-gnostic mythology insist on transforming alchemically with the passage of time. Christine Morgan’s Around Eldritch Corners is a state of the art example of that necessary evolution.