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 20th
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.
