While The Black Stars BurnBefore I get to my column, I’m very happy to announce that my collection While the Black Stars Burn won a Bram Stoker Award last month! To celebrate, the Kindle version is currently just 99 cents over at Amazon. My undergraduate university, Angelo State, posted a good writeup on my award.

I have been getting a lot of invitations to write for Lovecraftian and King in Yellow themed anthologies, and the contents of While the Black Stars Burn strongly reflect that. For instance, I wrote the title story, “While the Black Stars Burn,” after I was invited to submit a story for the Cassilda’s Song anthology. I knew I wanted to write a story evocative of the Chambers story “In the Court of the Dragon” and also evocative of Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann” but which was not a copycat pastiche of either one. I ended up writing the story at my first winter residency at Goddard, which is in Vermont; the heat wasn’t working well in my dorm room, and my being profoundly cold and underslept definitely influenced the story as well.

In other news, I interviewed Joe Hill for NPR affiliate WCBE 90.5. In the interview, he discusses his new novel The Fireman and offers updates on Locke & Key adaptations.

Also, I’ll be a panelist at the Origins Game Fair here in Columbus, Ohio in a few weeks. I’ll be participating in several panels: “Characterization and Dialog”, “Social Media 101”, “The Plot Thickens”, “The Art of the Short Story”. If you’ll be in the area, come by!

And now, on to the column.

“The Call of Cthulhu” is probably H.P. Lovecraft’s most enduring and influential story. It’s been reprinted and borrowed from and adapted in thousands of ways since its publication in Weird Tales in 1928. Lovecraft, a movie fan, would probably approve of the faithfully retro black-and-white film of his tale released by H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society in 2005; he might be horrified by the adorable Cthulhu plush toys and pun-laden Cthulhu tee shirts sold at science fiction conventions around the globe. The tropes from this classic horror story have become so ubiquitous throughout weird fiction and horror that it’s the kind of story that most any speculative fiction reader thinks he or she has surely already read … but in many cases (including my own) has not.

I initially read this story to capture some of the “flavor” of Lovecraft’s style and world building. I figured I would find it a bit old-fashioned, and while parts did creak … it also gave me nightmares! Not many stories do that to me these days.

Clearly, there’s something here that resonated and continues to resonate with readers. So I took a harder look at the story to find out what I found it so unsettling and why. I think that the disturbing core of this story is the kind of cosmic horror that Lovecraft evokes from the very first two lines:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity ….

At first glance, these lines simply look like a variant of the old adage “Ignorance is bliss.” But there’s more at work here. Lovecraft isn’t writing about bliss; he’s writing about mercy. And the structural ignorance of our minds is portrayed as the greatest mercy humanity can experience … greater even than the mercy of a quick death in the face of prolonged suffering. At the time the story was written, Lovecraft’s world was less than a decade past the horrors of World War I and a half dozen smaller wars raged around our planet … which he describes as “placid”. So Lovecraft is setting some pretty high horror stakes right from the start: as violent and brutal as humanity can be, it’s nothing compared to the horrors lurking amongst the stars.

Lovecraft ratchets up the horror in his description of the Great Old Ones: “But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. … They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by.”

I found this part utterly horrifying. Many of us, I think, have a terror of being buried alive. Of being conscious in the darkness, helpless, unable to move, unable to escape. And if it dragged on? Boredom and anxiety would quickly escalate to helpless insanity, as prisoners committed to solitary confinement can attest. Being alone with nothing but your own thoughts to keep you company is not a merciful fate.

And the Great Old Ones did this to themselves on purpose. That kind of eternal torment is part of their selfish design. And if they’d do that to themselves? The mind reels at the thought of what they’d do to any other living thing in the cosmos. And it’s staggering to imagine the thoughts such beings would ponder after such a long time locked in dark madness. That’s a masterful bit of horror that Lovecraft evokes in this tale.

About Lucy A. Snyder

Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her latest books are Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer's Survival Guide and While the Black Stars Burn. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Jamais Vu, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Steampunk World, In the Court of the Yellow King, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad 2, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck and is a mentor in Seton Hill University's MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.