Yog-Sothery madness from R Silverberg, M Tem and D Schweitzer

If you are interested in vintage SF and by some black twist of fate find yourself in the region of Hagerstown, MD, you should take the time to visit the antique stores on Route 40, because at Memory Lane Antiques, Antiques Crossroads and Beaver Creek Antique Market a wealth of old genre paperbacks, magazines and comic books as well as all manner of related material is on offer, much of it at bargain prices.  Recently at Antiques Crossroads I purchased for five dollars each paperback copies of The Madness of Cthulhu Volumes I (2014) and II (2015), anthologies of new stories edited by S. T. Joshi that (according to the back cover, at least) were inspired by At the Mountains of Madness, one of H. P. Lovecraft's most famous productions.  These books, once in the library of a John Johnson of Darrington, Washington, are in quite good shape--they look unread, though tick marks next to the titles of the stories on the contents page of the first volume suggest he did read them--so thanks to Mr. Johnson for taking good care of them.  Produced by Titan Books, the books look great, with nice fonts and cool cover images by John Jude Palencar, details from his Terror in A.D. 1000.

In a departure from normal MPorcius practice, let's take a look at Volume I and read some stories written in the last ten or twelve years.

"Diana of the Hundred Breasts" by Robert Silverberg (1996)

Contrary to what I just said, here is a reprinted story from 1996.  Consider this a plot twist.  (Madness of Cthulhu reprints two stories by Grand Masters of Science Fiction, this one and Arthur C. Clarke's "At the Mountains of Murkiness," which I am skipping because I assume it is a joke story.)  "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" debuted in Realms of Fantasy alongside a story by Tanith Lee and articles about Czech fantastic art and literature and about the illustrations on game cards.  The back cover of The Madness of Cthulhu suggests "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" is "rare" and "lost," but it was in fact reprinted in a Silverberg collection and two anthologies before Madness of Cthulhu was released: Volume Nine of The Collected Robert Silverberg, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's tenth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche's 2000 anthology Graven Images.  

"Diana of the Hundred Breasts" is a good story, with effective fantastic elements and engaging human elements.  Our narrator is a wealthy slacker who just travels around for fun, spending a lot of time on the Mediterranean visiting ancient sites.  He has a somewhat difficult relationship with his brother, a leading archaeologist; big bro is a genius with exceptional good looks who can also be a cruel and arrogant jerk.  For the first time in a few years these brothers hook up at an archeological site in Turkey.  They meet a fellow American, a Protestant minister from the Midwest who is a widower, and the archaeologist, an atheist who has contempt for religion and, as we expect of a college professor, is confident religion is just a scam used by elites to control the masses, sort of needles this guy, poking fun at Christianity, suggesting it is no better or different than paganism.  But the narrator suspects the cleric may have his brother's number--the minister believes the archaeologist, though gifted and privileged in so many ways, is unhappy because he is empty inside due to a lack of belief in anything.

At the site, the two brothers accidentally set free a space monster which is, perhaps, the source material of the famous image of Diana of Epheseus, and the experience has a profound effect on the archaeologist, shaking his cynical rationalist view of the universe--maybe there is more to the universe than the eye can see.

The people feel real and the images of the ruins and of the monster that may well have been a goddess to the ancient Greeks are vivid--thumbs up for "Diana of the Hundred Breasts!"  

"Cantata" by Melanie Tem (2014)

I think I've read four stories by Melanie Tem, "The Country of the Blind," "The Marriage" (with Steve Rasnic Tem), "Iced In," and "Lunch at Charon's," and liked them all, so it makes sense to read this one.  "Cantata" would be reprinted in the Tem collection Singularity and Other Stories.

"Cantata" is OK; I'm not thrilled by it.

A woman who has a mental condition called "amusia" or "amusica" is part of a scientific team on an alien planet or maybe just a remote previously unexplored part of Earth.  This site is home to intelligent but primitive humanoid natives, the survivors of a more advanced civilization that was destroyed by legendary enemies; these survivors may perhaps share an ancestor with us normal humans.  (These elements of course remind us of Lovecraft, whose work is full of degenerate races and old ruins and vague memories of past apocalyptic wars and hints that the human race is the product of genetic engineering by aliens.)  People with amusia cannot understand or enjoy music, and our heroine actually hates music.  The lost tribe she is working among has no music, no knowledge of music, music having been lost in that cataclysmic war thousands of years past.  But while here on the expedition she has begun hearing music, music nobody else hears, and it is driving her insane--the sounds cause her to itch, and she scratches so vigorously that she penetrates her skin, inflicting upon herself bloody wounds.  Eventually the natives rediscover music and begin humming and our heroine scratches herself so ferociously that she cuts her own throat with her nails and even penetrates her own skull and damages her own brain.

"Cantata" is subtle and literary as well as disgusting in its depiction of injuries, so shares a lot with the other stories by Tem I have read, but I somehow am not enjoying it as much as those others.  If I had to guess I'd say it is because the main character doesn't show agency--in the other Tem stories I praised so much, characters demonstrated evil or self-destructiveness through their actions, which excites powerful emotions in the reader and raises issues of morality, while here in this story the protagonist is primarily a victim of unknowable forces who is defined by an unalterable innate characteristic.  Stories about those who act are inherently more engaging than stories about those who are acted upon, and narratives about people defined by what they do more compelling than those about people defined by inherited identities.      

"The Warm" by Darrell Schweitzer (2014)

I liked Schweitzer's novel The Shattered Goddess and his stories "Going to Ground," and "Malevendra's Pool," so let's give this story a try.  In 2015 "The Warm" would reappear in the Schweitzer collection Awaiting Strange Gods.

Once at a book store I saw that someone had written a novel in which the wife of Captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame was the main character, and I recently heard that someone wrote a novel in which Julia of 1984 was the main character.  Part of the excitement of such derivate productions is that they are works by and about women, whom we are told are "marginalized."  Well, who could be more marginalized than a monster who lives in an underground labyrinth that almost no surface dwellers even know exist?  "The Warm" is based on Lovecraft's famous tale "Pickman's Model" and its narrator is the ghoul whom Pickman induced to serve as an inspiration for his macabre art.

Schweitzer does a good job of depicting the alien world beneath our feet and the lives of the monsters down there, and the psychology of a man who joined the ghoul population but is the least of their horrible number, and, through his contact with Pickman, begins to regain his humanity at the same time Pickman is losing his!  The pacing and images of the story are quite good, and I liked the twist ending.  Thumbs up!  

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This was an enjoyable exercise, so let's keep it up--we'll read four stories from the second volume of The Madness of Cthulhu in our next episode.