New Life For Deadly Dreams

Dead But Dreaming is an anthology of mostly-original Cthulhu Mythos stories (with, to my knowledge, one reprint) that originally came out in 2002 as one of the final releases of DarkTales Publications. It emerged in extremely limited numbers but gained some critical acclaim – enough to justify Miskatonic River Press reprinting it in 2008. Edited by Kevin Ross and Keith Herber – both veteran contributors to the Call of Cthulhu RPG, is the collection worth the hype (and the high eBay prices charged prior to the reprint)?

Stephen Mark Rainey leads off with Epiphany: A Flying Tiger’s Story, in which a World War II fighter pilot from the Flying Tigers – the volunteer airmen who went off to join an all-American air force group fighting the Japanese on behalf of the Republic of China before the US officially entered World War II – finds himself falling foul of some strange aerial power after a perilous dogfight. It’s basically a better Ithaqua story than August Derleth himself ever wrote; shifting the scene from the icy Canadian wilderness to the jungles of Burma helps establish some distance from the Wendigo myth Derleth used as inspiration (or, rather, the myth that Algernon Blackwood used as inspiration and Derleth ripped off) and teases out some of the wilder implications of an alien thing which can pluck you up and toss you around the sky on a whim.

Rainey is not the only writer here who undertakes an exercise in taking a motif from pulper weird tales and putting a different spin of it. Loren MacLeod’s The Aklo is basically a “secret white civilisation somewhere in Africa” story of the sort which littered the pulps; an attempt is made to subvert the trope by saying that yes, the Aklo are the ancestors of all white people – and they are miserably corrupt and evil, an evil which manifested through colonialism and global warfare millennia after their city was abandoned.

I’m not sure about this one. On the one hand, I can see the point in inverting all of those “lost race of white people in Africa who were so much more cultured and wise and kind than the bestial savages around them” stories. On the other hand, this isn’t that much of an inversion, since the Aklo are still depicted as having constructed an astonishingly advanced city (with ample slave labour) and so on, they’re just nasty about it. Furthermore, this sort of inversion does not really attack the core fallacy of such stories, which is the idea of racial characteristics meaningfully shaping behaviour over a span of millennia and ancestral predeterminism.

Black Wings: the Fourth Flutter

Another Halloween season, another opportune time to review one of the Black Wings of Cthulhu anthology series by S.T. Joshi – a regular collection of all-original Cthulhu Mythos fiction, freshly squeezed from the minds of a wide stable of writers. This time around, I’m going to take a look at the fourth volume in the series.

The first story in the collection, Fred Chappell’s Artifact, is a bit of a misfire. It doesn’t help that it traipses into making proclamations about race that display either a basic ignorance of the facts or a very odd interpretation of them. For instance, there is a passing assertion that the term “gypsy” doesn’t really refer to any specific ethnicity; this is demonstrably incorrect.

Worse, this is in the context of discussing a concept of ancient familial lines going back to ancient civilisations which retain within them the kernel of hideous cults of barbaric ancient gods (settle down, QAnon qultists, this is fiction). Whilst there’s ways of depicting this theme which don’t open the door to awful racist implications, directly saying that they have been referred to as “gypsies” over the years and depicting them as people from Foreign Lands who have infiltrated well-heeled American society in order to overthrow Western civilisation, which is basically what happens here, is highly dubious.

It gets even more dubious when Chappell draws a comparison between the situation here (the member of the secret family here has gained employment as the live-in maid to some WASPish aristocrat, the implication being that they are banging and his father and grandfather have banged maids from that family – or the same maid refreshing her look every so often – for generations) and the situation of plantations in the antebellum south where, according to Chappell, sometimes the master would take a slave woman as his concubine, put his wife aside, and allow his new lover to rule over the plantation, a situation which invariably led to the ruination of the plantation.