“Is appreciation of Lovecraft and the Mythos a Guy Thing, like the Three Stooges?” That was the beginning, a couple days back, of a lengthy conversation in a Lovecraftian group on Facebook. As far as I can tell, the editor who asked the question wasn’t setting out to irritate, enrage, depress, or offend a large number of dedicated aficionados of the Old Gent, but it happened nonetheless. As the shitstorm he inadvertently brewed up has waned, I’m still quietly boggling.
One can understand, studying tables of contents and looking back on the long run of Lovecraftian, Mythos, and generally cosmic horror, how one might come to ask if it’s just a “Guy thing.” There are, for instance, a grand total of three female Cthulhu Mythos writers listed on Wikipedia. Most of the Old Guard are or were men, and Lovecraftian fiction hasn’t historically been a place to go looking for strong women.
The problem is that this conversation happens constantly in publishing, genre and otherwise. Someone looks around and asks, in apparently willful ignorance of past discussions and the thousands and thousands of women who read and write every stripe of fiction, “what about those women?” Asking this is itself a kind of erasure: it’s staring obliviously into the face of those women and asking if they exist. Lovecraft is no longer a cult author, and readers of things Lovecraftian are no longer a coterie: from Hellboy to Hello Cthulhu to a geek President of the United States who undoubtedly knows his Cthulhu from his Yog-Sothoth, the tentacles have crept into everything.
There were a number of articulate responses in the discussion on Facebook, some polite and some caustic, but for my money, this comment by Molly Tanzer was the best:
As a new thread gets going in this community asking the tough questions like “What are women writers? Are they like… regular writers? I mean, they’re women, right? So, like, what do they write about? What’s their stuff like?”, I just don’t know what else to say. Especially as the first comment is basically “I can only think of three lady Lovecraftian horror writers!” So, awesome. Anyways, I am happy to say that I have felt welcomed and valued by the editors I’ve worked with within the Lovecraftian horror community, very much including Mike [Davis, editor of Lovecraft eZine, who did not initiate the discussion]. But this whole conversation is starting to wear me out. Apparently in 2014 women writers must still do double-duty–by which I mean, it’s not enough (for some) for us to just, like, write and publish quality Lovecraftian horror. We must do that, while enduring comments about how women don’t mythos because baby-makin’ hormones, while also taking our time to alert people to the fact we exist, AND remembering do so very, very politely so as not to offend the sensitive souls of editors who apparently don’t like to be reminded that part of their job isn’t just publishing their friends, but paying attention–actively reading what is being published by strangers and newcomers alike–trying new things and new people and new voices. Oh, and doing all that while also somehow preserving our sense of humor about life and publishing while being talked down to about how historically “masculine” means this-or-that, or Lovecraft such-and-such. Jesus. I mean, I have a degree in Gender Studies, and a Master’s in humanities that focused on history. And I write in this community. So… yeah.
Here are links if you want to do some reading. No consistency to these, really, just grabbed a bunch. I wasn’t able to find explicitly Lovecraftian/Cthulhuvian free online fiction for all of the authors listed, or wasn’t sure which to pick, and so left things as I did, which looks a little odd on the authors list. If you have suggested links about women who write Lovecraftian fiction, feel free to drop them in the comments.
Commentary
Women Who Write Lovecraft
Women at the Lovecraft Film Festival
Favorite Women in Horror
All-Female Authors Issue of Lovecraft eZine
Lovecraftian Archetypes: the eternal feminine
Joanna Russ and Lovecraftian/Mythos fiction
Authors
Caitlín R. Kiernan – Wikipedia. Amazon.
Ann K. Schwader – Interview. Story.
Elizabeth Bear – Interview. Essay. Story.
Molly Tanzer – Interview. Story.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Interview.
Gemma Files – Profile.
Lois Gresh – Collection. Interview.
Amanda Downum – Interview.
Livia Llewellyn – Interview.
Anthologies
Lovecraft Unbound
Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath
The Book of Cthulhu
The Book of Cthulhu II
New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird
Cthulhu Unbound, Vol. 2
Coming soon: the first all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, She Walks in Shadows , edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. What’s the deal with all-women Cthulhuviana? A year and a half ago, there was a fracas about whether women ever, you know, have anything to do with Lovecraft. Now that the anthology is available for pre-sale, Silvia has posted a FAQ on her website in response to recent inquiries. Check it out, and how can you not buy it with such awesome cover art? Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Table of Contents is so squamously, rugosely batrachian…
J. T. Glover 