Shining Moon Episode 19: Lovecraftian and Weird

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 19. With me today are Alicia Hilton, Kenneth Hite, and Dawn Vogel to discuss the topic of Lovecraftian and Weird Fiction. Do you have to be Lovecraftian to be weird? What *is* weird, and how do we go beyond the tropes that Lovecraft and his immediate successors set for us. Let’s get started with some introductions!

Alicia Hilton's website is https://aliciahilton.com. Follow her on Twitter @aliciahilton01 and Bluesky @aliciahilton.bsky.social. 

Kenneth Hite is available at kennethhite.bsky.social.

Dawn Vogel's website is historythatneverwas.com or you can reach her at Blue Sky/Mastodon @historyneverwas.

Links to stories mentioned in this episode:

 http://www.mirrordancefantasy.com/2018/03/tarnish.html

https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-issue-62/issue-62-stories/dissolved-in-some-ineffable-tide

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:02.722)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 19. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. With me today are Alicia Hilton, Kenneth Hite, and Dawn Vogel to discuss the topic of Lovecraftian and weird fiction. Do you have to be Lovecraftian to be weird? What is weird and how do we go beyond the tropes that Lovecraftian is immediate successors set for us? Let's get started with some introductions. Alicia Hilton is an author, editor, arbitrator, professor, and former FBI special agent. She believes in angels and demons, magic and monsters.

Her work has appeared in Akashic Books, Creepy Podcasts, Daily Science Fiction, Miss Alexia, Neon Space and Time, Unnerving, The Starring, the year's best hardcore horror, volumes four, five, six, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Her website is EliteHTPS, AliciaHilton.com. Follow her on Twitter at aliciahilton01 and bluesky at aliciahilton at bluesky.social. Welcome back, Alicia! We're changing gears heavily from poetry last week. Are you ready for this?

Alicia Hilton (01:10.358)
I am ready.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12.338)
awesome! Kenneth Hite has designed, written, or co-authored 100 plus role-playing books, including Gurp's Infinite Worlds Trail of Cthulhu, the Dragula Drossier, Night's Black Agents Bubble Gum Shoe, which I love the name, I have to check this out at some point, and Vampire the Mesquerade fifth edition. His other works include the two-volume Tour de Lovecraft, Cthulhu 101, The Thrill of Dracula, Cthulhu Wars, and the Nasia Call for Osprey. the Lost in Lovecraft column for Weird Tales, and an annotated edition of Chambers, The King in Yellow, and Four Laugh Crafty and Children's Books. Half of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast, he lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and his non-Lovecraftian wife, Sheila. Welcome back, Ken. I look forward to feisty and well-substantiated ideas from you once more.

Kenneth Hite (02:05.095)
Well, we'll try and swap those off.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:09.166)
Heheheh

Kenneth Hite (02:13.896)
It's great to be back.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:13.978)
I'm sorry?

Kenneth Hite (02:16.903)
I was I was saying it's great to be back. Sorry. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:20.17)
Oh, it's wonderful to have you again. And this is a topic on which I know very little, so I'm looking to be educated today. So Dawn Vogel has written for children, teens and adults spanning genres, places and time periods. She is a member of the SFWA and Codex writers. She lives in Seattle with her awesome husband and fellow author, Jeremy Zimmerman and their cats. Visit her at historythatneverwas.com or on blue sky slash mastodon at history that never was. Welcome back Dawn.

Kenneth Hite (02:26.155)
Hmm

Dawn Vogel (02:47.393)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:50.446)
It's wonderful to have all three of you here. I'm gonna get started by saying that I have sort of a tangled history with Lovecraft because when I was in college, 20, going on 30 years ago now, not to date myself here, everybody was talking about Lovecraft and I was like, okay, fine, I will read some of this stuff. And I read it in an unannotated version, which is a terrible way to get into anything because you don't have the... the apparatus around it. And so I was reading in a vacuum and I looked at it and I went, well, that was weird. And I set it down and I didn't think about it until everybody, it just blew up in the early aughts and the early teens of the century. And it became this thing that this armature of other people's ideas as they worked on it and permutated it and made it even more than it was before.

So I've learned more about Lovecraft from what other people have written than from Lovecraft himself, I think, which is a weird position to be in. So I'm going to start by asking what makes a story weird, not Lovecraftian per se, because that's the mythos, but weird. It's a slippery category and one that I have real trouble defining for myself. So I'm looking for insight from all of you.

and I'm going to start at the top of my alphabetical order with Alicia Hilton. What makes something weird?

Alicia Hilton (04:22.286)
Most of what I write, I would categorize as weird. I love to blend genres. So I mean, whether you call it cross genre or weird, I define weird fiction as blending at least two genres, usually more than two genres together, twisting tropes, taking the characters in unexpected places. So you're subverting expectations.

When you think about new weird, also doing it in kind of a modern way in terms of like, who are the centers, who are the characters that are at the center? In some of my weird fiction, I very like briefly might have a low crafty element, you know, like with Savage's Anonymous, there's Cthulhu briefly appears. But in those stories, I still change things in that oftentimes the main character is female.

which is not something you see in Lovecraft's work. And sometimes the character is a lesbian too. So that's really out there and different. And so I am essentially making a little bit of a nod or sometimes a jab at Lovecraft. And sometimes I'm doing it in terms of getting inspiration. I've used the moon beast, which is like a Lovecraft character in two different.

stories of mine. But I blended that, like one of them recently also has Mothra and Godzilla in it. So, you know, it's a strange combination and sometimes I'll use some humor. But oftentimes I blend science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction, mystery, romance, queer romance, you know, I will blend things together. That's what I like to do. That's the way that my mind works, is that I

Deborah L. Davitt (05:59.267)
Hahaha!

Alicia Hilton (06:20.842)
come up with strange ideas and then I take them off in tangents and my brain just goes where it goes.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:29.494)
I'm gonna have a quick follow-up since you specifically said that weird is blending genres. How does that differ from slipstream or does it?

Alicia Hilton (06:34.335)
Mm-hmm.

Alicia Hilton (06:37.598)
Well, I think that slipstream, I think as weird as pushing slipstream further. You know, weird is weirder. That's how I would define it. As weird as, call it weird for a reason, it's weird.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:44.884)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:52.43)
All right, I'm gonna move over to Ken, since he's next to my alphabetical order that I try to adhere to make things fair here. You tend to write more Lovecraftian than weird, but if you were going to make a definitional shift between the two, would you define it the same way that Alicia did or would you have another angle on it?

Kenneth Hite (06:59.281)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (07:15.743)
I mean, part of my take, first of all, almost all of these things are things that were made up either by the second or third best writer in a genre to pretend that they were the same as the first best cyberpunk. Being the classic example that Bruce Sterling invented cyberpunk so he could claim that he and William Gibson were doing the same thing. And Sterling's great, but he's no William Gibson.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:30.316)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:37.315)
Hahaha!

Alicia Hilton (07:37.994)
Hehehe

Kenneth Hite (07:39.255)
And that happened with steampunk that happened with a bunch of these genres. So I think that a lot of slipstream or the new weird or whatever is the same shtick happening either by writers or editors. And in fairness, when Lovecraft was writing, he was writing for a magazine called Weird Tales, primarily that existed because it wanted to sort of say, we're our writers. Seabury Quinn is the same as Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Mackin, the people you might've heard of.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:40.32)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:56.552)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (08:08.647)
So with that sort of genre theory structure in our mind, I would say that to Lovecraft, the weird meant horror that was neither physical horror, like I'm attacked by a bear or psychological horror. Like I'm gonna go crazy and wall a guy up in the wall, like Edgar Allan Poe. That the weird has to come from outside, that there's some supernatural paranormal, whatever you wanna call it.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:20.327)
Mm-hmm.

Dawn Vogel (08:30.445)
the

Deborah L. Davitt (08:31.461)
Hahaha

Kenneth Hite (08:37.847)
aspect to it. And that was Lovecraft's sort of definition of the weird as opposed to horror. Now I think that for me and I think that for a lot of people, including at least some portion of these genre anthologists, the weird is, it's similar to the notion of blending genres that

Deborah L. Davitt (08:38.956)
like that.

Kenneth Hite (09:04.307)
but I prefer to think of it as an uncanny treatment of a given genre. So the uncanny, going back to Freud, and believe me as a literary critic, he's way better than he is as a psychologist. The uncanny is the notion of something that should be familiar, but isn't. It's literally the Unheimlich in Freud, unhomelike. So you think you're home, but you're not, you're in a haunted house or something else is messed up.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:18.242)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:25.751)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:31.566)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (09:32.551)
That should be a doll, but it's talking that kind of thing. And I think that something that should be science fiction, but it feels like fantasy or it should be fantasy, but it feels like a mystery story or it should be a crime story, but it feels like horror. That's sort of where I would say if the word, the weird has a meaning or a value that I would sort of leave it to how uncanny, how uncannily are you treating genre in this case. And again,

I've got no beef. If the Vandermeers want to make a big anthology called The Weird and put all their favorite stories in, great. I love the Vandermeers. It's a great anthology. I have no, you know, dog in this fight except to say that for me to be weird, it has to be at the very least an uncanny treatment of genre. And ideally, you know, going back to Lovecraft, it should treat something that is genuinely outside and uncanny, not just this guy's got a pickaxe and also he's an elf. I'm not sure that's weird to me, you know.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:00.222)
I love this definition.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:28.247)
Yeah

Deborah L. Davitt (10:33.138)
But if he's an eldritch elf and he comes from outside our ken and from a dimensional fold we might be getting closer.

Dawn Vogel (10:35.501)
Hehehe

Kenneth Hite (10:35.529)
Yeah, I mean.

Alicia Hilton (10:36.542)
Hehehehehehe

Kenneth Hite (10:39.299)
Yeah, if Arthur Mackin could make an elf with a pickaxe terrifying, and in fact, he did in the Red Hand. It's a classic story of a guy who finds literally a ax that is used by these horrible, devolved, stunted elf creatures. And the reason they know it's weird is that the balance is all off for a human arm. And that's the sort of signifier that when you put into it, what might.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:00.046)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (11:04.223)
be a dark fantasy story by another author is suddenly a weird story because Mackenna is trying to make it uncanny in that way.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:13.51)
Interesting. We're going to move to Dawn now and you've been nodding along so I see that you're agreeing with a lot of things. Is there anything you'd like to add or shift in terms of paradigm?

Dawn Vogel (11:22.709)
Yeah, so in preparation for this, I did some quick looking at everybody's favorite source, Wikipedia, and granted, there's stuff there that not everybody will agree with, but the authors of that Wikipedia article on weird fiction argue that it is a subgenre of horror, and I disagree with that. It is often a subgenre of horror. You often get weird horror

like the new weird is also part of that and cosmic horror. And I've actually seen weird, new, weird, and cosmic horror used in an interchangeably and often in the same breath with one another to say, Oh, we're doing a weird, new, weird, cosmic horror anthology. And I'm like, okay, those could be different things, but a lot of people lump them together.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:57.18)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:05.655)
Yeah.

Dawn Vogel (12:15.233)
But I feel like weird does not necessarily only belong to horror and that you can have weird in other genres as well. And it does to me overlap some with slipstream, but it also is often surreal. And if you mash it up with humor, which is one of the things that I tend to do with weird fiction, it sort of verges on the absurdist. And so you've got, you've got, you know,

Deborah L. Davitt (12:31.468)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:40.35)
Okay.

Dawn Vogel (12:43.281)
I'm injecting this humor into something that really shouldn't be. And so you've got like this dark comedy slash absurdism. I also noticed looking at the list of authors that they give for weird fiction authors that it's basically kind of a who's who of my favorite horror authors. It's got Poe, Shelley, Stoker, Stephen King, Poppy S. Bright, who I had a weird, weird fixation with in college.

Mark Danielewski, who did House of Leaves, which is probably the least genre of the things, and then Neil Gaiman. So I was kind of like, yeah, this is the type of horror that I prefer.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:14.311)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:25.07)
Okay.

When and why do you choose to write weird but not Lovecraftian? And I'm going to bop to Halisha because you've said that this is basically your default mode. Is blending and almost making pastiche of things. So when you're just sitting down to write and you're looking at anthology calls, as we all do.

and you're inspired by a random phrase from the anthology called, why go weird? Why reach into your bag for that first?

Alicia Hilton (14:05.606)
I think that's just what I gravitate towards. I am a horror writer, but I don't usually do things like splatter punk. Sometimes my work is pretty darn violent, but I like to do strange, eerie horror, and I love to blend horror with science fiction and fantasy and dark fantasy. And so when I go weird, usually there's an eerie atmosphere. I've been told my writing is very cinematic.

I like to use all my senses. And when you use all of your senses, that allows you to really get strange. And then it's just natural to me with also my background, if you know, former law enforcement, oftentimes crime fiction comes in to my writing. And so it just, that's just the way my mind works. And I like really vivid descriptions. And when I say vivid, I don't mean just visually, I mean.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:37.867)
Mm-hmm.

Alicia Hilton (15:04.106)
Like I said, with all of the senses, and when you're using the senses, you can make something that is ordinary very strange and get even stranger and eerie and just creepy. And so that's why I gravitate towards it. I like to read that kind of work and I like to write it.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:06.4)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:26.102)
That actually makes me think of something out of Ken's essay, which we're gonna get to in a little bit, which is about the Lovecraft's use of...

Deborah L. Davitt (15:43.466)
It's a hyper space is technically what the essay is about, but he gets into really a lot of detail about the senses that Lovecraft invokes to try to create the sense of difference, the sense of othering and the environment and the colors, the sounds, everything becomes shifted and different.

And I just wanted to point that out in advance because that was an important thing that he points out in his essay. We're going to get back to that. But it is definitely a huge and seminal part of vivid writing of any sort. So I'm going to bop over to Ken. I'm going to switch the question a little bit for you because, again, I know that you tend to do a little bit more Lovecraftian than weird.

So why go to somebody else's mythos? Why write in mythos when you could be writing weird? I guess is the question for you.

Kenneth Hite (16:44.347)
Well, I mean, first of all, it's very generous of you to say I could be writing weird. That is yet to be really proven. I've written a couple of things that. Yeah, I've written a couple of things that wind up in game books that are not Lovecraftian explicitly. They might be qualified as weird, but I go to Lovecraft because I'm I love the structure, the architecture of the mythos that he made.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:51.699)
I really think that you absolutely could.

Kenneth Hite (17:11.675)
I don't think that myth is done talking to modern human beings. I think it's actually in many unfortunate ways more relevant than it was in 1928 when he made it up. So I feel like going to the Lovecraftian well, it's, I think we talked about this in world building. It's my principle is people already care about King Arthur. Why am I trying to get them to care about some dumb imaginary king that I have to make up?

Deborah L. Davitt (17:12.821)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:23.488)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:33.474)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (17:41.547)
People already know Cthulhu, they know Yogg-Sothoth, they know Arkham or whatever. If I can do something with that is still gripping and interesting and weird and fun and original, I should because that gets more people onloaded faster. This may be just a coward's defense of pastiche, and I, God knows, I grew up reading not just terrible Lovecraftian pastiche, but terrible Sherlock Holmes pastiche.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:46.187)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:00.875)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (18:10.123)
all kinds of awful, you know, one step above fanfic type things. In fact, it basically was fanfic. We just didn't have a three back then. We had to wait for Auto Penciler to collect it all into a paperback. But I enjoy well, enjoy maybe not the word, but I'm good at playing in Lovecraft Sandbox. And I think that you talked about, you know, people who do more Lovecraftian reading than Lovecraft reading. That's sort of the same curse that

Deborah L. Davitt (18:11.696)
Hahaha!

Dawn Vogel (18:20.009)
I'm gonna go.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:20.82)
Exactly.

Kenneth Hite (18:39.863)
falls on Dashiell Hammett who invented crime fiction, and it falls on Owen Wister who invented the Western. I mean, very few people read the Virginian. Lots of people still write and read Westerns or go see them even in the theater. So those, you know, for Lovecraft to have birthed this cultural phenomenon that is bigger than him, that's just, you know, he was.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:44.284)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:49.897)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:55.566)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:06.858)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (19:07.931)
either lucky to be there at steam engine time, or he was a seminal genius that transformed our understanding of the universe, or maybe little a, little column B, who can say? So I think that Lovecraft built a mythology of such a raw power and evocativeness that it's the same, you know, if I wrote a really great classical adventure story, I would have Ares and Zeus and Dionysus and Hermes in it, because that's...

Deborah L. Davitt (19:37.344)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (19:38.195)
that's relevant to that setting and that story and those people that rather than make up my own gods that wouldn't mean as much to anyone, including me, quite frankly.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:49.01)
Okay, that is absolutely fair and makes complete sense. Uh, Dawn, you write both weird and Lovecraftian. How do you change gears between them and what makes you reach for one over the other in any given circumstance?

Kenneth Hite (19:51.231)
Thanks for watching!

Dawn Vogel (20:07.605)
So I would say I write a lot more weird than Lovecrafty, and I've done both. But I feel like I write a lot more weird because, like I mentioned, the various names that are listed on the weird fiction page, that's where a lot of my formative reading really came from, is reading those authors at an age where my brain was just soaking up all of that. And so when I turn to writing, it

Deborah L. Davitt (20:33.013)
Mm-hmm.

Dawn Vogel (20:36.497)
makes sense that that's where a lot of my inspiration came from. And I just think also that's just kind of the way my brain works. It just always wants to play in the weird part of the world and the inexplicable and just it's what I enjoy. So it's what I write.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:58.678)
Again, perfectly fair. I'm going to start at the bottom and I'm going to start with Dawn on this one. When you do use the mythos, what do you do to add, what do you add to the story to make it your own take on it? And this is obviously something that all of you are going to have lots to say about. So everybody think about it. But Dawn, you're on the spot.

Dawn Vogel (21:20.817)
Okay, so to me, part of my answer is actually an answer to another question that you wanted to ask us about what do we do when we're writing in the Lovecraftian world when Lovecraft's own writing is sort of so racist, sexist, all those things. And so what I do a lot of the...

Deborah L. Davitt (21:41.454)
That there are, he was a product of his times, let's just say.

Dawn Vogel (21:44.585)
Yes, yes. But what I like to do is similar to what Alicia said earlier about making, you know, putting in a female main character, putting in a queer female main character, putting in characters of color. Anything that would make old Lovecraft roll over in his grave, that is what I like to add to the Lovecraftian mythos.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:05.074)
Okay, all right, fair enough. Ken, I'm gonna ask you the same question because obviously this is a place where you play a lot. When you're taking the mythos and you're trying to make it your own take, when you're trying to exist in his space, how do you go about making it your own?

Kenneth Hite (22:29.771)
I mean, part of it is the notion of the story is still the thing that the writer, in this case me, comes up with. I'm not just doing, oh, it's Whisper in Darkness, but in Wyoming instead of Vermont, I'm doing a different story with different characters in the Lovecraftian universe. There are Migo, there may even be a weird record that has strange clues on it, but the goal is to deploy that.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:40.97)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:46.626)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (22:59.139)
setting material broadly written for its own plot and with its own characters. If I'm, you know, borrowing even aspects of Lovecraft's setting, I try and change up the specific setting as it applies to the story to the extent that it's valuable to. And so I move it, it's not in Archimedes, it's in Vienna or whatever. And so the, you know, part of the great thing about the mythos for me though is that the mythos exists in all space and time. So if you want to write a Regency

Deborah L. Davitt (23:15.431)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:19.05)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (23:26.811)
you could do a Regency romance that happens to be connected to the Cthulhu mythos and maybe, you know, Mr. Darcy's descended from some fairly unsavory serpent people from back in Robert E. Howard times or whatever, right? But you can do that and play whatever kind of story you wanted and then add that gravitas and that terror that comes out of Lovecraft by judiciously deploying his concepts and

Alicia Hilton (23:40.222)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (23:51.041)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (23:54.303)
a couple of his proper names to signpost things. No one, well, I shouldn't say no one, but we should not. It's bad habit. It's eating ice cream out of the tub to just want to list off all the books we can think of and all the gods we can think of and go to that sort of Lynn Carter well or to, you know, make up our own God and then have all the other gods say, gosh, you know, you're just the best God ever. You're just on the same team as us.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:14.254)
I'm out.

Kenneth Hite (24:23.091)
That's the same, you know, Mary Sue Cthulhu mythos. And it's so common. Brian Lumley is maybe the worst, best, whatever I want to say, example of that. But I would like to tell my own story, but just within that mythology and within that structure. And that's the point again, like I said, of using Lovecraft. So the things that I'm changing, and they might be in the, you know, the sense of a non-

Deborah L. Davitt (24:24.403)
Mary Sue God. We can't have that.

Kenneth Hite (24:50.923)
classically Lovecraftian, um, uh, neuro-aesthetic academic narrator. Um, but one of the things about Lovecraft that I think is interesting compared to say, Robert E. Howard is that his characters, his white male academic, uh, characters all suffer horribly for believing what Lovecraft believed. Um, Robert E. Howard's self inserts are all Superman and they get away with stuff. Uh, Lovecraft, you know, he owns it. He's like, yeah, absolutely.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:12.702)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:16.359)
Yeah

Kenneth Hite (25:21.179)
my guy is going to set himself on fire or drown himself off the coast of Massachusetts or be driven, you know, probably murdered by, you know, by a by a globe spanning cult because he's me because he's my self-insert. And that's and that's wild to think that he does that. It's the opposite of, you know, it's like if everyone on A over three were inserting themselves with the yeoman that gets killed on the ship instead of the yeoman, the date Spock.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:29.858)
Horribly mad.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:34.358)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:38.931)
Yeah, that's a great point.

Kenneth Hite (25:50.163)
You know, they beam down on the planet in the red shirt and get mutilated. So it's just a wild universe that Lovecraft characters exist in. And so when you're changing them up, I mean, I admired the ballad of Black Tom as much as anybody. But I said, I'm not sure that, you know, I'm a doughy white guy. What do I know? But I'm like, I'm pretty sure that I would be happy to let, you know, a bunch of, you know, white guys go get eaten by Cthulhu and never meet them at all.

Dawn Vogel (25:50.605)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (25:51.234)
Hahaha!

Kenneth Hite (26:20.871)
So I'm not, you know, everyone writes who they write and people can get in the heads of some characters or not in the heads of other characters, but it just always intrigues me that, you know, representation demands that, you know, women and minorities also be horribly murdered by the mythos. I feel like that's a wild direction to go. I mean, it's fine. It creates some great stories, certainly, but it's an interesting spin on it. So, I mean,

Deborah L. Davitt (26:29.383)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (26:48.923)
Like Lovecraft, I'm a white male academic, so my characters wind up having a little of that same flavor to it, which is either me being lazy or me being a throwback, depending on what you want to say.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:57.346)
They do say write what you know.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:04.254)
Alicia, when you use the mythos, obviously you've made some glancing cameos in Savages Anonymous, which we'll be discussing later to Cthulhu. When you use the mythos, what do you do to make the story your own take on it? And how do you move through the space that...

divorced of its historical context. How do you remove the historical context and make it your own instead?

Alicia Hilton (27:35.998)
Well, a few of my stories were inspired a little bit by Lovecraft. The one I sold this week, actually, there are two main characters. One is a god and happened to be inspired by something in the mythos. And I changed the god to female. And so this god has the power to destroy and to create. And she is a mother figure. And I even call her a celestial mother.

And then my main female character, I mean, my main human character is a woman who happens to be a lesbian. And she has a genetic mutation. And I have a genetic mutation myself, so sometimes I give characters genetic mutations. And so I have these two main characters, one who is non-human, one who is human. They're both female. And I don't reference Lovecraft or borrow any, you know, like specific

aspects of the mythos, but it was sort of a touchstone, you know, a little bit of an inspiration for me when I was writing the story. And originally, I didn't even have the god figure, and then I realized there's something missing in this, and then I wanted to have two different points of view, and so I thought, oh, it wouldn't be interesting to start with this god figure, and so that's how the story starts with the god figure who is, you know,

Deborah L. Davitt (28:44.629)
Mm-hmm.

Alicia Hilton (29:01.314)
often another galaxy in the beginning of the story and then comes to earth and chaos ensues.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:08.502)
What I'm hearing is that there's basically a dialectic going on between the modern writers and Lovecraft. Sometimes it is a veiled conversation and sometimes it is a direct conversation, but it remains a dialogue. Part of that armature of stories around the mythos, it just grows year by year.

just massive at this point. So when you're first encountering it, it's very intimidating to try to cut your way into this and figure out where in the conversation you're starting, which thread you're pulling on, what is connected to and everything like that. So, yeah, we're going to switch to talking about stories. And I know that Alicia has to go early on us. So we're going to concentrate on her stories first. And then we're going to move to Ken and Dawn.

and that'll make things fair. It's just that we're gonna be talking primarily with Alicia first. All right, so, Mersa Me was published in 2019 in the anthology, Rigor Morbid, Lest Ye Become. It has been reprinted three times in the year's best hardcore horror volume five, best indie speculative fiction volume three, and Boneyard Soup, which is amazing. A story to be reprinted that many times means that it's got legs.

from the perspective of rather surprisingly sapient bacteria as it goes through a cycle of existence starting as an infected rat bite and then transmitting through other means. This is a short vicious horror story that definitely deserves the accolades that it's received. How is it weird?

Alicia Hilton (30:54.239)
Well, for one...

Deborah L. Davitt (30:54.774)
How does it blend? How does it blend? How does it, how is this not just, you know, regular horror, regular science fiction?

Alicia Hilton (31:02.91)
Well, it has a big implication. It's not a small thing. This tiny little bacteria could become the end of the world. You never know where it's gonna go next. And it is gleefully spreading as the tale goes on and infecting people. And I'm using my dark humor, which I like to use sometimes in my stories. And so we have horror, we have some science fiction with the aspect of how

Deborah L. Davitt (31:14.143)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:20.711)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:25.193)
Oh yes.

Alicia Hilton (31:32.746)
that bacteria spreads. And we have the sort of cosmic implication of you don't know how bad this is gonna get and how far reaching it is going to get. And it's different than I at the time had never read a story that had a point of view of not just a non-human being, but bacteria as the point of view character. And I wrote it before COVID and it was published before COVID.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:53.136)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (31:58.984)
Hmph.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:59.808)
Yeah.

Alicia Hilton (32:02.834)
And then COVID came along and I think that's one of the reasons the story got so much in the way of legs because here you have a story about, you know, I had no idea there would ever be a pandemic, but it's kind of our world.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:20.614)
All right, we're going to move to your next one, which is Savage's Anonymous, which was published in 2022 in the anthology, Hybrids, Misfits, Monsters, and Other Phenomena. Zapana? Am I saying that right? Zapana is an alien with two heads, one in the place where humans keep theirs, and the other embedded in her chest. She eats emotions, which is similar to another story of yours that

Alicia Hilton (32:33.352)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:45.03)
We read for the, I believe the Dark Horror and Dark Fantasy episode, which struck me as being, I found a tie. There we go. She eats emotions, particularly negative ones, and is the head of Savage's Anonymous, a support group for aliens, mutants, and other kin. During a routine meeting discussing murders and HR violations and marching on Congress, a human boy's ghost enters asking for justice and she absorbs him, and he becomes her th-

Third head as she works to see justice done on the sweatshop that had enslaved him and his family The only met lot nods to the Lovecraftian mythos are the references to Cthulhu It was portrayed as being just another alien one who can be collegial so long as you treat him with respect But this is a really weird story it goes Multiple different levels of weird it has a strange off-kilter viewpoint than I would say see in any regular science fiction or fantasy

And it definitely blends multiple different genres all at once. And when I thought it was going to stop, it kept going in a different direction. And I thought it was going to stop and then went in a different direction. And it was not conventionally structured at all. So that was it was a really fascinating read. Where did you draw inspiration for this story?

Alicia Hilton (34:07.77)
You know, that's an interesting question because sometimes I don't even know where stuff comes from. I have a really weird imagination. And when I was writing this, I actually was working on it before I saw the anthology call. And as I started working on it, the story got stranger and stranger. And you know, I changed the main character. I made her weirder.

you know, the aspect of the absorbing the other bodies wasn't there. And so I just kept layering it. And one of the things I wanted at the core of the story was emotional resonance. Because a story doesn't have impact unless you feel something about the characters. You don't have to like them. You could dislike them, but I wanted the reader to feel something. And I wanted the main character to be changed and really feel something and not just be changed physically.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:40.452)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:47.756)
Yeah.

Alicia Hilton (35:04.478)
but to have a change in her relationship with the other extraterrestrials and the mutants, and also a change in her relationship with humans, which in the beginning of the story is kind of hostile. And then you have this metamorphosis where she's actually now going to be part human herself. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:13.759)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:23.018)
Yeah, exactly. That was a transformative moment. It created dynamism in the character, and I really liked it. It was just not where I was expecting the story to go at all. So you subverted expectations on multiple levels, and I really enjoyed that.

Alicia Hilton (35:40.587)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:41.218)
Finally, we've got Devouring Sin at Serenity Pine Cemetery, which will be published November in Space and Time, issue 145, fall, winter of 2023. So everybody should be on the lookout for this. Eleanor is an extra galactic visitor who believes that her physical gifts were given to her by a creator to devour the sins of the dead until she's unmasked as an alien and taken to be experimented on. Then she undergoes a metamorphosis and turns her powers against her captors, eventually escaping, which is.

really, really trying not to spoil every detail of the story for the listeners. But again, you've subverted expectations with in terms of genre and in terms of structure. Again, the story goes places that I wasn't expecting it to go. I'm used to there being one turn in the story, maybe two, there was at least three that I counted. So yeah.

This strikes me as not being, it's definitely, it's horror from a cosmic source and science fiction. What makes this weird fiction in your definition of things? Because it is not as slipstreamy as the previous story we discussed. It is not as genre packed. So what makes this one weird?

Alicia Hilton (37:03.838)
To me it's weird because like you say, you have cosmic horror, you have science fiction, you also have some fantasy aspects in the fact that she is another being, and heavy crime fiction aspects because that's why she is unmasked and that is experimented on. So we have crime fiction and there are various different types of horror. There's body horror too.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:24.052)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:32.789)
Yes.

Alicia Hilton (37:33.066)
And we also have different layers of otherness with the hostility of the police and the corrections officers towards her, yet a corrections officer who does treat her like a person with some feelings. So it's not just like cookie cutter characters where I'm assigned to stereotyping. I don't like stereotyping people. I wanted to have different relationships. And so.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:50.317)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:59.467)
Yeah.

Alicia Hilton (38:02.81)
I'm folding all of that together and I'm unveiling things as the story goes and adding more layers, peeling back like the onion, essentially.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:14.502)
Right? Thank you very much for your time. I know you have to go early, so you can hang out for as long as you like and listen to everybody else. But when you go, I'll just wave and you can wave back and it'll be great. Thank you so much for having been on.

Alicia Hilton (38:26.747)
Okay.

Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:31.862)
All right, we're going to move to Ken and Dawn's stories now. We're going to start with Ken's story, which is Paperclip, which appeared in Delta Green Extraordinary Renditions, which was published by Arc Dream Publishing in 2015. And this short story set just after World War II, an American librarian who is a vowed job it is to keep books safe is looking for a book, the Gourl

And the way to find it is to find the man who was leading the Nazis towards using its power, Herman Mulder. The nameless librarian has a cover identity that's worn to thread-bearers. He's in a race against time and a race against a Soviet agent who also seeks the book. Except the Soviet agent is filled with the mental energies of an otherworldly being and a Herman Mulder, too, is more than he appears to be. I've got lots of questions about this.

Kenneth Hite (39:24.954)
All right.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:26.662)
It is set in the Delta Green setting, which is a game setting based on the Lovecraftian mythos, except our heroes actually have the option of fighting back in Delta Green, which is one thing that I love about it. They have the option of fighting back rather than merely going mad. Is this what draws you to Delta Green as a setting or is it more the alternate history aspect that draws you to right in this space?

Kenneth Hite (39:50.035)
Well, the Delta Green setting appealed to me first as a game designer because it's solved, not so much can we shoot Cthulhu. I mean, every 12 year old who played Call of Cthulhu has been using Tommy guns forever, but by answering the question, why are we all going into this haunted house? And the answer is, it's the government, it's paying you to inspect it or rather not paying you, but you are expected to do it. Riffing off Lovecraft's

Deborah L. Davitt (40:04.46)
Uh-huh.

Kenneth Hite (40:20.227)
a story, the shadow of Rinsmith at which at the end, the FBI and the Coast Guard come in and wreck the town of Rinsmith and clear up that problem. And what John Tynes, Dennis Detweller, and Scott Glancy did when they made up Delta Green is say, well, that can't have been the only thing they ever did. They didn't just say, well, done and dusted, no more mythos. There obviously was an ongoing program and that program is what became Delta Green. And the game was a brilliant.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:38.801)
Yeah!

Kenneth Hite (40:48.075)
Call of Cthulhu supplement originally now it's its own game that really answered that question. Why are you investigating as opposed to just being a weird collection of hobos and dilettantes the way that classic Call of Cthulhu was? So the notion that you can shoot back, I think it's interesting because that is a huge part of the Delta Green fandom and a lot of the Delta Green experience. And of course, the authors of Delta Green

Deborah L. Davitt (40:51.881)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:00.098)
Hahaha.

Kenneth Hite (41:17.619)
They are much more Lovecraftian purists than they are Robert E. Howard fight back types. And so the current edition of the game leans much more heavily into the sort of psychological disintegration of doing this work, taking from the actual sort of psychological pressures on espionage, intelligence professionals, first responders, cops, people who have to

Deborah L. Davitt (41:23.713)
Uh-huh.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:33.518)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:43.839)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (41:44.287)
deal with stuff that the rest of us don't over and over and over and over again and compartmentalize what you're allowed to say and what you're not and the kind of psychological damage that does. So they're trying to get back to a purest Lovecraft stance, all of which is to say that what I love about Delta Green is that you say alternate history I would prefer secret history.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:49.195)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:09.333)
Okay.

Kenneth Hite (42:14.387)
you know, just, you know, 10 degrees left of our universe, right, that if we knew more, if we had the right clearance, we would find out about, you know, not just the UFOs, but about, you know, the government program to fight Migo or Deep Ones or Cthulhu or whatever. And I think that that's, I wrote a whole book for Osprey publishing on that called The Cthulhu Wars, which is sort of a pretend military history of the US versus the Cthulhu mythos.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:27.911)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (42:34.402)
Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (42:43.899)
And so that is just meat and drink to my particular, you know, brain or interests or whatever you want to call it. So I think that's what really draws me to Delta Green, both to create games in it and also to create fiction in it.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:02.93)
Right? Love the answer. I particularly admired how immersive the story is in its historical context. How much of the history here is real and how much is secret? How much is invented? Because it felt so real reading it.

Kenneth Hite (43:15.917)
Um.

Kenneth Hite (43:20.711)
Well, that's, uh, this is something that I learned from, uh, reading Tim powers, the American fantasy author, which is that you make up as little as you have to, to explain, to, to move the story into that fictive space that you want it. So every detail in the story, except for the explicit Cthulhu mythos is either historical fact, like, um, uh, they

Deborah L. Davitt (43:26.09)
Yes, love him.

Kenneth Hite (43:49.499)
All the quotes are real, for example. I made up none of those quotes. The characters are all real, except for Glukhov, the Russian, and the librarian. Everyone else, I think I may have made up the OSS guy, but he's like every other OSS guy. Everyone else actually existed historically. It's just what was going on with Kalchenbrenner? What did he think he was doing? Why did he hide out in a mansion at the bottom of Dead Mountain instead of...

Deborah L. Davitt (43:52.642)
Oh!

Deborah L. Davitt (43:59.859)
Okay.

Kenneth Hite (44:18.931)
go to Argentina or do something useful. Project Leo probably isn't historically accurate, but I didn't make it up. Other people made it up. So I sort of said, all right, if Ernst Kaltenbrunner in between running the Gestapo is also running a secret occult program, how would he do it given the stuff that he has access to? And that's what I made up about hiding it inside all of these archives at Ruscha.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:30.082)
Hehehehehehe

Kenneth Hite (44:49.291)
Um, or an Arsha. And so, yeah, that's the fun, right? Is, you know, anyone could just make up a story. The real fun is to find as much as you can about a setting and a place in time and say, all right, what if the mythos did it? And I did the same thing with Dracula dossier. What if Dracula did it?

Deborah L. Davitt (44:55.069)
Oh yes!

Deborah L. Davitt (45:06.306)
Yep.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:10.678)
I really appreciate the way you've moved into the space and you've used the puzzle pieces and you've found ways to connect them in an interesting and intricate ways. Yeah, I do love Tim. I do love me some Tim Powers. I started reading him in college as a result of a vampire literature course. And that was the stress of her regard.

Kenneth Hite (45:35.147)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:37.39)
and that is just a wonderful movement through the romantics. And I will get totally off topic if you let me. So we're gonna get back on topic and I'm gonna ask you one more question, which is about humor, because Alicia mentioned humor and obviously Dawn talks about humor as well as something that comes into their take on the Cthulhu mythos. There is quite a bit of dry humor in your story.

Kenneth Hite (45:43.354)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:04.898)
in spite of the fast pace and deathly increasing tension, all of it is dry and sidelong. And I laughed out loud when the librarian is able to take advantage of the desperation of a second rate author, because we've all been there. Is it a hallmark of yours to deflate tension this way for a moment? Do you frequently use humor in the rest of your fiction work or was this just a special occasion?

Kenneth Hite (46:32.619)
I feel like a lot of that is just me, it's how I write and how I think. I certainly don't think, oh, things are getting scary, I need to crack a joke here. What I think is, well, my character would have that sort of smart ass response to Sukup, right? That he would say, all right, clearly this is what's going on. Or I would make the observation, the notion sort of the story itself is a bit of a black.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:43.095)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:48.98)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (47:00.391)
joke, but again, Lovecraft's stories are blackly humorous continuously. The Mountains of Madness, which is about us dissecting the aliens and then they wake up and dissect us. It's very funny. I mean, dark, but funny. And so the notion that the sort of the secret power that we have over the great races that they can't swim because they're cone beings. Once I thought that up as the ending, it's like I sort of wrote it to that.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:02.178)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:05.974)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:27.239)
Hahaha!

Kenneth Hite (47:31.259)
that joke, but it's also, you know, ideally, as you say, it's meant to be a sort of a tense thriller. How can this poor Schmo, even if he is, you know, read into the secret world, how can he defeat the great race of Yif? How can he stop one of these horrible Lovecraftian monsters? And when I figured out that sort of, you know, vulnerability, that sort of dictated a lot of the story. And so some of that meant, yeah, I had to sort of play up

lead to that point with some humor and some observation. I had to make the, the librarian couldn't be from, you know, Oklahoma. He had to be from Massachusetts now. So he could plausibly be, you know, a swimmer from way back. But all of that sort of element is, it's more how I think, or at least how characters that I write would think, because I'm not a good enough writer to really go outside my own head. Even when I wrote,

Deborah L. Davitt (48:02.436)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:16.159)
Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (48:29.879)
my sort of female obsessive Phantom of the Opera fan in my story, La Musique de l'Henoui, which is Phantom of the Opera crossed over with the King in yellow. I was writing my own sort of weird obsessive fan tendencies into her as much as I could because, you know, I couldn't count on having the psychology of a Canadian 40 something woman

at my fingertips, but I could absolutely count on having the psychology of a weird obsessive superfan at my fingertips.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:06.26)
Ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (49:10.287)
Oh, I really, once we got to the point.

Kenneth Hite (49:12.075)
And so other characters get all the jokes in that story. I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:18.586)
No, I was just gonna say that once we got to the point where he was drowning this creature that was inside the body of the human, I flashed back to all the moments where he was doing the odd things with his hands and oh, that's why he was doing crab people with his hands. I thought it was he was trying to make Mystic Sigils. No, no, it was crab people. Okay, and make perfect sense all of a sudden in that moment. So yeah.

Kenneth Hite (49:23.739)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (49:32.618)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (49:35.811)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (49:40.668)
Right.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:46.15)
Not going to say it was Dostoevsky-ish because when I got to the end of the Brothers Karamazov, there's a moment where you flash back to every single moment previously in the book and you go, oh shit, oh, it totally makes sense now. But there was definitely a moment where everything made sense.

Kenneth Hite (49:48.494)
Ha!

Kenneth Hite (49:59.463)
Well, spoiler alert, I don't think I'm ever going to write Dostoevsky.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:08.906)
It was six cents-ish then. How would you take that?

Kenneth Hite (50:10.311)
Yeah, right. I'll take that. I mean, I can be Sean a lot on a good day, sure.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:16.422)
Okay. All right, we're going to move to Dawn with one of her stories, which is going to... I was flashing to King in yellow through this one because of the yellow outfit that she's wearing. And I'm not sure you were going for that or not, but we'll talk about the story. This is Tarnish published at Mirror Dance in 2018. Adelaide wants nothing more than to become the queen at the ball held by the veiled prophet in the middle-class burg of St. Louis.

She's willing to do anything to ensure her fair chance of being the queen of the pageant until the Veiled Prophet is revealed to be something other than human. By no lesser a personage than the First Lady, Mrs. Cleveland herself, caught between campaign stops with her husband. Adelaide manages to thwart the Veiled Prophet's intention to open a door between worlds, driving the unearthly personage out of the man's body as she does so.

but apparently haunted by what she's seen in the prophet's mirror, a vision of another world with other stars. She enrolls in an astronomy course at a local university determined to find her own way between worlds. The note that I read at the end of the story suggests that you found inspiration for this very other worldly story in a very mundane place. Would you like to talk about that?

Dawn Vogel (51:28.617)
Sure. So I'm from St. Louis, Missouri originally, like the character in my story. And the Veiled Prophet Parade is a real historical and up into this day, they don't call it Veiled Prophet anymore, but it's been going in St. Louis since 1878. And it is based on

Dawn Vogel (51:54.229)
an Irish author's writing, I cannot remember the author's name, but the story is Lala Rook. Thank you. And so the way that this originally came about is that my husband, who is not from St. Louis, was back home with me for a holiday and we were looking at a book about St. Louis that my mom had and we came across the Veiled Prophet thing and he is like, what on earth?

Kenneth Hite (51:59.559)
Thomas Moore. Yeah.

Dawn Vogel (52:21.029)
is this. And so mom and I explained it to him. And as I'm explaining it to him, I'm like, I can see the King in yellow connection because King in yellow is one of my favorite parts of the mythos. And so I decided that I was going to write a story in which the person who was the veiled prophet was also an agent of the King in yellow. The involvement with Mrs. Cleveland.

is semi-historical in that Grover Cleveland and his wife were in St. Louis during the Veiled Prophet events in 1887, and it is the one year that they did not choose a queen. And so I took that element, paired it with the King in yellow, and voila, there is my story.

Kenneth Hite (53:14.123)
Mm-hmm. It's your Tim Powers moment right there.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:15.254)
I love this. All right, so obviously my next question, I'm sorry, you were about to say something, Ken?

Kenneth Hite (53:21.851)
I just said that's the Tim Powers moment right there. You look for those breaks in the pattern and you say, I'll bet that's carcosa.

Dawn Vogel (53:26.058)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:27.191)
Yes.

Dawn Vogel (53:29.084)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:31.79)
All right, so that already answers my next question, which was which aspects of the Lovecraftian mythos had the greatest influence in writing the story? You've already answered that. We'll move on to a different story of yours, which is hashtag TPE, which you're gonna be, I think, reading to us from in a little bit.

Dawn Vogel (53:47.725)
I'm not actually going to read that one. I'm going to read the third of my stories. Because as I realized, hashtag TPE has Latin in it, and I was not prepared to pronounce the Latin today.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:51.899)
Okay, then I will...

Kenneth Hite (53:58.719)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (54:00.746)
Okay. All right, then we'll talk about hashtag TPE instead, which came in both, it came from Miskatonic University and more recently in LOLCraft. Anthea Morrison has one real goal in life, the elusive TPE or total prospect enrollment. Her job at Miskatonic University is to get every prospect on the tour to sign on with the university, except that with her track record, the prospects keep dying.

Until today when prospective student Belladonna Waitley wants to go to the library of Miskatonic University and nothing is going to stop her. This is obviously the humorous side of weird fiction, boarding on parody of the Lovecraft mythos. Where did you get the inspiration and why humor? What pulled this out of you?

Dawn Vogel (54:52.801)
So I wrote this story for the anthology that it originally appeared in. It came from Miskatonic University, which was originally pitched as Welcome to Miskatonic University. And it was Broken Eye Books, yeah, Broken Eye Books, who I know the editor. And I don't remember if he had asked for humor specifically, but I decided that was the route I was going to take with it. And so...

Deborah L. Davitt (55:04.746)
Yes, I wrote something for that as well.

Dawn Vogel (55:19.349)
Because I spent a lot of time in academia, I was a grad student and then an employee at a university for a long time. I have a lot of academia in my brain and I find it as a good place to mine for stories. And so when I was thinking, what kind of story at Miskatonic might be hilarious? And thinking the whole idea that they, like every other university, need to recruit new students and...

Deborah L. Davitt (55:23.199)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:40.995)
Ha!

Dawn Vogel (55:48.449)
they probably have a problem with recruitment and retention given the legends of that school. And so I decided to play around with that and have a team of students working to get these prospective students enrolled. And there's a little bit of a Mean Girls aspect to it too, where one of the other campus tour guides is very much not a nice person. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (55:51.31)
Ha ha ha!

Dawn Vogel (56:16.453)
gives Anthea a lot of grief and so Anthea sort of is like, I've got to do this. If I don't do this, you know, what am I going to do next? So she just powers through it and gets lucky with the tour group she gets and not too many spoilers, but it ends up better than a lot of Lovecraftian stories would.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:19.15)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (56:41.515)
Well, I really enjoyed this one. This one was a lot of fun to read. We're going to bop back to Ken to talk about his essay, Hyperspace. This was first published in an earlier version in Weird Tales, Winter 2012. In this form, it was appeared in Tour de Lovecraft, The Destination, which was published by Atomic Overmind Press in 2021. This essay covers most of Lovecraft's oeuvre.

and takes a close look at how his view of other space went from the concept of a platonic ideal universe that overlays our own to multidimensionality that interpenetrates our universe. Lovecraft proposes different ways of accessing that higher reality that so challenges human sanity, magical, mystical, and mathematical by turns. Your concluding sentence is, in the end, hyperspace is heaven and hell simultaneously, and we are all already there.

I was really struck by this as your conclusion and is accepting this play that there is no exit, is that where madness truly lies for Lovecraftian heroes or what, where do you want us to go from there?

Kenneth Hite (57:54.675)
Well, I mean, to Lovecraft, the whole mythos is a literary symbol or a parable or whatever you want to call it about the nature of modern science. That science has demonstrated that mankind is not important, that our species will not survive, that our Earth is not protected by God or angels or anything, and that we're all just contingent blips.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:10.569)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (58:22.155)
and that nothing has any meaning because in the real world of science and atoms and geology and astronomy, we don't have any meaning, we're just an accident. We're a smudge in the edge of the universe's petri dish. And so that, yeah, and so if you crave meaning in the universe, that being forced to confront reality is what...

Deborah L. Davitt (58:22.854)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:34.136)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:37.799)
Existential horror at its finest.

Kenneth Hite (58:51.539)
drives you, you know, insane to be glib, or it means that you can't function like a regular human who goes around their life. You know, we may all have our, you know, I really love science bumper sticker, but we act like our opinions are valid. And we act like, you know, humans are important and that morality exists and all kinds of other things. But, you know, as Lovecraft says, if you were facing any of this honestly,

Deborah L. Davitt (58:51.608)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:11.65)
Hehehe

Kenneth Hite (59:20.743)
You'd know that we're all just going to die of something that we can't predict, stop or control or probably understand quite frankly. And that's the symbol of that is Cthulhu. And so hyperspace is the escaping of our sort of Euclidean universe where we think we understand cause and effect and physics to realize that the big universe is not any of that and that when you've escaped that you're

Deborah L. Davitt (59:32.167)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (59:49.859)
You know, that's all that happens is you understand that we're doomed and that's the end and yet to Lovecraft that is the real and the mythos is a mythology literally that exists to explain the universe to us and it explains Sorry, nothing and that's you know And you know, I don't I don't blame people for making it cute and darling and

Dawn Vogel (01:00:09.185)
the

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:09.727)
Yeah

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:14.347)
I'm going to pl-

Kenneth Hite (01:00:18.047)
trying to domesticate it and trying to back away from it and trying to fake themselves out about it and distract themselves with arguments about Lovecraft's pernicious racism, which is absolutely big and real, but it's not what the mythos is about. It's not why we're still arguing about his racism, for example, whereas no one cares or knows if A. Merritt was a super racist because A. Merritt did not write a myth that the...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:45.217)
Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (01:00:46.811)
the Western world is dependent upon in some sense.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:50.654)
Yeah, yeah, I was definitely wanting to make some sort of a comment about the fact that most of his contemporaries have faded and Lovecraft himself in spite of everything that we find detestable about him as a person, his ideas are so big and that they that they have a life of their own and

that's it. It's, it's a thing. And I just wanted to point that out. And I'm going to plug my own story here. I don't usually do this on the podcast, but I wrote a story in new myths this past year called dissolve in some ineffable tide, which is my take on cosmic horror. But it is definitely no mythos here, but it definitely talks about

postulating higher dimensions of physics up through the 11th or so dimension of that mathematics suggests is possible. Lovecraft was working through Einsteinian ideas struggling to reconcile them with a 19th century point of view in many respects. So he's fighting through different lenses of the 19th century versus the 20th century.

and he's trying to reconcile them in many respects and struggling with it. What do you think he'd do with notions of even higher order realities than the ones he had available to him or with quantum physics? Had he been able to receive them as possibilities? Would he have been even more struck by existentialism or would he have come to any other conclusion than what he already did?

Kenneth Hite (01:02:38.811)
I think that, and again, I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that quantum mechanics, Einstein thought quantum mechanics were too arbitrary to exist. Einstein thought there had to be a pattern and a rationality to the universe. It's why he famously said, God does not play dice with the universe, but, you know, and Schrodinger and Oppenheimer and everyone else said, well, you know, kinda. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:49.112)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:54.862)
Let's not play dice with the universe, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:03.01)
Hahaha!

Kenneth Hite (01:03:03.163)
Lovecraft would have been absolutely on board with quantum mechanics to the extent he could have understood it. He had very little math. He would have had the exact same journeyman's humanities understanding of quantum physics that I have. But he would have he would have embraced it as proving his point that the universe is arbitrary and that any pattern you see is pattern that you've created in your head. He would he would have made fun of people who

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:08.489)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:17.527)
Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (01:03:32.235)
try and reconcile quantum physics with Buddhism, which I see an awful lot of with Taoism, but he would have embraced quantum physics and he would have definitely done what he could with the sort of...

Kenneth Hite (01:03:50.863)
stream cosmology or the notion of brains, B-R-A-N-E-S, and these sort of higher dimensions. He uses higher dimensions very much as already, as I mentioned in the hyperspace essay, but to have more things to hang them on and to have more sorts of theory to play with, he would have loved that. He got the notion of dreams in the witch house from going to a lecture.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:53.439)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:02.943)
Yes he does.

Kenneth Hite (01:04:19.319)
by a Dutch physicist named Willem de Sitter who worked with Einstein. And he went and listened to that guy's lecture and he came back and he wrote dreams of the witch house because he was so charged up about it. So I feel like, you know, the more he could have sort of puzzled out of modern day physics, the more he would have liked it and he would have loved the failure of a unified theory. He would have just been stunting on Einstein all day over that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:46.036)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:49.77)
It would just would have proved him right. There is no logic. There is no order. There is no overwriting pattern. All right. We're going to go ahead and move into the reading portion of our agenda, which will be there is no I in heavenly host by Don Vogel, which appeared in the Friends Journal, which is believe it or not, a Quaker journal, which is a hell of an accomplishment to list on your resume.

Kenneth Hite (01:04:51.804)
Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (01:04:57.79)
Yep.

Dawn Vogel (01:05:17.673)
So, yeah, so this story, just a little background on this, they put out, Quaker Journal put out a call specifically looking for speculative fiction with Quaker ideals. And I am not Quaker, I was not raised Quaker, but I understood enough from friends of mine who are that I was like, sure, I'm gonna give this a shot. And specifically in their call, they asked for a coffee shop with a biblically correct angel.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:18.102)
Go ahead.

Dawn Vogel (01:05:46.377)
And so I took their idea and ran with it and the editors loved it and were like, yes, we are so glad that somebody did that. So that is the story.

*story snipped for copyright*

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:32.422)
Very nice. This is definitely more on the weird side than Lovecraftian, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. All right, we are going to go ahead and call this an episode. Next week on Shining Moon, we'll be talking about The Hustle, or how to establish your own self-publishing empire. I'll have two mystery guests who've taken vastly different paths to self-publishing success. So this promises to be an exciting and interesting conversation.

Dawn Vogel (01:11:39.582)
Absolutely.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:02.518)
Thank you both for having been on and we are out.