Editorial
When we first devised the special Multiethnic issue, we thought the approach would be simple: take the New England out of Lovecraft. Our reasoning? Lovecraft’s fiction focuses on the alien experience and we sought to define what was alien in an interesting way, by travelling to different locations and using different characters than he would have used to tell a story. Lovecraft’s troubles with race and gender have been made famous in his very writing. But by raising them, he also asked questions with a variety of possible answers far beyond what he himself might have tolerated. The mark of a great writer is the universal application of his/her work and we wanted to find writers who could ask Lovecraft’s questions in new cultural contexts.
We wanted to see settings we had never seen, explore shores that had remained untouched. It was a bit more difficult than we thought it would be to get the slush moving along, but eventually, we received enough submissions that met our objective and pared them down to 13 stories and one poem, which we present here.
The mixture of writers, settings and voices is eclectic, from well-known authors such as Ekaterina Sedia and Charles R. Saunders to other, lesser-known-yet-equally-compelling storytellers. The stories are set in France, South America, India, Canada, and many more locations. The characters are as diverse as the writers, with Hmong painters and Japanese empresses caught between the lines.
These stories do not just transplant Lovecraft to another setting; they redefine and toy with what it means to be a Lovecraftian hero, to write a Lovecraftian story. We hope this issue will be a mind-bending experience, much like the angles in “Dreams in the Witch House”.
We hope it will be a fresh look at Lovecraft and the possibilities inherent in Lovecraftian fiction.
You can read these stories online or download the PDF version of our issue (contains pretty pictures!).
Many tentacles,
Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
Table of Contents
- Quoth the Cultist | Mari Ness
- Red Goat, Black Goat | Nadia Bulkin
- Eyes in the Vastness of Forever | Gustavo Bondoni
- The Great Performance of Kadir Bey | Ekaterina Sedia
- The Doom that Came to Yamatai | Travis King
- A Model Apartment | Bryan Thao Worra
- The Bats in the Walls | Juan Miguel Marín
- Estelle Makes the Casino Run | Pamela Rentz
- Death on the Fine Line | Daniel José Older
- The Mountain that Eats Men | Caleb Jordan Schulz
- Bottomless Lake Bus Stop | Bogi Takács
- Kali Yuga | Sanford Allen
- The Hunger Houses | Raymond G. Falgui
- Jeroboam Henley’s Debt | Charles R. Saunders
Or download PDF edition.