It was a dark and stormy night. Well, dark and drizzly. And, above all, eldritch. In a special, extracurricular event well-suited to the Hallowe’en season, on 27 October, the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series hosted a launch party and evening of readings celebrating the publication (Dark Horse) of Ellen Datlow‘s newest anthology, Lovecraft Unbound.
The 336-page volume (and, despite its title, the book does not consist of loose pages, but is a bound trade paperback) presents 20 tales (16 original stories and four reprints) inspired by the vastly influential master of cosmic horror and dark fantasy, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. HPL’s career was relatively brief, but in that short time he created the Cthulhu Mythos, the Necronomicon, Innsmouth, Arkham, and Miskatonic University, Dunwich’s horror, Wilbur Whateley, Charles Dexter Ward, the artist Pickman, and Herbert West, Reanimator, and helped inspire and shape contemporary horror literature. Three of the tribute collection’s 22 authors were there to mark the occasion by reading from their stories published within it. (A fourth, Caitlín R. Kiernan, regrettably had to cancel.)
The evening began with the venue’s proprietor, John Ordover, welcoming the audience to the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art. (The Series’ regular venue, the South Street Seaport Museum, was unavailable.) The Gallery, he explained, is dedicated to promoting the new artistic form. Its screens-instead-of-canvases approach allows the SGDA to import art electronically, sparing artists the problems of shipping artwork and offering them opportunities for wider exposure, and presenting the New York public with a greater diversity of art from around the country and around the world, art that might not otherwise be seen, as well as enabling them to purchase high-quality prints. By rotating what’s on view, theoretically, the SGDA provides unlimited display space. This evening, the Gallery’s walls were marvelously covered with screens displaying portraits of H.P. Lovecraft (including an exceedingly rare photo of him smiling), illustrations of his eldritch creations (including a Cthulhu for President poster), photos of those reading, and a blow-up of the anthology’s cover.
Ordover then turned things over to the Series’ producer & executive curator, Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, who noted that this event was also the Gallery’s first, its “hard-soft launch”—”flaccid”, quipped John. Freund briefly recounted how L. Sprague de Camp taught him how to pronounce the names of the Elder God (tongue to the roof of the mouth) and about his meeting with the aged Sonia Greene (Mrs. H.P. Lovecraft), who disclosed that HPL was not the nicest man (or the best husband; the couple lived apart).
Editor Ellen Datlow related how she had been reading Lovecraft pastiches for years; in assembling the anthology, however, she wanted HPL without the tentacles or ichor, or the word “eldritch”, but with the sense of paranoia, doom, and terror. She then introduced the first reader of the night, Richard Bowes.
Rick is a very familiar face at NYRSF and Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings, and, of course, in year’s best anthologies. His story, “The Office of Doom”, centered on an NYU professor who has undertaken cleaning out a “creepy” deserted room at the Bobst Library, and how the cursed Necronomicon arrived there on an interlibrary loan from Miskatonic University.
The second reader, Michael Cisco, essentially repeated his reading from the one he gave at Fantastic Fiction at KGB six days earlier. His offering, “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark”, told in the present tense by a young woman, was still unnerving. Renewing an old acquaintance, she’s persuaded to accompany her friend home, and on their train ride, they engage in a philosophical discussion of existence. What emerges is a vision of predatory, voracious, machinelike, extradimensional minds, their natures material and immaterial, even symbolic (odors, textures, emotions, and actions), that extend into our reality to ingest us (Cisco’s nod to the gods of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos). The truth of ultimate is revealed at the dark abode that is their final destination and doom.
After a break, the evening’s final reader, Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear, shared an excerpt from her story “Mongoose”. Co-authored with Sarah Monette, as was her story “Boojum”, and set in that universe of living starships, the tale briefly acquainted us with extradimensional feeders, toves, raths (as in momraths), and bandersnatches.
The audience of about 60 included Amy Bergenfeld, Paul Berger, David Braum, Kris Dikeman, Beth Fleischer, N.K. Jemison, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Barbara Krasnoff, Gordon Linzner, Fred and Dorothea Phillips (no relation to HPL), Carol Pinchefsky, Robert Rodriquez, Ian Randal Strock, and Terence Taylor. Afterward, a number of the group adjourned to a nearby bar for refreshment and further conversation. And in his house at Sunken R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu lay dreaming.
Ellen Datlow’s somewhat-briefer-than-usual photo set of the evening is on this Flickr page.