Wow, taking a week to write about almost nothing but Conflation has really piled up a ton of material on my "to write about" list.

A little while back, I saw links on a bunch of blogs to the fact that minor SF author Nick Mamatas has re-released his 2004 novel Move Under Ground under a Creative Commons license. Not quite the same one that I use, but in addition to providing the full text of the novel on his website for you to read, he's licensed it for unlimited free reprint, as long as you attribute it correctly to him, make no money doing so, and don't create any derivative works of your own from his material, like a screenplay or something. The capsule summary, H.P. Lovecraft meets Jack Kerouac, sounded like something carefully calculated to try unsuccessfully to catch my attention, too trite to be any good, but since it cost me nothing but a few minutes' time to read the first chapter, I gave it a look. I ended up reading the whole book, but my main reason was one that would probably only matter to me and a few others. You might like it or not, I'll get to that in a minute. First, here's what hooked me in.

Once I'd swallowed the whole corpus of Lovecraft's fiction and poetry, I got a sense that in H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, and in his idealized universe, the best of all possible worlds is one in which people lived by the Victorian pseudo-scientific update on the old Puritan ethos. To him, the ideal universe was one where every man grew up to adulthood chaste, married an equally chaste woman, lived a loving but mostly passionless life in which every waking minute that he wasn't earning the means to support his family was spent helping her maintain their home and raise their equally passionless children. The Puritans believed that we should live this way because God ordained this. The Victorians believed that we should live this way because science ordains it. But by the time Lovecraft was writing in the 1930s and 1940s, it was becoming pretty clear that the proposition that God ordains the Puritan life and the proposition that science proves its perfection were both crumbling. So Lovecraft's vision was one of people trying hard not to find that out, trying hard to exclude the mind-shattering knowledge that religion was a fiction, that humans are animals, that man and the Earth are not the center of the cosmos or its real purpose ... not for any good reason, but for nostalgia for "good old fashioned" civilization, for fear of what we'd become without Puritan/Victorian civilization as an ideal to live up to. And so, in Lovecraft's fiction, it is consistently people who have no incentive at all to live the Puritan/Victorian life, whether wealthy decadents, tri-racial isolates, or tenured professors, all of whom had nothing to lose by casting off the shackles of Victorianism, who open the doors to Things Outside and risk shattering the Victorian Era that Lovecraft regretted not having been born into.

And what fascinated me about Move Under Ground is that Mamatas completely inverts that whole proposition. Mamatas keeps the sense, in Lovecraft's fiction, that just outside the boundaries of the Earth and just outside the boundaries of the material universe we know there are Unspeakable Things out to do us no good, and perhaps substantial intentional harm. But Mamatas has incorporated into this a proposition near and dear to the Bohemians and beatniks, one that is entirely antithetical to Lovecraft. The beats believed that most straights, by which they mean mundanes in general and not just heterosexuals, were people who gave in and agreed, grudgingly, to sell off pieces of their soul, one at a time, in exchange for security and safety or at least the illusion thereof. Guys like Kerouac and Cassidy and Burroughs and Ginsberg believed that by the time that straights reached middle age, most of them had no soul left to sell. So Mamatas asks what if it's not their sacrifices of their souls that keeps the things outside, outside? What if the things outside are, whether they know it or not, what they're selling their souls to? Literally?

So when the book begins, a few years after Kerouac's On the Road, the mundane conformist world of 1960 or so has sold off so much of its soul to Unspeakable Things that R'lyeh has risen. Cthulhu roams invisible. Shoggoths imitate the dead and the living in shambling zombie-like mockeries of life, tempting people to further unspeakable sacrifices. Azathoth glares mercilessly down from the sky, and where his eye looks, reigns madness and suicide and mass murder. But the mundanes have sold so much of their souls that there's no humanity left in most of them. They're even physically transforming, under the weight of soulless life and from the chants that the churches, now all preaching the new gospels of Azathoth and Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth, offer them for solace, into slug-faced or beetle-faced humanoid near-robots. Whether out of denial or surrender, they can't even see the tentacles writhing down from the sky or up from the sea, can't even see what's happened to their own physical forms, don't realize how insane what they're doing to each other and their cities is. Society's outcasts, the oppressed racial minorities and the unemployed hobos and bums and the drug addicts and the mentally insane, do see, and know that they don't comprehend why nobody else sees what they see. But what can a couple of bums and crazies and drunks and junkies do?

Other than hitch-hike cross country all the way from San Francisco to Manhattan, through the yawning chasms of spreading insanity, with nothing more than warm beer and shallow pop-culture Buddhism to sustain them, in order to plunge directly into the heart of the worst and oldest infestations and try to save the world?

Lovecraft must be spinning in his grave.

The prose is quite good, for most of the book. It really does manage to not merely capture but update for our times the kinds of nightmares of things slipping out of our control and under the control of inhuman and incomprehensible supernatural aliens that Lovecraft tried so hard to inject into the plebian world of vampires and werewolves and ghosts that had reduced horror fiction to a stack of shopworn clichés by the time of his childhood. It also seems to me to do a great job of capturing the beats at their best and their worst, at their most poetic and at their most degraded. I could recommend this book with no reservations at all to the same kinds of people who like, say, Illuminatus!, if it weren't for one annoying problem. It's the same problem I had with Michael Bishop's The Secret Ascension, or, Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas and with William Browning Spencer's Resumé with Monsters, and even to a lesser extent with Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric. Not only does this book have a very similar feel to those books, but like them, it has an ending that feels kind of emotionally flat, unsatisfying, anti-climactic, and sort of bolted on. But I sure paid a lot less for Move Under Ground, so I've sure got no right to complain about a book that I had no particular trouble finishing, now, do I?

I have many vices. Considering that at least three of them are, in the opinion in the Social Security Administration, irreparable at this point and sufficient to render me unpalatable to any plausible or reasonable employer, makes that first statement an obvious truism. But alongside my grand and documented major vices, I have many trivial vices, some of which as incurable as my recurring major depression with incomplete interepisode recovery. One of them is this: if a joke occurs to me that I know with reasonable certainty won't be funny, or even comprehensible, to anybody with me, I usually go ahead and tell the joke. Many of these jokes depend on having read the same thing(s) that I've read, and in a world with a publishing industry as huge as the one we have, and a backlist so much huger, what are the odds of this? Nonetheless, the recurring looks of blank incomprehension and periodic glowers of disapproval for my perceived elitism are insufficient to cure me of this vice, because I receive periodic tiny doses of reward for it: when somebody does get a joke that I'm pretty sure nobody is going to get, I feel a powerful rush of gratitude that I have "smoked out" a kindred soul that I might not otherwise have detected.

In the Archon 30 Grand Masquerade costume competition, Pierre and Sandy Pettinger performed a scene from R.W. Chambers' "The King in Yellow" from The King in Yellow. I love them for it, even though it would appear (from the dead silence and stunned incomprehension all over the room) that I was one of perhaps six people in the entire 1000-person audience for that show who actually "got" what they were doing. I am further in awe over the fact that they managed to work into the design of their costumes every single trivial bit of detail we are given about the King in Yellow himself from the fragments of "The King in Yellow" that are in The King in Yellow. They didn't imagine the character the way I imagined him, and I don't hold this against them in the least. The descriptions are intentionally vague and subject to interpretation; their interpretation is in no way inferior to mine and the execution was a joy to behold. Despite the fact that the presentation was completely lost on the audience, I think they quite deserved the Best in Class award they won at their (Master Costumer) level and the minor workmanship award they also won.

I don't really hold it against the audience that so few of them have read enough of "The King in Yellow," let alone The King in Yellow, to have gotten the joke. I own a copy. And I'm glad I read it. But I won't pretend it was a great read, or a fun read. Because of my peculiar interests, in Lovecraft and in the overall topic of Forbidden Lore, I found it an informative read. But I'm not going to say that you must rush out and read it. I can, however, quickly background you on it, for any of you who were in the audience and didn't get the point of the presentation even with the postscript they gave the Master of Ceremonies to read. You see, H.P. Lovecraft got the idea of people being driven crazy by what they've read, by his own admission, from a small collection of short stories written 30 years earlier by Robert W. Chambers. The framing device, the meta-story, of those six stories is that years before these stories are all set there was a small scandal in Paris. A group of actors had performed a piece of experimental "art" theater, a play called "The King in Yellow." What made that single performance a scandal to be talked about for years was that due to some combination of the script, costuming, performance, sets, and plot every single person who saw the performance went in some way criminally insane: turned into some kind of sexual predator, or degenerate pervert, or serial killer, or a suicide or would-be suicide, or some other affliction for which the whole surviving audience had to be institutionalized. The actors were arrested and all known copies of the script burned ... but a few copies survived. None of this actually transpires in the stories; we piece it together from casual mentions in the stories which are themselves about people who went to a lot of trouble to find and read "The King in Yellow." And that's the real thrust of R.W. Chamber's stories in the book The King in Yellow: what kind of person would go to the trouble of tracking down something that illegal and that obscure and that hard to find even knowing that it would be bad for them? (The short answer: artists, political radicals, but even more so wealthy people with more money than sense and more sense than morals. People that Chambers considered borderline insane to start with.)

The play "The King in Yellow" no more exists than Lovecraft's equally fictitious insanity-inducing grimoirum The Necronomicon. And even more so than Lovecraft's Necronomicon, it suffers from the problem that it really is impossible to imagine what such a play could contain. The fictional device of The King in Yellow truly is an improbable one, one that simply has to be hand-waved or treated as a heavy-handed metaphor or taken with a large grain of "suspension of disbelief" as a science fiction horror element. Nonetheless, in order to convey the impression of plausibility, Chambers had to actually give his various radicals, decadents, and bohemians some lines to quote to recognize each other by, or to refer to in their madness as elements of the play transfer themselves to their individualized psychoses. I haven't counted, but all in all we have maybe a few dozen or nearly a hundred lines of song, poetry, and prose from the play ... none of which make much sense by themselves. We are given a thumbnail sketch of a plot to string them together: on a distant world circling another sun, in the last city of a decadent, dying species, there is a legend that on the last day of survival for the species there will come a mad prophet called The King in Yellow, wearing The Pallid Mask and carrying on his person The Yellow Sign. The rulers of Lost Carcossa schedule a costume party to lift people's spirits (and, secretly, to see if the rumors of The King having been sighted are true), and someone comes costumed as The King in Yellow. At the end, we are given to understand, he turns out to be authentic, he reveals the Yellow Sign, and everyone present (including a good chunk of the audience) perishes in gibbering madness, in a massive and sudden surge of suicide and murder. Yeah, I know: not very convincing. But then, that's not the point. Still, there have been attempts to reconstruct the play from the fragments, most notably James Blish's reconstruction in his story "More Light," which you can find reprinted in R.M. Price's anthology The Hastur Cycle.

The Pettingers performed the scene from the play-within-a-book that may be the scene before the scene with the initial revelation of the Yellow Sign. The MC, reading from their script-card, explained to us that this was the scene from a fictitious play that supposedly drives audiences insane, "but of course, that can't really happen, can it?" Unfortunately, the Master of Ceremonies for Archon's Grand Masquerade is such a genial, friendly guy that he really can't pull off the necessary grimness to deliver that line and make people shiver. That's OK; I know a straight line when I hear one. I "went insane" on cue, pulling out Evil Laugh Number Two at full volume with all the stops pulled out. What can I say?

I see your "The Internet is for Porn" WoW machinma, and raise you one. I wondered why, considering how much more flexible in costuming and setting it is, we haven't seen more machinma coming out of City of Heroes or City of Villains instead of places like Halo or World of Warcraft. Sure, thanks to annual bribes contests, there are some, but not a lot that would be worth showing anybody but another player. I've mostly concluded that unlike the other games, it's harder to get bored in CoX; our players are too busy playing the game to sit and painstakingly make movies or music videos. But the delay before the next major software version hits the test server keeps dragging on, and on, and on, and so someone who was, I presume, looking for an outlet for their frustration, produced ... Bobbo Number Five.

(And I'm one of the people champing at the bit to get my hands on "issue" 7. Masterminds now can have a new type of minion: your own biker gang. Now if they would just ship the bloody thing! Gaaaarrrrrrhhhh...)

Awww, isn't it so c-u-u-u-u-u-te! Right up until the whole house explodes. I don't think it's worth what it (quite legitimately, judging by the looks of it) will cost, but part of me really, really wants ToyVault.com's Necronomicon Book Plush. If nothing else, I want it for the same reason I used to keep the not-particularly-good Pop-Up Kama Sutra on my library shelves ... for the sheer entertainment value of watching people when they see that such a thing exists and I have one.

I'm not sure why, but I'm impressed. Once Apple ported the Macintosh OS to (mostly) Intel-standard hardware, it was inevitable that you could buy a Macintosh and dual-boot it between Windows XP and MacOS X. And Apple now offers a free beta test utility called Boot Camp, to hack their own boot loader so that you can hold down the Option key while starting, or use a Startup Device control panel in either OS, to reboot back and forth between them. It turns out that it needs a very picky boot loader to run, though, which complicated the heck out of the inevitable hack to rig one for triple boot, so that you can select between Windows XP, MacOS X, and Linux. And while it's a sloppy hack and looks like a bear to install, people have managed it.

Now, for all that I used to be a hardcore Macintosh fanatic myself back in the MacOS 7 days, I can't wrap my head around what either Linux or MacOS offers me right now that's worth paying too much for too little hardware and then waiting while the computer reboots to use it. Yeah, I miss Kalendar from the KOffice suite, but not enough to reboot my PC every time I want to check my calendar, which is why I haven't bothered to rig this machine for dual-boot. I hear that there are still things that MacOS does better than a Windows PC with current patches and a copy of Firefox, for all that nobody's shown me one in many years. But hey, if you're in that niche market that needs to have Linux, MacOS, and Windows XP on the same box, now you're in luck.

There's a war on terror going on, or so they tell me. Medicare part D screwups are putting people in the hospital, especially schizophrenics who can't get their prescriptions refilled. US companies like Ford are going under. And we have to rebuild most of Biloxi and half of New Orleans from scratch. So why are we bothering to send an automated research vehicle to Yuggoth (with only one delay, yay!), and why should anybody but a handful of nerds care?

Well, for one thing, it's not like it was a spontaneous decision. NASA didn't just wake up one morning, decide to jaunt on over to Pluto/Yuggoth for breakfast, drive over to Space Probes -r- Us to pick one up, flag down the next rocket, and stick it on board, then drive home and wash the dishes or whatever. NASA got assigned the task, decades ago, of sending space probes to every planet in the solar system. If there's anything we learned (that we're all allowed to know) back during first (documented, well known) contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence back in the 1920s, it's that we know awfully little about conditions anywhere much beyond the surface of the Earth. (In either direction from Earth's surface, up or down. But I digress.) And that much of what we thought we knew was wrong. And if there's anything else we learned from all of that, it's that what you don't know can kill you. So yes, NASA's been sending robotic probes, not shoggoths but simple mechanical/computerized probes way too dumb to be corrupted into doing anything nasty even if there are hostile intelligences there, to every planet in the solar system for 30 some-odd years. This time it just happened to finally be Pluto's turn.

The very reasons why you might care less about Pluto than about other planets are the reasons why it actually matters. Pluto isn't like any of the other planets. In fact, some astronomers would rather label it not the outermost of the planets but instead the innermost of the large objects in the Kuiper belt, not a small planet but a large comet in a still-unperturbed orbit. Or, just as interestingly, in maybe an interestingly perturbed orbit; it's the largest object we know the orbit of that's not in the plane of the ecliptic. So having all kinds of data on everything from Mercury out to Neptune tells us nothing about what we're going to find when, years from now, the New Horizons probe finally makes its fly-by of Pluto. And whether it's a planet that's potentially perturbing the orbit of comets or a really big comet itself, we really could stand to know more about the objects in the Kuiper belt, since that's where every comet to fall into the inner solar system originated.

We do, in theory, know one of the things that we are likely find when we get out there: an awful lot of Vermont and Himalayan granite, that was painstakingly excavated from Earth and flown out to Pluto by the Mi-Go, the intelligent space-faring winged-lobster-shaped fungi from Yuggoth. We may even see Mi-Go, and if we do, it'll be the first time we've seen any since they evacuated the Earth around the time of the blaze of publicity about their existence here back when Miskatonic University's Dr. Wilmarth first revealed proof of his contact with them to journalist Howard Lovecraft for his Pulitzer Prize winning story, "The Whisperer in Darkness." But let's not get our hopes up too high about Yuggoth -- or our fears. It's not a given that the Mi-Go even have any presence left in our solar system. It's not a given that if they are still on Yuggoth, as they call Pluto, that they'll show up to New Horizon's sensors, since they didn't show up on Wilmarth's photographs. If they have left Yuggoth behind, it's not a given that they left their city behind for New Horizon's sensors to scan. And if they are there, let me set your mind at ease, there's no particularly good reason to think that any of them are still worshipping Yog Sothoth. (I've suggested elsewhere that it may be for fear of what contact with Yog Sothoth was doing to some of their kind's minds and morals that the species cut off contact with our planet.)

But no, spin whatever conspiracy theories you want for pure fun or for fiction, but we're sending a space probe to Pluto for perfectly valid planetary science reasons, not because of a 70 or so year out of date contact with aliens who allegedly once were based there.

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(For those of you who just tuned in to this particular series of essays, no, I'm not serious. This is only the latest in a series of fictional essays I've written from the point of view of someone just like myself who grew up in an alternate universe where the 1920s and 30s science fictional horror of H.P. Lovecraft was all real, was straight journalism about extra-terrestrial and extra-dimensional threats to all of human existence ... and where it turned out to be no bigger a deal than any other threat to human existence, from chemical warfare to rock and roll, from runaway inflation to The Bomb, and we just cope with it. I don't have a complete list of them handy, but the easiest way to find them is to click on the "cthulhu" tag, here or above.)

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (whose Christmas album you may remember that I'm inordinately fond of) finally finished their biggest project to date. It's a complete silent movie adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's most famous short story, "The Call of Cthulhu." Their goal was to create a non-existent historical artifact, a movie that would look exactly as if the rights to "The Call of Cthulhu" had been picked up by a major motion picture studio as soon as it was printed, and made into a medium- to big-budget silent movie all the way back in the late 1920s. The movie is available on DVD now. I haven't seen it yet, but it's getting rave reviews in places like Boing Boing.

Anyway, the review got me thinking about two related problems anybody would have while trying to film the story. The first is that, well, frankly, it's unfilmable, and I don't just mean because of a giant squid-faced monster rising out of a slime-covered cyclopean non-Euclidian city to do battle with the crew of a trans-oceanic steamship. I mean it because as written, it doesn't exactly have a straight-forward storyline. The plot, such as it is, is that the narrator has found in his late uncle's (a professor of linguistics) effects a box of random clippings, notes, and souvenirs. When he figures out that his uncle was murdered because of what he'd figured out about the stuff in the box, he sets out to interview everybody in the notes that he can find. He eventually pieces together that after the fact, his uncle had figured out that the human race had just barely, through the heroism of one steamship crew, narrowly escaped extermination; that his uncle and the police had failed to put all the pieces together in time to do anything about it themselves. By the time the nephew figures all of this out, it's an even more moot point, because the events happened years ago. So how do you film this? Do you tell the story in chronological order, and leave the nephew out? Do you tell the uncle's story as he pieced it all together, counting on the audience to keep track of the jumps in the narrative as he gets the various pieces out of order? Do you tell the nephew's story, which is just basically a dry almost scholarly bit of news analysis? And the related question I thought of would be, how do you make this something that a modern audience could relate to?

And then, in this sudden flash of insight tonight, I realized what I'd love to do. I completely lack the resources and skills to do it, but I may just be nerdy enough and bored enough to eventually tackle the script and post it as a piece of fan fiction. Adapt it as an episode of the National Geographic Channel's series "Seconds from Disaster!" I'm thinking it might start something like this:

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March 23rd, 1925, deep in the South Pacific. Yesterday, the crew of the steamship Emma nearly lost their ship to a typhoon, then nearly lost it again to an attack by pirates that cost them the lives of both their captain and their first mate. Little do they know that their situation is about to take a turn for the worse, putting them on the scene of the human race's narrowest escape from extinction yet to date. How did it all go wrong? What desperate act of bravery saved us from extinction, and what lessons can we learn for the next time?

Using advanced computer simulations, archival footage, expert analysis, dramatic eyewitness accounts, and careful re-enactments, we will take you there, to the South Pacific in 1925. Second by second, we will show you how law enforcement failures, mechanical complications, and the abuse of military-grade forbidden lore lead inexorably to the catastrophe. Stay tuned for Seconds from Disaster: The Call of Cthulhu on the National Geographic Channel.

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I know that some of you aren't from the USA. Some of you know that the USA fought a war of independence over a pitiful couple of percent import tax. You might also know that the ink wasn't even dry on the US Constitution before there was blood in the streets of the capital city over a tax on whiskey. You probably don't know, most of you, that one of the contributory causes to the Civil War of 1861-1865 was a relatively minor tax on imported farm machinery. But even if you didn't know that, in light of many other examples, it won't surprise you. Americans are, famously, murderously opposed to taxation. The far-out kookier parts of the Libertarian and Republican Party go so far as to suggest abolishing all taxes; if a majority want the government to do something, let that majority pay for it voluntarily out of their own pockets. This idea shrivels and explodes into fine dust when exposed to the even minimal sunlight of "basic arithmetic." But it has been shown that, for sufficiently photogenic causes, it sometimes works.

Automobile licensing is handled at the state level here in the US; all 50 states have their own laws, their own schedule of fees, and so on. The US government has struggled to make excuses in the courts to have some input, but even after 30+ years of that, the states still pretty much run their own vehicle licensing programs however they want. (Which is to say, mostly badly, which is why the Department of Motor Vehicles is a cliché in all 50 states for bad service, and one of the reasons why Spider Robinson once wrote that, "Transportation is a boil on the ass of every American.") But one idea that has caught on in all 50 states (or nearly all, I'm not sure) is the idea of adding an optional tax on top of the already aggravatingly high annual or bi-annual automobile license tax. However, if you pay the optional tax, you get two benefits. You get to earmark that tax for one of a handful of specific government programs or grant programs. And you get a special license plate designed to show everybody who drives behind your car that you were virtuous enough to give your own money to support this worthy cause.

Unmistakably the most popular such cause is something usually called "Kids First!," because here in America, trust me, everything is done "for the children" (as a reaction to and pendulum swing from the decades of neglect from around 1964 to 1980; see Strauss & Howe, Generations). The name sometimes varies, but almost all 50 states have some kind of program where voluntarily-donated taxpayer money is collected, then given out by the legislature to approved charitable groups that specialize in preventing child abuse, preventing spousal abuse, and/or responding quickly to get the victims of parental or domestic abuse to safety. And to stress that your voluntary donation went to help society's most innocent and helpless, the anti-child-abuse voluntary-tax license plates are always designed to look as if a very young child had designed them: crayon lettering, finger painting, and so on. Which created the opportunity for one guy in Virginia to pay the Kids First optional tax, plus the optional tax to get to pick his own license plate letters instead of getting random letters and numbers, so that he could put this work of beauty on his car:


Well, of course he'll eat the kids first! They've got less gristle, have accumulated fewer toxins, and besides, their parents run faster! That's probably why the guy who got this plate drives a Jeep in the first place, right? Ia! Ia! Cthulhu f'htagn!

Wow, did it take me this long to set up my point? I'm terribly sorry about that, so I'll get right to it. Like I said, that fight between a dead soldier's family and his Internet email service for access to his email reminded me, indirectly, of a trap question that I asked one of my theology teachers back in high school about understanding phenomena like ghouls, self-resurrecting dead magic users, the use of soul projection to take over a fresh body while dying, the use of biochemical means to reanimate corpses, and the combined occult/biochemical resurrection technology popularly called the Curwen Effect, from a specifically biblical perspective.

What still amuses me about his weak, inadequate answer is that here it is, 70 to 75 years after journalists dragged this stuff out into the public view where 20th century society had to deal with it, and Christian biblical literalist fundamentalism still has no coherent, cohesive answer to this stuff. Why that amuses me so much is that, had it not been for when and how this stuff and other Forbidden Lore became political issues back in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Christian fundamentalism wouldn't be the political powerhouse that it is today. Guys like John Stormer, or to pick more contemporary examples like James Dobson and Tim LaHaye, owe their best-selling books, their unusual influence over political figures, their adoring legions, and their very lucrative careers to the public horror and outrage of that time period. People were suddenly confronted by such "hideous" truths as that human beings were not the first intelligent species on this planet, we were (depending on how you count) the fourth or fifth. That we are not currently alone in the universe. That the universe contains sapient beings of unimaginable scale, nature, and godlike power -- and more to the point, none of the ones that have been observed to actually exist are benevolent towards human beings. At best, their motives are inscrutable to us just as our ways of thinking are inscrutable to them, and they might squash us without even noticing. At worst, in cases such as Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth, they're overtly hostile to our species and destined to inevitably win. And that previous species on Earth (and perhaps future species, via time travel) left behind a "toxic waste dump" of actual functioning magic spells that are so ill-suited to our species that while they work, they all have horrific side effects -- and yet there are humans who accept those monstrous side effects in order to wield that power, if they can escape the law long enough to do so.

75 years later, most educated adults take these things for granted, although sane and healthy people hardly ever think about them. But 75 years ago, when the scientific and historical and astronomical and mathematical and archaeological revelations accumulated to the point where the searing black ocean of knowledge swamped and overflowed our snug little island of ignorance, the American public was clear and unambiguous about what they wanted. They wanted two (contradictory?) things: "Make it go away!" and "Tell me it's not true!" They turned to their congressmen and senators and governors and the President to make it go away, and for the most part that part has been successful; actual documented abusers of Forbidden Lore come only once every few years, making them rarer than spree killers or serial killers. To make it go away, they flocked, gradually at first but more and more over time, out of the mainline Christian denominations that were willing to acknowledge scientific truths, like the Episcopalians and the Lutherans and the Mennonites and Reformed Judaism, and into frankly anti-scientific, stridently conservative faiths like Pentacostalism and Fundamentalism and Orthodox Judaism, and eventually even the Catholics picked a stridently conservative pope, the recently deceased John Paul II. They wanted to be told that "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!" Because then they didn't have to confront the implications of the truth.

Now, it is true that the fundamentalists themselves don't acknowledge this as being where the energy for their movement came from. They talk about thundering evangelists and religious puritans in America in a continuous historical line back through William Jennings Bryant, back through Jonathan Edwards, all the way back to the Puritan Migration of 1620 to 1640 that established the first large-scale white colonies on this continent. But that's just the history of the idea, not of the movement, and let's face it, by the end of Prohibition the movement was pretty much dead and discredited. Then public revulsion over Forbidden Lore became news ... and I don't think that it's a coincidence that that's when the American historical trend away from puritanism reversed course and began to move the other direction.

If you want another example, look at Saudi Arabia ... and in particular, why we call it Saudi Arabia instead of just Arabia. The House of Saud traces their ancestral rule back hundreds of years. But at their strongest, those historical Saudi sheiks were no big deal, no bigger deal than any other of several hundred tribal sheiks rattling around the Arabian desert. For most of that time, the Arabian peninsula was under unified Islamic rule, yes -- under the Turkish throne of the Ottoman Empire, who quite justly considered Arabia an empty, ignorant, irrelevant chunk of the middle of nowhere that just happened to have two sacred cities in it. But the rise of the House of Saud over all the other Arabian sheiks was tied to the sudden popularity of a previously unpopular sect of Islam, usually called Wahabbism. Prior to the 1930s, pretty much the entire Islamic world was dominated politically by Sufism, a strand of Islam so moderate and tolerant that it could fairly be compared to the Anglican Church, and in fact, that was roughly the role that Sufism played under several consecutive Islamic empires. But then in the years between roughly 1925 and 1930, treasure hunters and archaeologists began digging around the edges of pre-human cities, and long-ago-destroyed cult centers for worship of the Great Old Ones, and turning up the same evidence that universities and archaeologists and geologists and treasure hunters were turning up in places like Antarctica, Australia, Tibet, the South Pacific, and even mountain tops in Vermont and western Massachusetts. And the revelation that evidence of such monstrosity lay beneath the sands of the same sacred land that also held Mecca and Medina aroused the same revulsion, the same demands to make it go away and then tell us it never happened, in Arabia that they did here at home.

Now, again, people tell me that oil wealth would have spurred a puritan backlash in Islam, a return to puritanical values as a control on a suddenly wealthy society. And they tell me that militant puritanical Islam was a historical inevitability once the West, out of guilt over failing to prevent the Holocaust, permitted the Jews to carve an ethnic and theocratic homeland out of the Muslim Ummah. But both of those things happened after the rise of the House of Saud and their unification of Saudi Arabia under joint Saudi/Wahabbi rule. No, I think that the only logical way to interpret the historical record is that Wahabbism would have remained an obscure bedouin sect unheard of except among nomadic camel herders in the Arabian desert, and the House of Saud would still be yet another medium-poor family of camel herders in some other Islamic (or even westernized!) kingdom or empire, perhaps ruled from one of the more traditional Islamic capitals like Istanbul or Baghdad or maybe even Cairo, if it hadn't been for the widespread backlash to the shocking revelation of Forbidden Lore.

So there you have it. The Necronomicon (and related works, and corroborating scientific evidence to be sure) caused the rise of both sides, the fundamentalist "Crusader" side here in America and the fundamentalist "militant Islamist" side in Arabia, of the current "War on Terror."

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Pant, pant. OK, I'm tired and a little headachy (and my dogs are barking) as much or more from working hard for Tricia's Treasure Chest's performance Friday night as from this, but wow has this gone on longer than I expected to take it. Thanks to everybody who contributed to the followups and replies, you really amused me as much as I hope this amused you. For those of you who came to this (against all odds) only in this last, most recent essay, click on the "cthulhu" topic tag above to see my explanations and prior columns in this role-playing exercise about an alternate universe which came to terms with the Cthulhu mythos when my grandparents were young, the world didn't end because of it, and we just cope; where, in fact, the world isn't very much different from ours. This was the part of the role-playing exercise that I was really looking forward to, because to me some of the most fun comes when your character argues convincingly, from the facts available to him or her, with all reasonable logic, to a conclusion that we, having the benefit of facts they don't have, know otherwise. You and I both know that fundamentalism both here and in Arabia did just fine without the impetus of fear of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones, revulsion over ghoulish magic, and the need for law enforcement and the military to control access to the most dangerous magics. But the other me, the one who group up in that world, wouldn't know that. Discuss.

One of the things I brought up yesterday because it fascinates me is the question of we decide, especially in cases involving illegal reanimations of the dead or other occult means of assuming the shape and memories of the dead, whether or not the result "is" the same person. And the truth be told, in reality, we don't decide these things via religious values, or some abstract philosophy like the continuity theorem that I brought up yesterday as a straw man. We decide these things, like all complicated moral issues, via national discussion and debate, in this case going all the way back to freelance journalist Howard Lovecraft's famous True Detective sensationalized account of the complicated murders of Edward Derby and his wife, Asenath Derby (nee Marsh), "The Thing on the Doorstep." It's the same dynamic you saw in the Lacy Peterson case, or for that matter the O.J. Simpson case, two sensational (and sensationalized) murders that had nothing to do with the occult or other Forbidden Lore. Journalists see an unresolved emotional, philosophical, political issue and they see a sensational crime or incident that touches on the heart of it. They then ram it down our throats. We discuss the issue over the water cooler and in beauty salons and over the dinner table and in the letter columns of newspapers (and these days, on the Internet). And if the level of "tut tut"ing over the incident rises to the level of a mass uprising of hysteria and widespread demands that legislators "Do something!", then that's how we get new moral laws. Otherwise, the disapproved of behavior just gets reinforced as Not Nice via the fact that it gets you talked about disapprovingly, to varying degrees.

The "continuity" idea is a straw man, by the way, because we know of at least two violations of it. When I mentioned it, I was only thinking of one, the one that's touched on in "The Thing on the Doorstep." Since then, somebody reminded me of another example. In the "Thing on the Doorstep" case, the self-reanimated corpse of Asenath Derby claimed to have the soul of Edward Derby trapped inside it. The corpse was sufficiently compelling in its argument that Edward Derby's best friend (whose name escapes me, it's been too long since I last read about it) snuck a revolver into Arkham Asylum and shot the body of Edward Derby cold dead in an attempt to kill the murderess's spirit. The friend was, of course, found guilty of murder since the law at the time had not been updated to take reanimation or soul possession into account. Such things still being thought impossible, the law had no provisions for them. But since then we have been warned that human beings of partial Deep One ancestry (and possibly other rare individuals of particular telepathic aptitude) can, in fact, with the application of spells from the Necronomicon, force an exchange of souls with a targeted individual. So let's assume that Lovecraft got it right, and leading up to the death of the body of Asenath Derby there were several forcible exchanges of personality and memory beween that body and the body of Edward Derby. Under those circumstances, which one "is" Edward Derby? In cases involving ghouls, we rule that memory and personality are not sufficient to prove identity. In (fortunately extremely rare) cases like this one, we rule the opposite way. Is there any guiding philosophical principle by which we decide these things? No, we just "know" -- by way of long-running societal debate.

The other example that someone reminded me of, indirectly, involved the Great Race of Yith. Between 1908 and 1913, there were various newspaper accounts of a strange case, the apparently focal retrograde amnesia of a Miskatonic University professor named Wingate Peaslee, who simply woke up one day in 1908 with no memory of who he was, no longer even speaking much English, and completely ignorant of survival skills for the modern world. He regained his functional (but not personal) memories fairly quickly, even showing aptitude for skills which were beyond his prior abilities, but his personality seemed permanently altered in somewhat unpleasant ways by the amnesia incident. Then in 1913, he awoke from a brief illness believing that it was still 1908 -- his original memory, abilities, and personality had returned. All of which was completely baffling until he recovered his "real" memories of that 5 year period, when the "real" Dr. Peaslee had been telepathically hijacked back to Australia in the Permian Period into the body a member of an alien colony there/then, so that one of their number could explore our time. He was supposed to have had his memories of having been back there erased, but they gradually returned. Those he told of his returning memories wrote them off as bad dreams ... right up until the lost city of the Great Race of Yith was found by paleontologists in 1935, matching his description to the point where he could still navigate his way around the ruins. Since then, we've concluded that other people over the centuries remembering fragments of spells they learned from the Great Library of the Great Race of Yith are the origin of most of the forbidden occult lore that has since been made illegal (again) by all modern governments. (See Wingate Peaslee with Howard Lovecraft, "The Shadow out of Time," originally published in National Geographic back in 1936.)

But the relevance to the life after death debate is this. When I first heard of these stories as a kid, not only did I not know much of the neurology of memory formation, frankly, neither did anybody else. But the cases of Edward Derby and Wingate Peaslee fly in the face of everything we've learned since. When Edward Derby's mind was trapped in the body of Asenath Marsh-Derby, the sensory impressions received by that body should have been impressed on the brain of Asenath Derby, but somehow the same telepathic spell that forced the transfer must have continued to transfer the fresh memory impressions between the bodies. This becomes even harder to imagine when the gap between the two brains that swapped identities spans millenia, continents, and species, and yet it has been proven to have happened. So yeah, between 1908 and 1913, what was the legal, moral, "real" identity of the body of Wingate Peaslee? Under today's law and public morality, would that body still have been him, or the alien? If under today's law he would have theoretically been dead in 1908, who was he after 1913?

Wow, this is running much longer than intended. I haven't even started on what all of this has to do with fundamentalism and the War on Terror. I guess that'll wait for the weekend.

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In the profoundly unlikely event that this is the first of these essays you've seen, click the "cthulhu" tag link above to see what this is all about. For those of you playing along in the comments, I started out really loving the made-up court and historical precedents and laws, but remember this: this stuff has been illegal and thoroughly suppressed since the mid 1930s. We're sneaking up on so many made-up cases that we're in danger of making such cases look common, if we haven't already gotten to that point. So think long and hard before making up any more occult incidents in the history from 1935 to 2005, and look over the existing occult incidents that Lovecraft, you all, and I have created before deciding that you have to make up yet another one to make your point. That goes double if the person using or abusing the Forbidden Lore wasn't a government agent, a law enforcement official whose duties would have required them to know this stuff, or a carefully-watched university professor studying the subject. I don't want to spoil your fun, but it threatens to break continuity if you make Forbidden Lore look commonplace. I'm supposing it to have been long known, since before most of us were born, that this stuff was possible, but for there to be no more people who know how to do it than who currently know how to manufacture the firing mechanisms for atomic weapons or weaponize anthrax spores.

I mentioned Justice Frankfurter's deferral to the lower courts to define death "in accordance with the commonly accepted usage of the term," and arachnophiliac brought up the early 1980s state-by-state adoption of the Uniform Definition of Death Act. And that reminded me of a funny conversation I had with one of the leading names of the Christian fundamentalist intelligentsia, Dr. John A. Stormer, back in 1979 or 1980, when I was taking "Principles of Spiritual Growth" under him, a required religion class for sophomores at the fundamentalist Christian, Independent Baptist run school that he founded. From time to time we'd get far enough ahead of his syllabus that he'd open the classroom to any question on evangelical doctrine, sort of "stump the principal" day, usually on Fridays.

Now, before I go any further, I have to give you one more detail only a few of you already have: Dr. Stormer, like most of the faculty there, admired me but didn't trust me. Teacher after teacher, and the whole administrative staff, at one time or another told me that I had great potential. I may have graduated solidly in the middle of my class, but they and I knew that that was sheer laziness on my part. I "got" theology. It was my favorite subject. Heck, two (or three, depending on how you count) religions later, I'm still in love with Christian fundamentalist theology. It's one of the greatest intellectual logic puzzles, logic games, ever invented, and it directly addresses what William James called "matters of ultimate concern" -- how could I not fall in love with all of its intricacies? But I was deeply distrusted, and a little feared, because I could not be counted on to either (a) come to the same conclusions they did in my exegesis of the Christian scriptures, or (b) take their word for it that their exegesis was right and mine was wrong. We clashed on whether or not marijuana and tobacco were prohibited by the Bible. We clashed on long hair for men. We clashed on whether or not rock and roll was inherently Satanic.

So in light of the above debates, which were already so intense that they threatened to hold me back one or more years because of them, you can just imagine how they felt about my already-in-place itch to explore the boundaries of just what I, as a civilian, was allowed to know before trespassing into government-classified Forbidden Lore. Like so many authority figures in my life, they couldn't really bring themselves to trust me when I said that I had no interest in using it. (Never mind that they never once caught me ever doing or saying anything other than what I had said I was going to do. Because I didn't come to the same conclusions from the text that they did, they didn't trust me to stay on the right side of law and morality. And given that I later recognized my own polyamorous nature, which they would have considered an abomination whether or not it was an abomination for King Solomon, I suppose they'd count that as evidence I couldn't be trusted to be sniffing around Forbidden Lore, too.)

Now, I tell you all of that so you'll understand just how itchy it made Dr. Stormer when I asked him how he reconciled the standard Dispensationalist doctrine that only God can raise the dead, and that he only grants that power to special prophets at times when the Dispensation is changing, with the existence of the Curwen Effect, which was at the time I think the only form of re-animation I'd heard of yet. Dr. Stormer was prone to chewing on his glasses while thinking, and this was no exception; he chewed on his glasses and "ummed" for a good long time. (Two years later, for our Senior Class Gift, we got him a pair of glasses where the arms had been replaced by candy canes. He laughed right along with the whole school.) I'm sure he already knew the official answer, but I think he was wrestling over just how much of it to say in front of a crowd of 16 year olds. Finally he gave that answer that will be familiar to any of you who were, unlike me, raised in Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, or Primitive Baptist churches. He denied that the Curwen Effect raises the dead. He said that it was his opinion as a Biblical scholar that the reason for the shocking change in personality among people who've come back via the Curwen Effect is because it isn't their personality, their soul, that's animating that body. It's a demon pretending to be them.

I was waiting for that answer. So I asked him, all faux-innocently, if that wasn't the same thing that many Anglican ministers had said about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when it was a new technology? To my disappointment, he said he didn't know anything about that -- but it's true. But it's sort of an unfair comparison. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation doesn't involve dissolving the corpse in weird chemicals and baking it down to some kind of weird powder and then reciting some kind of weird incantation over it, or however exactly it is that they (don't) do it. Now, granted, the Anglicans ministers who condemned resuscitation were concerned about the Biblical passage that said that God breathed the soul into Adam. They were concerned that once the soul was breathed out by the last breath, it was blasphemous and possibly demonic for a human being to breathe a soul back into the body. From our 21st century vantage point, that looks silly and superstitious, like believing that the sun revolves around the Earth because the Bible says so, or believing that pi equals three for the same reason. But anyway, the Uniform Definition of Death Act was made a lot easier by the fact that in all of the known forms of resurrection, you have to start with something that you and I would clearly and unambiguously recognize as a dead body.

But that transition from live body to dead body is a philosophically interesting, and philosophically fraught one. If you're old enough to read this, then the body that you're using to scroll through this essay has no atoms in common with the body you were born with. We recognize that it's still you -- to the extent we do, and consistent with the Uniform Definition of Death Act -- because of continuity. We can trace the 3-D outline of you, for all that it changed over time, from when you were born to now, or at least we take it for granted that we could, or at least we take it for granted that you could. (Memory doesn't work that way, but we'll let that pass. This is a theoretical discussion.) If, to take an extreme and unlikely example, the Mi-Go were to surgically extract your brain and put it into one of their interstellar travel containers, we could still trace that brain's path through space and time from birth to when the canister started talking to us. If they took it out and put it back into the body, or even into another body, we could trace that path through time to you, and at no point would it pass through a completely unambiguously dead body. (So far as we know. It's not like we know how the Mi-Go do it, especially since nobody on Earth has seen a Mi-Go since they freaked out and abandoned the planet roughly 70 years ago.) But let's face it, some bodies are ambiguously dead. That's what the Terry Schiavo fight was about, after all. I suppose if it weren't disgusting, immoral, and illegal all three, somebody could have tried to resurrect Terry Schiavo and if that had failed, then we would have known she was dead! But that's circular reasoning. For now, suffice it to say that we "know" that there is a time, t. For time < t, the body is alive. For time > t, the body is dead. But what it is that changes in the body at time t that makes that change so different from all of the other changes the body undergoes in a lifetime, neither human science nor human philosophy nor human religion has anything really reliable and clear and trustworthy to say yet.

This is already getting too long. Tomorrow, time and Internet access permitting, I'll finish explaining the real reason why, in hindsight, I find Dr. Stormer's answer fascinating. Before I do that, I'll mention a certain rumored psychic ability that can be acquired by humans of batrachian descent that makes the "continuity" idea even more fraught, so don't bring it up yet; I've only left it out for now. And if I have time (because you knew I would), I'll even relate it to a recent news event, and to the War on Terror.

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Out of character: You all rock. If you came to this in the middle and are completely baffled, click on the "cthulhu" tag to see the previous essays in the series, or take my word for it that only some of the above, parts of the parts that relate to my personal history, are true, and the rest of the "facts" are from an alternate universe that takes the Cthulhu Mythos for granted. In particular, though, I want to especially thank arkhamrefugee and arachnophiliac, whose replies to yesterday's column just blew me away; I was still laughing maniacally an hour or more later. And in fact, if you read it early in the morning before there were many replies, go back to yesterday's journal entry and read all the replies, because with the exception of someone whom I shall mercifully not single out by name who unforgivably wanted to drag that plebian, shallow, and incompatible Anita Blake crap into a Cthulhu universe (you know who you are), all of the replies were just amazing.

The funny thing to me is that I wasn't at all proud of yesterday's entry. It was something I crapped out to meet my self-imposed deadline. I thought it was the second-weakest entry in the series. But I guess if you're the kind of person who reads my journal, it comes naturally to you to make up fake legal precedents and put them in the context of painfully similar American history while fitting them amazingly carefully into the Lovecraft canon. Which is a very long winded way of saying: you all rock. But I already said that.

A couple of months ago, there was an interesting 3-way dispute between the Army, a grieving mother, and one of the Internet email services, I forget if it was AOL or Yahoo or whatever. What it basically came down to was that her son had died in Iraq. The family wanted to be able to read his email, because it was all that they had left of him. As far as the online service was concerned, their terms of service did not allow this; without the permission of the deceased, they could not give anybody access to his private files. The family tried to claim that as his next of kin, they were now the legal owners of the files, and tried to drag the Army into it (if I remember correctly, which I might not) and the courts to try to make the online service bend.

So I've been wondering since then, off and on, why they didn't just ask the deceased? We know that there are well-documented spells and/or technologies for communicating with the dead. There are probably dozens of them, judging by the the long list of ones that we know about: the Curwen Effect, Re-Animation, the Ghoul effect, and the documented ability of many Necronomicon-trained sorcerors to possess the grave worms that have eaten their body and use them to reanimate the skin, just to name four that I can think of right off the top of my head. Sure, those techniques are all very much Forbidden Lore. And yes, the US is signatory to the International Occult Non-Proliferation Treaty; heck, President Coolidge authored the thing. But while US law forbids the use of occult lore derived from pre-human sources by unlicensed individuals, and while the treaty forbids its use by the US military as a weapon of war, as far as I know there's no reason why some licensed thaumaturge inside the US army couldn't have asked the late soldier if his mother could read his email.

Except, of course, that there's a perfectly good 1947 Supreme Court ruling that suggests that the online service wouldn't have to honor that answer: John Doe aka "Henry J. Ford" versus the Estate of Henry J. Ford, or as it's commonly known, "Ford" v Ford. When the reanimated corpse of Henry Ford showed up to contest the reading of the will, the estate counter-sued, asking the probate court to rule that Ford's death certificate was final. "Ford" argued that the law permits withdrawing death certificates in the event that the subject turned out not to be dead after all, such as when the attending physician mistakenly declares the subject legally dead and then they wake up. The probate court demurred, saying it didn't have authority to define death, so the case got kicked all the way up to the US Supreme Court.

By the time of Ford's death in 1947, worries about forbidden occult lore were really big news. (Of course, all the while Project Paperclip was still sneaking Nazi SS occult scientists into the US and providing them with new identities or white-washing their records inside US-occupied Germany. I don't care how badly the US needed to know what occult capabilities the Soviet Union might theoretically have had, the ends don't justify the means. Those guys inculcated into the US military thaumaturgical culture a tolerance for morally disgusting research on involuntary human subjects that lasted well into the 1960s. Even just talking about Sydney Gottlieb's MK-ULTRA project, the enemy within was more dangerous to Americans on American soil than the entire Communist bloc was. Is it fair to blame the CIA's coddling of Nazi occultists for MK-ULTRA? I think so. But anyway, I digress.) Because fears of foreign occult attacks and sneaky subversive occult subcultures was riding high (and, admittedly, because it was a fascinating legal topic I think), the US Supreme Court certified the case.

Anyway, the Supreme Court wisely turned down "Ford's" contention that a human being isn't really legally dead until both soul and memory are irretrievable, because it would require probate courts to prove a negative before even the simplest will could be executed. In the end, they left it to the state and local courts to establish the facts of death "in accordance with the commonly accepted usage of the term" (Justice Frankfurter, writing for the majority). Of course, that definition was so vague that it's lead to a huge number of subsequent court cases, challenging "re-animation" by every means from mouth-to-mouth to recovery from a coma after artificial life support to several occult technologies. The way the case law looks to me, by and large, if a technology derives from pre-human magical technology in any way instead of from post-Enlightenment technology, if there's even the faintest whiff of the Necronomicon or Cultes de Ghoules about how the person came to be disputing their own time of death, the courts have ruled against the deceased.

So even had some military or law enforcement spell caster been willing to step in to ask the dead soldier if his mom could read his email, I think the case law says that the online service provider wouldn't have been bound to accept that opinion. (Of course, for all I know the real reason that no licensed thaumaturge stepped in is that some of our so-called allies in the War on Terror, like Saudi Arabia, are even twitchier than we are about forbidden lore, so the US military is going out of their way not to remind our Arab partners that we maintain access to that technology.) Of course, I'm just a guy who follows the Supreme Court cases as a hobby, not an actual lawyer, so what do I know? In the meantime, it turned out to be a moot point; the family eventually did what everybody does when they need to retrieve information that a dead person password-locked, including Cantor-Fitzgerald after 9/11: they got together a bunch of friends and family of the deceased and kept making informed guesses until they cracked the password, safe in the knowledge that under the same "Ford" v Ford precedent, nobody was going to be able to come back from the grave to sue them for invasion of privacy.

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P.S. Unless I lose count, this is the seventh of my faux essays from an alternate universe where H.P. Lovecraft's stories were all part of the true history of the 1920s and the 1930s, and as a species the human race learned to deal with them as just one more thing that could go wrong, just like all of the other threats to human existence that we know of in the real world. You can use the "cthulhu" tag to to find the earlier ones, including my out-of-character explanations. Feel free to "play along" in character in the comments to any of these!

Yeah, I know, I have partial drafts of three or four books already in progress, but it occurred to me to wonder if I might have an idea for something actually easier to write, and possibly more commercial.

Sin City (which I wouldn't mind seeing again, hint hint) has me thinking about corruption in all of its forms, and the only reason I don't start right in on that topic is that in the last several weeks, while I was struggling with aphasia, I thought out a ton of material on the subject, and I hardly know where to start. But among other things, I've been: thinking about official corruption, thinking about my alternate-universe Cthulhu timeline, and reading Resume with Monsters. (Or re-reading it. I'm not sure. It was filed on a shelf that only contains books that I've already read, but I don't remember any of what I'm reading.) When those thoughts all collided during breakfast this morning, it occurred to me to wonder if I couldn't get a book out of the combination of things.

Imagine Carl Hiassen meets H.P. Lovecraft, set in eastern and southern Missouri. Take a character loosely based on my self-identity in that alternate universe, a lot like the guy who wrote the essay "It'll Never Work" about why he can't get hired as a licensed occult investigator. Now, give him a job as a security consultant, someone who does security audits for corporations. I imagine him as having a hard time finding work because he's too honest, he doesn't tell customers what they want to hear. (They want to hear that the threat to their business all comes from dark-colored strangers and low-level employees, and that they can fix all of these threats for good by a one-time purchase of some expensive gadget. They do not want to hear about professional employees ignoring policies they don't like, and executives embezzling from the company, or about garden-variety risks that have to be managed on an ongoing basis like fire safety.) So he freelances as an investigative journalist for weekly newspapers in the area.

So my thought is to make him a Miskatonic University flunk-out, someone who had to switch majors out of Occult Sciences and transfer to an easier school because he couldn't handle the foreign-language requirements. As a result, he's under constant FBI surveillance, and he knows it, and he plays games with the surveillance team just to lighten the daily boredom. Then he gets a lead on an investigative report he might be able to write about official corruption in the crack cocaine and methamphetamine business in the Missouri bootheal. He sets out looking for official corruption to report on, only to run afoul of a Missouri Highway Patrol occult investigator who doesn't like him, who's down there trying to "prove" that the drug trade is literally ghoulish. So an FBI field agent in Occult Investigations picks him up, and threatens him with extraordinary rendition, thinking that our hero has too many ties to the occult history and now he's in a suspected ghoul-dominated area. He persuades the FBI guy to investigate whether or not the Missouri state or local cops are honest, under the guise of an occult law enforcement investigation, and to bring him on as a temporary freelance consultant, which would lend our hero temporary legal status.

Frankly, it feels to me like all I'd really have to do is nail down in my head the details of the actual criminal conspiracy, what actual occult ties it had (I'm tempted to use the Curwen Effect). Once I get the actual villains, and the framed non-villains, worked out in my head it feels like it would almost write itself. It becomes an occult "buddy cop" story about a cynical private investigator and a too-honest FBI field agent in the sump of inbreeding and corruption that is eastern and southeastern Missouri, which after all these years of reading St. Louis Post-Dispatch exposés of the meth trade I'd hardly even have to research.

Normally, my attempts at writing fiction suck; I have a hard time with convincing dialog and characterization. But this almost feels like something I could actually pull off, no weirder or harder to imagine and write than many role-playing gaming scenarios I've written. I find myself wondering if I could actually finish a book like this, and if I did if it would sell?

OK, since I have readers who have an even higher Mythos Knowledge score than I do, I had better cover my butt on this one.

First of all, the background for people who aren't long-time readers. I have a series of alternate-universe essays, written by myself from an alternate time line in which H.P. Lovecraft's classic science fiction horror stories were not fiction published in Weird Tales, but were actual journalism. The world really is in danger from the Great Old Ones, and other cosmic terrors both extra-terrestrial and home-grown. There really are books of real magick out there that create horrific consequences for the reader and those around him. And everybody has known this for as long as they've known about machine guns, dynamite, poison gas, aerial bombardment, disease warfare, nuclear weapons, antibiotic-resistant germs, and all of the other things that might kill us off any day now. And yet, since it's just one more (in this case literally) damned thing, society learned to adapt and adjust, which is what I think would really have happened. Here's my longer introduction to the series, and here are my previous essays:

1. Say No to Shoggoth/Human Sex!
2. Cthulhu versus Spider-Man and the Justice League
3. It'll Never Work
4. 2005 Prediction: We Will Not Make Any More Contact with Extra-Terrestrial Life
5. Global Warming and the Interspecies Cold War

Now, someone is very likely to jump on me for the fact that my take on ghouls depends very heavily on a "fact" that H.P. Lovecraft never mentioned. So let me talk a little bit first about ghouls and what Lovecraft did say about them in his fiction. Ghouls aren't an invention of his, they're a pre-Islamic legend in the Arabian penninsula, one that shows up prominently in the Arabian Nights stories which were so influential over Lovecraft. In traditional folklore, they're just a form of evil faerie or degenerate demonic species that lives out in the desert, comes out only at night, and otherwise lives alongside the people of that part of the world.

Lovecraft had an obsession with cannibalism, among other sources of horror; in his fiction, there are at least three distinct degenerate species of creatures that were once human before their distant ancestors combined the practice of forbidden magic with a taste for human flesh. The only ones that recur in multiple stories though are the ghouls, best documented in the marvelous short story "Pickman's Model." But Lovecraft never actually explains why the ghouls are obsessed with human flesh, especially the flesh of famous dead people.

I saw a fantastic, wonderful extension of this in a Martin Greenberg anthology called Miskatonic University. I wish I could tell you the author and the story title, but my copy seems to have grown tentacles and snuck away. (Isn't that how it always goes with Cthulhu mythos fiction?) Anyway the premise of this story was that ghoulishness briefly became a fad among the "jazz set" on the Miskatonic campus during Prohibition, and it's the story of a father trying to separate his daughter from a bad crowd, but he doesn't know how bad. Anyway, the idea in that story was that by eating bits of people, living or dead, ghouls could take on their shapes and gain their memories. This made sense to me, and not just because I was prepared for it long ago by an excellent 1980 Ted Sturgeon short story called "Why Dolphins Don't Bite." That you can gain a person's powers or memories or shape by magic and cannibalism is one of the standard recurring themes of fairy tale and folklore.

So my interpretation is that what costs ghouls their looks and their shape, what gives them the ability that Lovecraft mentioned to squeeze themselves through the tiniest pipes and tunnels, is that they acquire the power of shapeshifting in part by becoming these rubbery, super-flexible things. I'm suggesting that once you've changed your shape, this new more flexible but much creepier shape is your default permanent shape. Since we know that a lot of Forbidden Magic was actually learned from other species' records in the library of the Great Race of Yith, I further imagine that this spell was created by intelligent dinosaurs, the fabled Serpent Men of Valusia, and that's why in humans it creates a permanent empathy disorder and a tendency towards sociopathy; it was intended to be performed by someone with a more reptillian brain. Of course, Lovecraft himself probably only mean the sociopathy to be the "obvious" result of addiction to human flesh, and the addiction to human flesh to be the "obvious" result of dabbling in pre-Christian religion and forbidden magic. But I like my explanation better.

The slow deaths last week of Terry Schiavo and Pope John Paul II really had the ghouls circling. And this time, I don't mean ghoulish people like that creepy Viennese archbishop who's been openly campaigning for the Papacy (in flagrant violation of canon law), or a certain notorious anti-abortion terrorism supporter, or a certain increasingly conservative long-time Democrat presidential candidate who's famous for a dubious bloody shirt. I mean the real ghouls.

Most people don't know that there's not really a ghoulrights community on LiveJournal, but they shouldn't be surprised. The ghoulish community never really had their own Stonewall, but ever since Lawrence v Texas implied that states can't impose morality laws any more, the ghouls have joined the polyamorists, polygamists, the sex-toy sellers, and everybody else who's trying to argue that they're not practitioners of a society-destroying vice, they're just an "alternative lifestyle" that harms no one and ought to be completely legal. (Edit: I see that they've not really finally creeped out LiveJournal.com management enough to get their little community deleted, presumably for advocating illegal magic. I'm not surprised. It doesn't invalidate my point, though.) Since what they advocate includes the legalization of civilian use of highly classified and highly dangerous Forbidden Magic, I'd be stunned if ghoulishness ever becomes both legal and socially accepted. (Of course, back in the 1970s I said the same thing about robust cryptography, so what do I know?)

Anyway, their latest little foray into bad taste has been that certain (obviously anonymous) members or supporters of the ghoul community spent the last week or two pushing a couple of "harmless" little proposals. As everybody knows, a ghoul is a former human being (or a descendant of former human beings) with a subterranean lifestyle, an extraordinarily hideous and almost liquidly flexible body shape, and a permanent nearly-uncontrollable craving for human flesh. Although the ghoul rights community denies this accusation, and points to a handful of known scholarly ghouls who are allegedly harmless, it's a well known fact that the (apparently dangerously simple) spell that turns a human into a ghoul not only involves cannibalism, but the first use of that spell permanently turns the spell caster into a sociopath, someone with a total empathy disorder, a complete inability to care about other people's feelings or pain except (in rare cases) in a theoretical or intellectual way. People turn themselves into hideous, flesh-eating freaks not just to renounce society, not just for kicks, but for the specific power it gives them: upon consuming a tiny bit of the deceased's flesh and performing the visualization or spell or whatever it is, they acquire the deceased's memories, and the ability to assume that person's shape for as long as they can maintain their concentration.

So imagine my disgust when I found out that the ghoulrights community was trying to contact Terry Schiavo's parents, the Schindlers, and and the office of governor Jeb Bush, to make an offer. They offered to settle the issue once and for all as to whether or not Terry Schiavo was able to form thoughts or memories for the last 17 years. They offered the Schindlers a chance to say goodbye to their daughter, and final closure. In other words, they offered to eat her. Being good Catholics on both sides of the 17-year fight over the disposition of the disintegrating mechanically animated corpse of Terry Schiavo, neither Michael Schiavo or his inlaws took them up on it, obviously. At least, dear gods, I hope not. Hopefully fate has been merciful, and someone intervened to keep them from even hearing about the offer. If you need any further proof that ghouls can't feel human feelings, that somebody thought this was a good idea should pretty much settle it in your mind.

So on top of that public relations "coup," the ghoulrights community took it one step further, saying it would be a terrible shame if the now-late Pope's remarkable gifts, and memories, and abilities were all lost to mankind. Knowledge and ability like his should be preserved, they argued. Besides, all it would take is the most tiny change in canon law (they claim) to have John Paul II remain Pope for centuries. That's right, they asked to eat him, too. The ghouls or ghoul-wannabes who chimed in on that thread seemed to think they were doing the college of cardinals a favor. No, not really.

It boggles my mind, sometimes, what people in alternative or underground communities think of as being likely to make them more popular.