Book Review

She Walks in Shadows ed. by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles

H.P. Lovecraft was a creepy dude who wrote creepy stories that made a permanent mark on horror and pop culture. His most famous legacy is a series of stories that makes up the Cthulhu Mythos.

In Lovecraft’s world, the universe is populated with bizarre and all-powerful beings (one of which is Cthulhu) who regard us as more insignificant than ants.

Heroes in Lovecraft who learn of our true place in the universe almost always go insane from the revelation.

In real life, of course, readers have dealt with the horror of Cthulhu by turning him into this adorable toy puppet.

adorable plush green Cthulu puppet

Lovecraft had very confusing relationships with women during his life, and women are largely absent from his stories. The short story anthology She Walks in Shadows is a collection of stories inspired by Lovecraft’s style and mythos. All these stories are by and about women. The new viewpoint makes the Lovecraftian sub-genre fresh and exciting. There’s absolutely nothing romantic about it, but if you want a nice change of pace that incorporates intersectional feminism and horror just in time for Halloween, this is your jam.

This collection has adventure and horror, sex, violence, and some very dark humor. The one thing missing from this anthology is any romance – that’s not surprising, since the Lovecraft style is not terribly conducive to romance. There are examples of lust, and there are crushes (including lust between men and women, women and women, and men and men), but there aren’t any romantic relationships that I would describe as truly loving.

While romantic love is absent, there are several examples of close relationships between mothers and daughters. In my favorite story, “Eight Seconds,” an Australian rodeo rider named Sam has a terrible relationship with her daughter, Lulu. Lulu hates that her mom is a rodeo rider because she constantly has to worry that her mom will be killed. Sam, who is not the most expressive soul on earth, can’t explain why she loves rodeo riding so much, and she can’t express tenderness or affection to Lulu because she believes that toughness is essential to survival. Ultimately Lulu runs away to find solace with a cult that worships The Great Mother. When Lulu, who is understandably hysterical, babbles, “The Great Mother loves me. She gave me a job. I’m the Mother’s goat girl. Somebody’s got to look after the goats” Sam’s response is so perfect, so utterly immune to drama, that I started laughing even in the midst of my anxiety: “Well, the Great Mother can get herself another goat girl,” she says, right before she starts kicking ass.

A story like “Eight Seconds” works so well because it works on more than one level. On one level, you have some basic Lovecraftian tropes (scary cultists who worship an even scarier monster) that satisfy a Lovecraft fan’s desire for those kinds of images (The Great Mother is scary as shit). On another level, it surprises by using the tropes in a new way – the setting (Australia), the characters (instead of fragile Victorian males, we get a very tough woman and her ally, a rodeo clown), and the theme (what does it mean to be a good mother?).

The final level on which the story works is that it tackles a universal theme with flawed but relatable characters. These characters and their conflict would work just as well in a story without supernatural elements. The characters have clear motivations – the daughter is barely introduced, but we can understand her desire for safety, stability, and love, and that makes us care about her even as we recognize her immaturity. Meanwhile, Sam is flawed in ways that become strengths when faced with an unusual situation – the same qualities that make it hard for her to be a tender, affectionate, ‘normal’ mother are the very qualities that make her resourceful and impossible to intimidate when the chips are down. The story is concise and tight and so perfect that I want to print it out and frame it. It’s the story in this anthology that keeps coming back into my head, and that’s largely because it’s so perfectly character-driven (and also scary).

Although “Eight Seconds” is my favorite story, it’s not the only good story – in fact, this is a remarkably even anthology in terms of quality. All the stories are solid. Some are direct re-workings of specific Lovecraft stories. For instance, in the terrifying story “Violet is the Color of Your Energy,” we get the point of view of the farmer’s wife from the Lovecraft Story “The Color Out of Space.” The story “Turn Out The Light: A re-imagining of the life and death of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft” is so horrifying that I had to walk away from the anthology for a while – it’s not scary or gory; it’s horrifying and suffused with dread and empathy. There are stories set in Ancient Rome, and stories set in modern day laboratories and high schools, and a surprising story set in a kind of alternate universe church where high school girls volunteer to clean demonic altars. “Hairwork” tackles the legacy of slavery and “The Adventurer’s Wife” takes on colonialism and the idea of the white explorer.

The stories have diverse characters in diverse situations, but they share that common Lovecraftian atmosphere of dread and wrongness. Most of them aren’t scary like a jump scare is scary. They are horrifying in the sense that there is so much wrongness. Lovecraft was a master at conveying the idea that things are just not right, and that this not-rightness is all that is required to cause characters so much distress that they go crazy. The writers in this anthology do a great job of running with the idea of not-rightness.

This is a great anthology for Halloween, as long you are in the mood for horror as opposed to romance. As a bonus, the anthology is illustrated with drawings that run from grotesque to adorable. I had a great time reading this although it’s just barely possible that I slept with the light on one night. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to eat all the candy I bought for trick-or-treaters (I shop early and often) while I read “Eight Seconds” again.

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She Walks in Shadows by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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  1. Lostshadows says:

    I have so many cuddly Lovecraftian horrors. 🙂 I swear the Moonbeast is the cuddliest thing on the planet. (Really disturbing if you’re familiar with them from Lovecraft’s work.)

  2. jimthered says:

    I am a massive Lovecraft fan (and, like Lostshadows, have lots of Lovecraftian plushies — also statuary and so, so many games). I’ll be checking out this story collection.

    And for those interested in some of the best Lovecraft original stories, the collection BLOODcurdling TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE (even if it lacks “Herbert West, Re-Animator).

  3. MirandaB says:

    I plan to get this when it comes out.

  4. I am really excited about this book. I’ve tried to adapt Lovecraft for the screen more than once and the truth is that he’s tricky. Not only are his stories almost entirely devoid of female characters, but his protagonists are often frustratingly opaque. I’ve often wondered if the trouble with cosmic horror is that it dwarfs human emotions and makes them seem pointless, rendering character wants and needs–romance included–insignificant.

  5. Varian Rose says:

    This sounds amazing.

  6. Maura says:

    I attended Necronomicon 2015 in Providence a few months ago. One of the editors of this anthology, Silvia Moreno Garcia, was a panelist; she moderated a whole panel around the topic of women writers in weird fiction, and it was terrific. She mentioned she is likely to do another one of these and is looking for even more writers of color to include. Given HPL’s jawdropping racism and complicated relationships with women, it’s really exciting and a little transgressive to see great work like this coming out of the literary seeds he planted.

  7. Liviania says:

    I was super excited about this anthology until I learned that RequiresHate had a story in it. As I’m personally not buying any of her work, I’ll just hope that the other stories get reprinted elsewhere as short stories tend to do.

  8. cleo says:

    Can’t resist the chance to share The Toast’s Texts from H P Lovecraft – http://the-toast.net/2015/08/24/texts-from-h-p-lovecraft/

  9. Pandora Hope says:

    Ah, love is a many-tentacled thing! Carrie S, many thanks for your awesome review of ‘Eight Seconds’; totally blew me away and can’t express how delighted I am that you so deeply understood and empathised with the characters and the story:)(still jumping up and down like the Great Mother Goat herself!)

  10. Madge says:

    If you’re looking for a Lovecraft-ian love story, look no further than Ed Brubaker’s “Fatale” noir comic book series published by Image Comics. The series is a brilliant mix of (film) noir tropes – including a femme fatale named Josephine, amnesia, cults, obsessive love, and a violent, claustrophobic setting that would make Cornell Woolrich proud – and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The series is illustrated by Sean Phillips, and is a beautiful, sophisticated, adult graphic novel.

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