Invocation

A young Wiccan man invokes one of the Old Gods into a shopping mall Santa.

Jake walked out of the hospital into a raw, sleeting December afternoon. He shivered, buried his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and hunched against the cold. He needed to walk. If it were warmer he’d walk for miles and miles until the Earth beneath the pavement took his grief and his worry and held them. Instead he went to the mall.

He felt out of place there, with its fluorescent lights and piped-in Christmas music. Looked out of place, too, with his blue hair, Doc Martin boots, and an enormous pentacle painted on the back of his jacket. …

What Lovecraft Feared
A look at Winter Tide and Deep Roots by Ruthanna Emrys

Between 1931 when the story was written and 1936 when it was published, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. By 1941 the Nazi death camps were incinerating Jews by the millions, and in ’42 President Roosevelt authorized the mass arrest of 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them American citizens. As with the residents of Innsmouth, there were no trials, no definite charges, and they were held incommunicado in concentration camps for years. ...

What prescience was it that allowed Lovecraft to write such an apt and chilling metaphor for the internment of Japanese Americans?

What Lovecraft Feared
A look at The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

As someone who loves the descriptive prose and unabashed romanticism of Lovecraft’s stories, I am heartened by a handful of writers working within the mythos today who, instead of trying to wipe away the racism have faced it head-on, holding it up to a mirror to show us its backward reflection. ...

If we live our lives in a small circle of firelight surrounded by a bulwark against the darkness and chaos beyond, then it may not matter if the chittering voices in the shadows come from space aliens, infernal demons, or — as in “The Horror at Red Hook” — illegal immigrants. Fear of the unknown is easily transferable.