So I have just been shown a review of Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, edited by Lynne Jamneck and forthcoming from Dark Regions Press. According to Alison Lang in Rue Morgue Magazine:
The crown jewel in this collection is "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" by Sonya Taaffe, which opens with a female descendant of the legendary Waite family attempting to drown herself in a decrepit bathroom. Told from the perspective of Anson, a proudly queer "child of Innsmouth," the story lovingly describes the fishy attributes of his kin with language more poetic than Lovecraft himself could have imagined. "Over the warm rosewood of her skin, the faint olive tinting of her nascent scales shone like the patina on bronze," begins one passage. Taaffe's story turns the tables on the Lovecraftian skill of describing the ineffable, the awful and the unimaginable and makes it deliriously lovely and wholly human. Through her tale, she affirms that anything can happen when new voices are permitted to run wild in Lovecraft's realm of fearful symmetries. And that's why Dreams from the Witch House deserves to be read—widely.
I will talk more about this story when it is more widely available, but everyone who knows me can be shocked, shocked that I read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and sympathized instantly with the sea-people, the shape-changers, the inheritors of the sea-city that glimmers at the bottom of the narrator's dreams: "Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions." Of course I write of their metamorphosis with envy and admiration: I have singularly failed to grow scales for most of my life, though I taught myself to swim in the Atlantic with my eyes open to the salt. It didn't occur to me until just now, but there are ways in which this story is probably in dialogue with Splash (1984) as well as Lovecraft. I have wanted sea-change as long as I can remember. I have been disappointed, and hence "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts."
(Anson is queer, and Jewish, in part because it would have distressed Lovecraft, but also because I am. My fish people will be intersectional or they will be bullshit.)
The e-book is currently available as part of the Cthulhu Mythos E-Book Bundle; the print version hits shelves and doorsteps later this month. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Tamsyn Muir, CaitlĂn R. Kiernan, Gemma Files, Amanda Downum, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Storm Constantine, and R.A. Kaelin among others, with illustrations by Daniele Serra that remind me favorably of Stephen Gemmell's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It is worth your time.
I should go to bed now, but I'm pretty happy.
The crown jewel in this collection is "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" by Sonya Taaffe, which opens with a female descendant of the legendary Waite family attempting to drown herself in a decrepit bathroom. Told from the perspective of Anson, a proudly queer "child of Innsmouth," the story lovingly describes the fishy attributes of his kin with language more poetic than Lovecraft himself could have imagined. "Over the warm rosewood of her skin, the faint olive tinting of her nascent scales shone like the patina on bronze," begins one passage. Taaffe's story turns the tables on the Lovecraftian skill of describing the ineffable, the awful and the unimaginable and makes it deliriously lovely and wholly human. Through her tale, she affirms that anything can happen when new voices are permitted to run wild in Lovecraft's realm of fearful symmetries. And that's why Dreams from the Witch House deserves to be read—widely.
I will talk more about this story when it is more widely available, but everyone who knows me can be shocked, shocked that I read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and sympathized instantly with the sea-people, the shape-changers, the inheritors of the sea-city that glimmers at the bottom of the narrator's dreams: "Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions." Of course I write of their metamorphosis with envy and admiration: I have singularly failed to grow scales for most of my life, though I taught myself to swim in the Atlantic with my eyes open to the salt. It didn't occur to me until just now, but there are ways in which this story is probably in dialogue with Splash (1984) as well as Lovecraft. I have wanted sea-change as long as I can remember. I have been disappointed, and hence "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts."
(Anson is queer, and Jewish, in part because it would have distressed Lovecraft, but also because I am. My fish people will be intersectional or they will be bullshit.)
The e-book is currently available as part of the Cthulhu Mythos E-Book Bundle; the print version hits shelves and doorsteps later this month. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Tamsyn Muir, CaitlĂn R. Kiernan, Gemma Files, Amanda Downum, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Storm Constantine, and R.A. Kaelin among others, with illustrations by Daniele Serra that remind me favorably of Stephen Gemmell's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It is worth your time.
I should go to bed now, but I'm pretty happy.
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