And having a hell of a time keeping one eye on the skyline

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Oh, right, and I read the trade paperback of Alan Moore's Neonomicon (2010), which did not impress me. It wasn't the rape scenes, although there is a substantial duration of them (the book opened to one when I picked it up). It was the fact that if I want Lovecraftian body horror—if I want sex with Deep Ones, unimaginable, mind-breaking violation, congress with things that are nothing so comprehensible as callous human predators and that leave their object waiting coolly for nothing more than the hastening obliteration of a world which allows these and so many other atrocities to occur—I can pick up any of a dozen issues of Sirenia Digest and get it done better. I'm not being shown anything I haven't thought of. Ditto the sex cult whose ultimate goal is the birth of the apocalypse, because I have seen horror films made in the '70's. If there was some kind of meta-commentary going on—an indictment of Lovecraft fandom, the reduction of women in horror to their sexual physiology—I missed it. Mostly I was left wanting to read some Caitlín R. Kiernan or Gemma Files. Or e-mail Paula Guran and ask her to edit, for real, that anthology of weird erotica that was batted around after the panel at Readercon 2012. The point here is not a-ha! I am too edgy for Alan Moore!; I don't have time for that kind of nail-buffing weirdo pride any more than I think I should get a British history pat on the back because I liked George VI before The King's Speech (2010). It was just the blank, slightly nonplussed feeling of picking up something acclaimed and putting it down in confirmed knowledge of the fact that there is better cosmicist fishsex in this world.

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So circling back to tentacles, if the mood Alan Moore wants to instill in the reader by the story's end is a devastating, dreadful nihilism, the utter insignificance and condemnation of the human race that deserves every aeon of devouring by great Cthulhu dreaming and unborn, a woman getting raped by some orgone-high cultists and their scaly-cocked pet Deep One is not going to do it for me. Especially when the sex is used as an illustration of the horror: that overturns nothing about Lovecraft's world, examines no new angle. If the entirety of the emotional effect is intended to rest in the fact that the comic went there, then there is going to have to be somewhere intrinsically as empty and incomprehensible as the careless stars of Lovecraft's cosmos. There in Neonomicon was where far too many women in horror fiction end up. And so we're back to me feeling that I have seen this story before and I've seen it better, when I think instead I was supposed to feel I'd been put through a wringer of what my favorite author really means. Here's all the racism you didn't notice, the sexuality that squirms out sideways in the horror of damp sea-caves and slime. Here is the ultimate end of his philosophy: a brutalized woman gladly birthing the end of all things. Okay, then. That's an interpretation. But it isn't much of a revelation. And this is Lovecraft, all right? "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Revelations that destroy are his stock-in-trade. You can't pull that off in your modernization, your meta-level has failed. And I have not been confronted by anything new.