The Shoggoth Concerto

[ecosophia]

...is now available for sale from Founders House Publishing, and sellers of eldritch tomes everywhere.  Here's the cover blurb: 

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In the Shadow of Hob's Hill...

 

Brecken Kendall doesn't plan on becoming a composer. She also doesn't expect to encounter one of the eldritch realities H.P. Lovecraft borrowed for his weird fiction. A sophomore at Partridgeville State University on the edge of the New Jersey pine barrens, she’s trying to leave behind the bitter memories of her childhood and get a degree in music education. Lovecraft?  He’s just one of the authors discussed in a class she’s taking that semester, where she learns about the polymorphous monsters called shoggoths.  Those are nothing but an old legend, she thinks...until a young shoggoth, traumatized by a night of fire and death, appears in the kitchenette of the converted garage where Brecken lives.

 

A lucky chance—or is it more than that?—allows Brecken to communicate with the creature, and she decides to give it the food and shelter it so desperately needs. Over the weeks that follow, an unlikely bond grows between them. Brecken will need all the help the creature she nicknames Sho can give her, for her plans for her future are shattered by the awakening of an unexpected talent for music composition; her selfish and abusive boyfriend is seeking power in strange tomes of eldritch lore; the secret organization that annihilated all but one of the shoggoths under Hob’s Hill is still hunting for survivors of that terrible night; the living darkness the old books name Nyogtha, The Thing That Should Not Be, is weaving its own cryptic plans—and from beyond the boundary where curved time meets angular time, the terrible Hounds of Tindalos have scented their prey..
 

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It's not your usual fantasy novel; it's not even your usual Cthulhu mythos novel. It's a strange and lyrical tale about love, death, classical music...and shoggoths. Interested? Pick up a copy here.

Comments

Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, yes, Brecken's boyfriend is a grade-A cad. And I still marvel that anyone in a culture that's been steeped in science-fiction for over a century should freak at nonhuman alien life forms. Especially since the s/f of my youth pounded the theme of anti-intolerance very, very hard indeed, and the ones slightly earlier had some delightful, totally nonhuman alien characters.

BTW, thanks for the Old English derivation of "eldritch." It makes excellent sense.

Possible spoiler alert - stop here?

The state of the music program at Partridge High - is that a deliberate plot by you-know-who to ruin music for everyone? Or is it simply the barren heavy-handedness of programs run by distant bureaucrats with no field knowledge whatsoever?

Or why my children took band in school and enjoyed it, but are getting private music lessons for their children. Sports likewise, I might add.

Pat, in a land of sunshine, flowers, slapdash service, schedules a mere suggestion, and lotus-eating comfort.

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear it. A couple of notes:

a) Jay Olmsted was modeled on the leading figures in half a dozen of the more lurid bad-boyfriend stories told by women I know. Remarkably, there was a lot of common ground; I gather that it's a type.

b) I have no idea if my fictional Professor Boley's theory about the origins of the word "eldritch" is true or not, but I never found the standard dictionary definition plausible.

c) It's not you-know-who, in any direct sense. It's simply what happens when you get a society that by and large accepts the values of you-know-who -- and of course it's also part of one of the underying themes of the novel, the conflict between the rigid conformity of a supposedly "progressive" mass culture and individual creative visions that don't "progress" in the right direction.

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

Look up “Game” sometime. It’s a theory that to get sex a young man needs to be rude to the woman he’s pursuing. They insist it works. If it does, it’s probably because salary-class males are taught to be ashamed to show strength when dealing with women, and of course we all like a strong, kind, thrifty etc. gent with no bad habits!

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[ecosophia]

I've encountered that in my research trips into alt-right territory, somewhere off past the hopping green frogs and the anime cuties in Nazi uniforms. I suspect that it does indeed work, as the cult of mandatory niceness in today's culture has produced certain patterns of male behavior that, as a fair number of my female friends tell me, are the opposite of sexually attractive.

But the character Jay Olmsted isn't using "Game." He's simply your common or garden variety, infinitely self-centered young male jerk.

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t see too much of the salary class anymore. What are the unattractive patterns of behavior?

One thing about young men that would turn me off if I were a young lady is how feminine most of them are. I mean physically feminine. Compare pictures of today’s young men to pictures of the young men who were fighting WW II. I imagine 60-some years of dosing livestock with powerful female hormones, with the meat then sold for human consumption, has a lot to do with that.

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[ecosophia]

I should probably ask my female readers to chip in here, as they'll have a much longer and more detailed list than I will. The thing that I've heard repeatedly, though, are a squishy-soft "nice boy" affect, kind of the emotional equivalent of the Pillsbury doughboy.

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

Sound off, please, young ladies! (I’m an old lady, in a few months I will be even older! 🎂)

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, so I don't date anymore but I used to and so I've dealt with a lot of this behavior and it's annoying. Basically, most of the men who adopt this persona are just refusing to grow up. There is a very childlike affect to their demeanor, which makes any woman getting involved very certain that she's going to be dealing with an emotional baby. I would argue that this behavior *isn't* feminine, femme, or what have you. It's childish. I've slept with a lot of femme guys, and they were confidant, hard, and adult.

That said, often with the guys who have the ruthless and rude affect, the same hold true. They often seem like they're an infantile bully. I find this also to be a major turn off. I've slept with a fair amount of butch guys, and they were considerate, adult and tender.

There are definitely women though who are into both sorts of bad behavior. Don't ask me why!

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with this, it's not about masculine vs feminine but about mature vs immature. Some women go for immature men because they think they'll be the one in charge in such a relationship - learning the hard way that if your partner is a spoiled brat who's stronger than you you'll cater to his whims, not shape him according to your own ideals.

I remember once reading the theory that this type of man is the result of patriarchy adapting to feminism without really changing. It used to be that men were in charge and thus had all the responsibility, which made them have to be hard-working and decisive if they wanted respect. Then feminism came along but mainly succeeded in assigning more work and responsibilities to women without fundamentally dismantling male power over women, so that now many men are all too happy letting women do all the high-responsibility work while enjoying a kind of perpetual teenagerhood themselves, doing nothing, being nothing, and presenting this as a "progressive" mindset. I still think feminism has achieved (and continues to achieve) important progress for women, but there's more than a grain of truth to this as well.

Re: Yes! Got it last night.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a story by Ernest Hemingway, called "Summer People" that depicts a squishy male, "Odger," who earns nothing but contempt from the woman he desires. The Hemingway character in the story, who mildly mistreats her, also beds her the same night. This "fictional" story was actually thinly disguised memoir. The characters' counterparts in real life, including "Odger," were all too easy to identify and the story, which was a bit too explicit about a certain form of sexual intercourse, didn't appear in the early editions of "The Nick Adams Stories." You can find it in more current editions.

[ecosophia]

BTW, one of my readers tried to post something here regarding a spluttering critique of HP Lovecraft's influence on video games, and for some reason it got eaten by Dreamwidth. If you're the person who sent that, and happen to read this, can you please resend it? I'd be happy to respond...

Spluttering Critique

[(Anonymous)]

Hi John
I went on a dream quest for the lost spluttering critique figuring that shoveling “racism Lovecraft video games” into a search engine’s firebox would return a short list. Yeah, wrong. Vice has both mouth froth and thoughtful comments… and it led me to Lovecraft Country by Ruff. Hmm…
Anyway - if you would forgive my well-worn soapbox, may I suggest using new historicism as an analytic tool for the anti-HPL snarkum from the politically and academically fashionable. Vesser’s Second Law pops off the page for me… “every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes”…
What do you and your eldrich readers of antediluvian origin think?
Rusty

Re: Spluttering Critique

[ecosophia]

"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Splutterings" has a certain naive charm! Yeah, beating up on Lovecraft is quite the contact sport these days; I get the impression that most of the people who do it have literally never read an issue of a pulp magazine from the between-the-wars period, and I'm not sure how many of them have actually read anything Lovecraft wrote, much less processed his deep ambivalence about his own ethnic background and his constant return to the theme of "you are the thing you fear." New Historicism is a useful tool for those who are willing to consider the possibility that they're wrong, but I'm not sure how widespread that willingness is these days.

Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[(Anonymous)]

At its root, apart from your ongoing "X' meets the Old Ones, joins Our Side, is the time-honored "Misunderstood genius battles pettiness of the opposition, triumphs." Because Brecken is shown as a genius on the order of Mozart, not just as a talented composer who happens to like Baroque. I did like your cameo of the traditional music underground, and of course the comedy played out for Darren's parents.

Re: the number of hard-faced, discontented forced-to-be-fashionable women in your sagas and in RL, I saw a community theater production of Mamma Mia in which the middle-aged women stole the show. Fat, forty, rocking out with great energy and enjoyment and quite overshadowing the juvenile-sounding bride-to-be. Being community theater, they cast real people for real roles, not Hollywood glamorpusses.

Personal note: one of the great blessings of old age is that nobody expects you to be fashionable.

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[ecosophia]

Hmm? No, Brecken Kendall's not a genius. She's a good talented composer whose inspiration comes from the Baroque. I'm not sure where you got the impression that she was a Mozartesque genius; that's not either expressed or implied by the story. (Mozart was composing fine pieces when he was a child; Brecken had most of a decade of music study before she wrote her first, reasonably successful piece.)

I'm perfectly well aware that there are middle-aged women who aren't hard-faced and discontented; Miriam Akeley, an important figure in The Weird of Hali, is one of them. I've simply met a lot of middle-aged women who are hard-faced, discontented, and force themselves to be fashionable.

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I figured her for a genius because she blew all her music professors away with her works, except the ones tightly wedded to other genres. (Post-spectralism?)

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[ecosophia]

Talk to some working professors sometime! Getting an undergraduate who's reasonably talented and works hard is, according to those I know, a red-letter day. Professor Toomey at Partridgeville State says that her composition is the best piece of undergraduate work he's seen in ten years -- given that it's a midsized public university in New Jersey with a small composition program, that's not exactly a star-studded compliment. The audition committee at Miskatonic is impressed by her musicianship more than her compositions, and that's something that comes out of her obsessive practicing (as noted in the story), not genius. As for June Satterlee, she's favorably impressed by Brecken's bourree in B flat for the same reason Carson Toomey was -- it's a fine piece of undergraduate work, noticeably better than the run of the mill.

As for "postspectralism," I didn't want to pick on any of the currently fashionable art music styles more than any of the others, so I invented one to serve as a stand-in. It could have been any of them, of course.

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[(Anonymous)]

Hear hear!

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[(Anonymous)]

My “hear hear!” was for that when you’re old you don’t have to be fashionable; not sure how it ended up way down here!

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[ecosophia]

I figured that was it. When conversations take off on a Dreamwidth thread, comment and response can be miles apart!

Re: Finished Concerto. Trope alert -

[(Anonymous)]

I... don't think you read the same book I did. JMG shows Brecken as struggling with some of her compositions, failing to achieve what she wanted with the music and needing feedback to improve the pieces, as well as needing to put time and work into her successful comnpositions. That's not "a genius on the order of Mozart".

I've also only seen two hard-faced, discontented, fashionable women in JMG's fiction --- Aunt Lisette in Kingsport, and Lucy Wegener in Shoggoth Concerto. The majority of his female characters are none of the above.

I stand corrected

[(Anonymous)]

Knowing very little about music except to listen to it. But, yes, the long hours of practice are certainly the key. Thanks for enlightening my ignorance.

State of Education

[lieven]

Great story. I look forward to the second movement. I know next to nothing about music so I had to look up bourree. Coincidence that according to WP it originated in Averoigne? For the view on current education, have you by any chance read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? He even uses music as a metaphor for how bad the situation is.

Re: State of Education

[ecosophia]

Thank you! Presumably WP said the bourree originated in Auvergne -- the province of Averoigne doesn't actually exist. (It was invented by the writer Clark Ashton Smith as a setting for some fine spooky medieval fantasy stories.) As for Lockhart's essay, no -- I'll have to go looking for it.

personal reaction

[(Anonymous)]

Just got the book delivered unto my hands yesterday and Could. Not. Put. It. Down. Really lovely story and main characters that truly touched and spoke to my heart. Wanted to start re-reading it immediately after I hit the end (resisted since it was 4am). Accurate & appealing cover, too. Made my day after a painful week - along with the Lovage seeds I got in the same mail. (I expect I'd prefer Lovage to Lovecraft.)
[almost 62yo female gardener & Bujold fan; reads fiction for escape & comfort; never read this genre before but definitely considering getting the weird of Hali series now]
SW in CO

Re: personal reaction

[ecosophia]

Thank you -- I'm delighted to hear that you enjoyed it. It's very much my own favorite of my novels so far.