I submitted "Breakwater" and soon heard back from H. David -- the story was accepted into the anthology, which would feature a cover by the brilliant artist Michael Bielaczyc and a reprint by the master himself, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", one of my all time Lovecraft favorites. Idolaters recently arrived in my mailbox, looking as beautiful if not more so than imagined. It was my pleasure to speak to many of my fellow authors in the Table of Contents, who shared the back-stories behind their stories.
Harding McFadden on "Casual Blasphemies": "Of all the various critters that Lovecraft littered his stories with, I suppose that my favorite have always been the inhabitants of Innsmouth. When I stumbled across the guidelines for this anthology, it seemed an obvious choice to try to write about them, and their forms of worship, as, to be quite honest, trying to wrap my mind around many of the other followers seemed to be quite beyond me. In a great old movie, a character says, ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’ I try to stay humble by knowing mine. As for the rest, you can blame an introduction that Robert W. Price wrote a decade ago for an Innsmouth collection. In it he states his belief that old Marsh might not have been a villain, but rather someone trying to make the best of an impossible situation. Coming at it from an atheist point of view, he saw the interbreeding of Innsmouthers with Deep Ones as a way to postpone, or even eliminate, the coming destruction of his people. From that beginning, I tried to imagine what a worship would look like then. It wouldn’t be something drastically different from any random church gathering, though with a different sort of gospel than we would use. To that, add in a bit of religious fanaticism, and eventual patricide, and there you have it. In truth, I forgot all about writing this story until a few hours before the deadline, so I started pounding my head against a wall while knocking it out with all haste. That it was purchased at all was an astounding thing to me. I hope that you all enjoy it."
DJ Tyrer on "Fane of the Faceless God": "Generally, cultists in mythos stories are portrayed as evil and crazed, which is fair enough, given that most such stories are told from the point of view of (relatively) sane humanity, and, indeed, it stands to reason that some such people will literally have had their minds broken by what they have learnt. But, just as not every terrorist or serial killer is some froth-mouthed loony, I am fascinated by the idea of cultists who are rational. Such people, like Celia in my story, would be perfectly capable of functioning within human society to further their plans. But, in addition, they do not see themselves as evil or insane, even though their actions and motivations might seem so to others. Just as the Great Old Ones are incomprehensible to mere humanity, functioning as they do on an entirely different scale, so the rational cultist functions on a different level to normal humans, making a meeting of minds all but impossible, yet tantalisingly close. Entities like the Great Old Ones produce a frisson of fear because they remind us of the limits of our knowledge and power. In contrast, those cultists who are a step beyond the human remind us that our humanity may be little more than a veneer and make us question just what makes us human."
Robert Krog on "The Ones Who Remember": "H. David Blalock told me about the Lovecraft homage anthology sometime back, probably in 2014 at one convention or another, I'm not sure which one. I told him I wasn't really a big fan of Lovecraft and that I wasn't all that familiar with his works. David is persistent though and asked me more than once to write a story for it. Since I'm a big fan of David and his work, I gave in sometime earlier this year. I'm not sure when or from whence the idea for the story came to me, but come it did. The villain of the piece was inspired by some of the lifeless partners for whom I worked back when I had an office job. I am sure that many of them were sociopaths or psychopaths that would have welcomed the coming of a Great Old One to destroy the world, aiding and abetting it in all ways that they could. There's something soul deadening about the pursuit of money and power and something maddening about the meticulous routine one must endure at times to pursue such. Thus the villain, Mr. Rains was born for my story. The heroine, Jessica, could be one of any number of lovely fangirls I've seen wandering conventions dressed in costume, combined with one of any number of competent office workers I've known. The rest was research. Lovecraft's work was equally inspiring. Challenged by my wife, I did personally test the bit about the duct tape. It works."
Jonathan Dubey on "Arms of the Gods": "I'm not going to lie and say I've read everything H.P. Lovecraft has ever written, though I know a lot of people have. I can with a clear conscience say that I've enjoyed what I've read. I've noticed patterns in his short stories; he almost always writes from first person point of view, almost always male, and almost never gives a character description or name of his protagonist. I believe that he did this in a way to make the reader feel like they were in the story, like, this guy could be me. I like the idea of making a reader feel like they're part of the action. In Idolaters of Cthulhu, we were asked to submit stories from the perspective of a villain -- someone wanting to bring about the evil from beyond. I wanted to do justice to Lovecraft's style, and still give you a story that you would care about and hopefully scare you a little. I chose to make the protagonist a woman, but keep the rest of the pattern. All that was left was motive. Why would someone choose to do these horrible things? In my mind there is only one true reason, one excuse: Love."
Amanda Hard on "Fatwa": "‘Somebody will always be incensed’ was the prompt one of my writing teachers sent out last spring. From that, I built a short tale of a writer who accidentally damned himself to Hell by channeling the lyric poetry of fallen angels. I worked on the seed idea for a few months, but I couldn’t resolve what seemed to be the injustice of the poet’s fate. I found my solution when I considered what might happen if Lovecraft’s Starry Wisdom cult survived into today; if its followers accepted predestined paths determined by a significantly ‘higher’ power. A fatwa, in Islam, is a legal ruling for a specific case, similar to a Supreme Court decision, but not actually legally binding. The ruling is left up to the individual to accept or dismiss, based on his or her faith and moral compulsions. In this story I wanted to question both destiny and faith, to swap them around and investigate whether either one is behind the actual mechanism of art-making. While I think it’s something of a cheat to have one’s protagonist ‘accidentally’ call up the Great Old Ones (almost always through his or her incredibly irresponsible decisions and general negligence) I do sympathize with my character’s obsession with notating the music of the cosmic spheres and anticipating the terrible promise of a future of his own making."
E. Dane Anderson on "The Meat Junkies": "The original idea for ‘The Meat Junkies’ came about one late night while driving a friend home. Elliot Avenue in Seattle is an odd mix of light industrial, fast food places and a lot of other assorted businesses, almost none of which are open at night. The near quarter-mile stretch of street can be quite deserted after dark. At the south end of the road is an oddly placed ice cream shop, situated nowhere near decent parking, and like the rest of the area totally deserted at night. My friend and I asked each other if either of us had ever seen the shop open. We hadn’t. I quickly joked that it must be a front for something. My friend immediately said ‘aliens!’ And taking a cue from the old Peter Jackson film, Bad Taste I upped the ante and said that it was a secret way station for aliens who were trading in human meat. After I had dropped her off, the story started to form in my head. The aliens became Shoggoths with all their human loathing characteristics. The setting changed slightly to a much bleaker type of urban decay landscape. And in the forty minutes it took me to drive home, I had the rest of the story outline worked out. Originally, it would have ended with a black-ops team showing up and using a spray chemical to disintegrate the Shoggoths. But in keeping with the Lovecraftian tradition, I thought it best that the humans lose."
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