more on your Doorstep

Thinking again about 'The Thing on the Doorstep' has caused me to re-read it again since this post. Luckily all HPL's stories are eminently repeatable and I found myself gulping the story down in a local café as greedily as I did my tea and cake. If not more so!

One thing that I'd somehow not picked up on, when I was focussing more on the body-swap, were the connections to 'the Cthulhu Mythos'. There is the mention of three infamous books, including the Necronomicon - indeed, it's that eldritch tome which contained the spell making body-swap sorcery possible. But in one info-packed passage, a raving Edward Derby mentions hideous (and to HPL fans, familiar) creatures:

"Dan - for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! [..] Ia! Shub-Niggurath! [..] The Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!' [..] in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins [..] I saw a shoggoth - it changed shape...."

This is shocking indeed! In the winter of 1930-31 Miskatonic University, that educational body unrivalled in its pursuit of arcane knowledge, financed an expedition to Antarctica, as related in 'At the Mountains of Madness' - with horrific results. For woken up by the expedition were the shoggoths - frightful creatures which, long ago, had been (we learn) the slave race of those great explorers The Old Ones. (in a favourite passage of mine it is related these shoggoths "were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys"). And yet here they are, dredged up by a human cult somewhere in America!

Did they tunnel there way across subterranean space, or did the cult/s somehow summon them with magic, in the way they apparently got the weird objects Derby showed his friend - "These things, he said, came "from outside"; and his wife knew how to get them."

Shub-Niggurath herself is mainly mentioned in what has been variously called 'the revisions' or 'the collaborations', i.e the stories HPL wrote or rewrote (with varying degrees of input) for other writers. We only know she is a 'she' due to references of her giving birth to other horrors - she is "the goat with a thousand young". It is a priest of Shub-Niggurath who is cursed, in 'Out of the Aeons', to life as a mummy due to presuming to seek her aid in worldly affairs. Other than this, we don't really know much about her.

There are also references to the town of Innsmouth and families such as the Gilmans, previously referred to in 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' - in which we discover that the inhabitants of that town are not shunned by their neighbours towns without reason! Indeed there is a tantalisingly awful hint of just how connected Asenath is with the fish-like inhabitants of that weird place when we read that, at the time she was possessed or swapped by/with her father Ephraim, she was a "trusting, weak-willed, half-human child" (my emphasis). Fishy indeed!

"Kamog! Kamog!" as far as I know is original to this story, being the name the cult gave to Ephraim, or knew him by. As for who or what 'the Hooded Thing' was, we can only guess. Was it Shub-Niggurath herself, or some manifestation thereof?

At the risk of sounding lazy, I must admit I first turned to the 'New Annotated' to see if there were any notes about Shub-Niggurath and what stories she was mentioned in, but there was none. There is an appendix in Vol. 1 with the genealogy of the Elder Races but it doesn't index all the times they are mentioned or appear. When I next read HPL's mythos stories I shall have to take notes!