Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 assignment for 7th August 2010: “Final Creative Task”.
“Your long-term assignment — the end to our expedition — is to create your own Lovecraftian composition. It can be a short story, a poem, or some other creative work that expresses your personal interpretation of the genre.”
TASK TWELVE: 7th August 2010.
THE MONOLITHS UNDER THE SEA.
Being a new Lovecraftian tale and a prequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu”.
Download the printable PDF file + 35-minute audio-book reading (33Mb, .zip file).
My new short story has been crafted for the Vacation Necronomicon School. It is constructed around a scaffolding made of appropriated public-domain materials. These date from between 1859 and 1893 — one unpublished letter, a magazine article, and two hardly-known short stories by very obscure authors (full details at the end of the story). I have blended these sources together, generally rewritten sections, tinkered, cut ruthlessly, rearranged, and have added my own words to fill any resulting gaps. In this experiment I take my cue from Lovecraft himself, who once wrote in a letter of March 1933…
“Someone ought to go over the cheap magazines and pick out story-germs which have been ruined by popular treatment; then getting the authors’ permission and actually writing the stories.”
I hope the story also expresses the discoveries I’ve made on this summer school, about just how much Lovecraft was an expert collage-ist of his many diverse borrowings and inspirations.
Enjoy!