Unveiling the Eerie Realms of Michael Shea: A Dive into Cosmic Horror and Social Commentary with Danny Anderson

Embark on a journey into the chilling depths of Michael Shea's weird fiction with the insightful Danny Anderson as our guide. As we unravel Shea's unique spin on cosmic horror, you'll discover how this master of the macabre carved out a space that's both hauntingly familiar and alarmingly otherworldly. Together, we illuminate the dark corners of class struggle and revolution woven into the fabric of Shea's narratives, and celebrate the unorthodox heroes that populate his tales. This episode promises to draw you into a discussion that's as profound as it is unsettling, showcasing the enduring power and relevance of Shea's stories in today's weird fiction landscape.

Danny and I navigate through Shea's metafictional world, where the barrier between the real and the imagined thins to a mere wisp, and the monstrous entities of Lovecraftian lore take on an almost palpable presence. We delve into the craft of Shea's storytelling, reflecting on his portrayal of characters shaped by raw experience rather than literary convention, and how this lends a gripping authenticity to his work. Through our conversation, you'll appreciate the finesse with which Shea balances gritty social commentary with the ineffable horror of the unknown, challenging you to reconsider the very nature of horror narrative.

As we cap off our exploration, we pay homage to Shea's intricate narrative voice and the haunting themes that stitch his work together. Delving into the power of witnessing, the complexities of class dynamics, and the subversion of Lovecraft's cosmic indifference, we uncover the layers that make Shea's fiction resonate so deeply. And as we acknowledge the impact of authors like T.E.D. Klein and Caitlín R. Kiernan, we also tip our hats to Mark Fisher's critical insight, offering a fresh perspective on the weird and the eerie a decade after his influential essay. Prepare to be captivated by a conversation that not only celebrates a literary maestro's legacy but also plunges into the philosophical undercurrents of horror and humanity.

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:34

Hello and welcome to the bomb blog, and today I'm here with Danny Anderson, formally of sectarian review and now of freedom. So Danny is a professor of literature at Mount. I love this, no.

Danny Anderson: 1:52

Yes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52

Okay, now I'll. This is college out in Pennsylvania. One of my old stomping is grounds. You know, when I say Pennsylvania, I mean pencil-tucky so and I don't mean that insultingly, it's just sort of a sociographic. So don't think Philly is what I'm saying and we are about a million miles away from that, as we could be both the Christian college part of that and the pencil-tucky part of that in the works of Michael Shea and I wanted to talk to you about the works of Michael Shea one because he he I mean, he died almost a decade ago now, but it seems like recently he, in the last three years, he became a cause celeb in like the, the, the, I would say dark fiction, weird fiction, literary and podcast universe again, and it felt a little random to me that I think what prompted it was the release of the book that we're talking about, which is His collected Cthulhu mythos stories, which came out in 2017.

C. Derick Varn: 3:20

We're in a new edition. I don't think it's the first time they've been published together, it's just this was the first time They'd all been collected together, called demirer to complete Cthulhu mythos tales of Michael Shea, and then he became kind of a cause celeb again because one of the stories in this collection became the basis of a Guillermo del Toro sponsored short film on Netflix.

Danny Anderson: 3:46

Netflix, yeah yeah, it's cabinet of curiosities. Actually, I don't think that's in this collection. That's the autopsy, that's a standalone story of his, but I don't believe that one is in this collection. I think it's the third episode of cabinet of curiosities.

C. Derick Varn: 4:00

Yeah, I think you're right. Actually, I do not think it's collected here and I'm I'm misremembering it because I have. I have read all of shea but Weirdly, shea is highly, highly, highly anthologized, yeah, but not often collected. So it's. It's kind of a it's a weird situation where, like, if you've ever gotten almost any of those like modern Cthulhu mythos stories, either fat face or Satagua or oh, polyphemus, and one of those stories will be in there, and so I think I see fat face like republished like 20 times or something it's that's the one where he sort of kind of found his footing as a heir to Lovecraft right and an updater of Lovecraft, not just sort of somebody doing what Lovecraft did.

Danny Anderson: 4:57

He sort of took what Lovecraft did and and really kind of ran with it in a really interesting new direction, which is, I think, part of why he's this resurgence that you're talking about and the fact that as an ST Josh, he's the editor of this. He is a very kind of prominent I mean, he's the people that media people go to to talk about Lovecraft when Lovecraft comes up in the news. So he's sort of like, in many ways, the, the caretaker of that legacy, and so that's Obviously there. He's a fan of of Shay, so I think that that's probably that advocacy helps to ST Josie is an interesting character in that he's a jerk.

Danny Anderson: 5:39

I.

C. Derick Varn: 5:41

Mean that I don't mean that, like I don't mean that personally I have no, I've actually heard he's quite nice as a person but his literary persona is like the most cantankerous, like neoclassical, all atheist, like left liberal who Also thinks it. Our modern concern over sentimentality in class stuff is not particularly weird. That's why I actually find it interesting that Josie loves Michael Shay so much, because one of the things that Josie actually Criticizes most modern work fiction for I just reading some of Josie's essays the other day so it's not at my mind Is being too concerned with character and not enough concerned with the weirdness or alienness of the character and to concern and reliability. And what I find interesting is Shay is the only love crafting writer I know that really gives a crap about being relatable like. All of his characters are characters that you might meet. They're very lived in and they're very. There's a very literary element to Michael Shay that you often do not get in pre Weird fiction.

Danny Anderson: 7:01

Why absolutely there's a real interesting I mean he's like committed to Expanding lovecrafts focus all if you think of the like, if you just randomly think of a lovecraft story, it's some professor who's discovered a book or is on an expedition or something like that and discover something, and it's all told in the first person. Shay like narrates the lives of people who are definitely not that. We have sex workers, we have people who work in liquor stores, we have our comic book artists there's and bikers there's all these, these kind of like street level people that working class people are likely to know, unlike the characters in a in a Lovecraft story. So yeah, he's actually, I think, ideologically committed to that, that kind of experience and bringing that love crafting experience to that kind of person.

C. Derick Varn: 7:56

Yeah, what I, what I find so fascinating is basically also as far as like how far can you get from, from Providence, the LA in the Bay Area, I mean like, and still remain in the United States? And how far can you get from like the post-gothic Archa texture of Lovecraft? I don't, you know, they're not people who have read Lovecraft essays or letters, but Gothic fiction is, is something that he's both critical of, but the post strain of it is like, does run through Through webcraft and I find it weirdly, I must say it's not present here but it's. When I read these I think far more John Carpenter but even more literary than I do. Most Lovecraft pastiches like it's just something different and and I would I think one of the reasons Shay wasn't taken Always that seriously on his own is he's kind of known for these and for the nif, the lean stories which are these sword and sorcery stories written deliberately, it like as a update and rebuke of Jack, of Jack fans which both have demons and horror but are also making fun of sword and sorcery those two things together, I think, when he's coming up in the 70s and 80s and Even up into the 90s and early 2000s, when some of his last work is is published.

C. Derick Varn: 9:46

I Think those are severely out of fashion. I mean, even when Shay was Was kind of recuperated, I feel like I first read him in the 2000s in like Lovecraftian around four or whatever that we were on by that time. Like like that, there was this weird internet meme of Lovecraft stuff and I you know Part of it's Lovecraft. Interesting part of it's that it's in the public domain so you can do all kinds of stuff with it without getting sued.

Danny Anderson: 10:17

Well, in Lovecraft, lovecraft encouraged it from the beginning, right.

C. Derick Varn: 10:21

Right, yeah, he was. Yeah, I mean he was known as a not to speak well of the old New England racist, but he was known for like going in and like writing people's stories for them for pay not taking pay and just, and also not taking credit for the story. He wrote like, yeah, yeah, and One wishes he maybe had Taken a little bit more money and bought more than canned beans and not given to himself gastric cancer. So, cuz, apparently eating canned beans at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century was a bad idea as your primary food source.

Danny Anderson: 11:06

Probably even today.

C. Derick Varn: 11:07

Yeah, probably not a great idea now. Yeah, for different. I don't think it would necessarily give you gastric cancer.

Danny Anderson: 11:13

But Heavy metals, no doubt, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 11:17

Yeah, I just to back up to something you said you I had written down because I wanted to bring up John Carpenter as well, because some of these story Topically are Trudding the same ground as John Carpenter I'm thinking particularly of the presentation is a story that reminds me very much of in the mouth of madness, and they both of course have the common ancestor of at the mountains of madness by love, by Lovecraft.

Danny Anderson: 11:44

But I do think that Carpenter, his work Also saw that initial rejection and then subsequent adoption or recognition right. And I think there's something about two artists that are kind of doing working-class, bring working-class perspectives at least to this sort of traditional kind of high-end of pop culture, of Genre, and I think they're kind of out of step with whatever is Contemporarily popular, because they're true to what they're doing. And then I think it's it's, I think, I think, entirely fitting that Shay has a similar kind of retroactive acceptance that the Carpenter's had. And I have to admit, I mean, I'm kind of on the record John Carpenter is actually my favorite artist of any medium. I love John Carpenter deeply, and so that's maybe I'm looking too much for him in Michael Shay, but I certainly did see a lot of it.

C. Derick Varn: 12:43

Yeah, I think that's. That's there both in the source material and in the genre blending, because one of the other things that I was that I think about when I see this is I'm like every one of these stories is almost into genres. They're all weird fiction but like Some of them are weird fiction plus cosmic fiction, which I don't that always overlaps, but but Some of them are definitely noir. Some of them feel I Mean the one about the wizard in the revenge, that one I always have to look that Nemo me impune last seat.

Danny Anderson: 13:23

Yeah, yeah, I don't know how to pronounce Latin, so, but that's actually like a cross between Poe and Lovecraft.

C. Derick Varn: 13:32

Right, it's well, in the titles of Poe reference, I mean like yeah, yeah yeah, the cast of the Amanteado right like, but also that's the one that's written.

Danny Anderson: 13:44

it's the only one that's written in a voice that is extremely Extremely high gothic yes totally and almost as parody though it's, it's actually hilarious To read that voice actually and but it does sound like something out of pose mouth, off of pose pen at least.

C. Derick Varn: 14:01

Yeah, it's that I mean. And when you realize what's going on in that story, it's like, oh, this guy is getting revenge on his ex-girlfriend who happens to be a Porn actress of some variety.

Danny Anderson: 14:12

Yeah, the setup reminded me of Ty West X. Um, yes, until it diverts a little bit. I was actually wondering if Ty West had read the story before he made X and then it. Then it diverts from that, but yeah, the setup.

C. Derick Varn: 14:25

Well, I mean, yeah, it's like Ty West X. If also there were dark underworld gods, it actually existed and manifested by the end of the story. But you know what's interesting about? About that that story stands out to me is different from the rest of collection, and a couple things I mean. It is it is both poeing and Lovecraft, not just Lovecraft. It's also One of the few, one of the things about Shay that I find interesting and I would love if, like, feminist scholars wrote on him.

C. Derick Varn: 14:58

So many of these stories are from a female protagonist point of view, and one that I mean I'm a dude so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask but one that I find pretty believable. That one's the exception, and I think that's why the narrator is so pompous, because Shay doesn't like him. It's hilarious until you also realize how awful what's going on is. But it takes a couple of like, I don't know, when you first read the story it's so cartoonish that you're like wait, oh, like, okay, this is actually really messed up. But yes, if people wanted to think about what the setup is, imagine the cast of the Amadeya and Tyre West X, and at the end there's a Cthulhu X, makhana like. It's basically that like and told from the point of view of a very crazed wizard.

Danny Anderson: 16:05

I'm like imagining someone taking like story dice and that's just what came out of the can when they rolled it right, all those things, and he just wrote that story.

C. Derick Varn: 16:15

Yeah, it does. That was the one I'm like can we stack up trope after trope after trope but also make it believable? And like? The thing about Shay is, when you describe some of Shay's stories you go there's no way that's going to work as a story and then you're like no, I totally did. I don't know how it worked as a story. It's kind of maddening like that. I want to talk about Fat Face, because it's the other one that's an odd one out and I think it's also the one that's most well known. I believe it's set in LA and not the Bay, which it's automatically a little different, even though it's pretty clear that Shay knows LA really really well. I mean, one of the things I can tell you I know the Bay area really really well and Shay's description of the Bay area is pretty much dead on. But I gathered that is also true for Fat Face, which is very much set in LA.

Danny Anderson: 17:13

And that's important to him because he very often narrates a character's trip through streets and he's very careful about naming streets and naming neighborhoods and street names, and the topography of the city is very important to him.

C. Derick Varn: 17:30

And he gets different characters' voices I feel like fairly accurate, or at least you feel like they're a similar enough that even someone who is from there would probably. Yeah, maybe that's not exactly how they talk, but it's really close. He's one of these dudes that you know. When I think about how he could write these characters, I think about like his jobs. Like he was a night clerk in the Mission District, he worked as a construction laborer, he was an EL, an English language learner teacher, he worked as a doll kinds of. So he basically had the gamut of like I mean it's when I mentioned those jobs, I'm like, okay, so one's white collar, one's blue collar, one's kind of in between, but he just did so many things for work and he did it while writing.

C. Derick Varn: 18:27

So I think there's that and there's the sense and, like Fat Face, that story could be super exploitative and super seedy and it goes to places that are, I mean, when you like this spoiler alert for people who haven't read Fat Face, so go find it in one of the 85 collections. It's in Art Demerge, which is a book we're talking about today. But Fat Face's initial like setup is this very innocent minded sex worker, incredibly innocent minded sex worker who is clearly traumatized from something that she witnessed.

Danny Anderson: 19:19

Get a massage parlor or something like that.

C. Derick Varn: 19:21

Yeah working at a massage parlor that seemed to have been mob owned and she didn't catch up to that and she saw something and they didn't hurt her, but she clearly shouldn't have seen it.

C. Derick Varn: 19:31

And so she's taking some time off and is working kind of as a street walker, but she's kind of laying back and she's in and out of this hotel that's across the street from this, when it's first described as pretty hilarious this hydraulics massage place for what it looks like elderly people with weird medical conditions and also a home for pets and then it's not that at all, but that's what it looks like and the initial description of it is so hilarious.

C. Derick Varn: 20:14

But this story, which I said could be seedy, there's like a there's a lot of like seedy tropes in it. Every time it could go that way and in a way that's it is seedy, but in a way that's exploitative. It doesn't do it, it actually goes in another way and usually a horrific one, like it continues to be totally surprising. And also the protagonist is portrayed not as stupid, actually, but as like too well meaning to navigate the situation and even other things that are implicated in this, like the weird, the weird clerk that's on the side of the street who, like, warns her of something who is clearly not entirely human, like there's a thousand things goalposting like that she needs to stay away and there's something really, really horrifying going on and her friend is murdered, and by murdered I mean mostly dissolved. Yeah, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 21:42

No, there's like a, an interest, like her demise is basically her wanting to give a freebie to this person across the street, fat face, who she thinks is a kind person, right, and then he turns out to be like a I love crafty and kind of being literally love crafting.

C. Derick Varn: 22:02

Yeah yeah, he become, interestingly, this the one of the reasons why the story is so well known is it actually has to call a Cthulhu game lore. Oh, the Shogoffs that can look like humans are called Shogoff Lords. That's actually from this story, it's so original.

Danny Anderson: 22:18

Yeah, that's interesting Okay.

C. Derick Varn: 22:21

And for those of you who know what Shogoffs are, they're, if you've read the mountains of madness they have this weird thing, created by another alien race that, like, has no real form and probably killed their masters, and lovecraft is horrified by them because they're mis-edgenated.

Danny Anderson: 22:37

Well, I actually think I mean, the Shogoffs are very frequent motif in these stories. Yeah, they come up, a form of them come up very frequently, if not all the time, and and I actually think that's a canny choice, given the fact that he wants to do a lot of like class work in these stories, because you could think of the Shogoffs as a kind of like worker revolution before you know, in the ancient, in the old world, right, they overthrew that they were created to be basically slaves.

C. Derick Varn: 23:12

Like a slave or both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in that story that actually we might be descended from them. Even in the original text, yeah, In this text you get that. But then you also get this idea. But the class stuff is interesting because the Shogoff guy across street is clearly like a small business owner is the way he's manifested himself. But then later on and another story we get the Shogoff in the swimming pool and it's definitely an attack on like an upper middle class family.

Danny Anderson: 23:43

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 23:45

And I don't know if those theories were written to be parallel, but they sure are, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 23:51

And the presentation. The same thing. The being I forget the name of that mystical being basically is preying on the super rich in that story and using kind of working class comic artists to help him create the portal or whatever in which this happens. And so, yeah, he's doing really interesting things. And that's not to say the Shogoffs are like they're the villains, they're the. That's the being that kills the sex workers in that face, of course. But there's a very complicated and interesting Lovecraftian being to bring into these stories and to way that he develops them for his own purposes, and he's in this new place that he's using them. It is very interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 24:39

Yeah, it is fascinating to me what he's trying to do here. I mean because on one hand, you have these cosmic entities and some of the stories do truly go cosmic. There's that. What's the one that goes nutty cosmic?

Danny Anderson: 25:01

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 25:03

The one where they're basically moving through LA trying to like stop someone from watching a film that's going to resurrect, like, like, break down the barrier of the world.

Danny Anderson: 25:15

But one carpenter has a short film for Masters of Horror called cigarette burns. It's very similar and theme.

C. Derick Varn: 25:24

There's so many. I kept like I was also thinking how much of this reminded me of Prince of Darkness. There's the obvious comparisons to the thing Like, except that, unlike carpenter, like all of these stories, with the exception of Fat Face, are all within probably four blocks of each other in the worst environment area. Like it's a lot of them.

C. Derick Varn: 25:50

The Mission District and the Tenderloin are spelled out like street to street, and then there are some things in like the suburbs, like I got the feeling that some of those, like some of what's being described there, is like Silicon Valley although before it was Silicon Valley because it's clearly would have been in the 70s but the kind of like super rich areas outside of the Bay that now like is the Bay really.

Danny Anderson: 26:17

And I thought that his vision of the Bay is different. It isn't. I mean, some of these were written in the 2000s, when San Francisco was well gentrified, right, and he's not talking about that San Francisco he's talking about, like Dirty Harry, san Francisco, still Right, and so yeah, he's, he's. He's like creating a, he's spotlighting a very different version of San Francisco than we want to think about now, at least.

C. Derick Varn: 26:43

So yeah, I mean basically, I would say like even when he was writing some of these late stories, he's basically creating a nor mythology I mean separate from the Cthulhu mythos for San Francisco that makes most of the city the Tenderloin, which is just kind of like if you've ever been to San Francisco, like the Tenderloin districts the roughest neighborhood. It's not quite as bad as like Skid Row and LA, but it's it's rough but it's not huge. Right Like and this was before, this is well before. Even in his late stories, like the San Francisco we know now, which like a playground for the super rich and masses of homeless people, but he basically has like a San Francisco where there are still working class people. It feels like it very much feels like even in this late stories, that it's set in like the 70s and 80s. I was thinking about that the whole time. That's another thing that reminds me of Carpenter, like even when you're out, even when you're well outside that timeframe, at least when those stories are published. That's the field they aboke is 70s and 80s California.

Danny Anderson: 27:54

Live yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 27:55

Yeah, exactly, it feels more. It feels a lot more like they live than like Steve Jobs Biopic. So it's, it's. It's interesting. I do the one thing I will say as well. I think the three stories we've mentioned so far have the most distinct protagonist. There's another story that has a kind of nor protagonist who's in a bad situation. What's that one? He actually is kind of a gangster, maybe it's one, oh, I can't remember.

Danny Anderson: 28:38

The stories do form a single world in some ways and they're kind of hard to disentangle for one another in many ways.

C. Derick Varn: 28:45

Yeah, well, that's the thing Other than Fat Face and there is almost a meta-narrative to these stories. They build in one of the interesting things about them. Outside of the two stories that we're mentioning, where like and I think the female protagonist stories in general are pretty memorable, the ones with male protagonist. I actually tend to find that the side characters in those stories are more memorable than the character. In that sense that is a little lovecraftian, where the main character is kind of a cipher but you're getting much more of a feel of the world. That's one of the things with lovecraft stories is, even when they have people and then they don't really have people, because here you're getting a lot of these are like well, what is a diner after you get off your construction shift in the Bay Area in 1985? That's the space you're moving in.

Danny Anderson: 29:51

It's like listening to a Tom Waits song In a lot of ways Like an early Tom Waits song. Yeah for sure, in the ending it turns out to be a later Tom Waits song. Right now it gets bizarre and surrealistic. Now the one exception. I think another exception other than the Poe infused one that we talked about is under the shelf, which is that takes place in Antarctica.

C. Derick Varn: 30:16

Oh, yeah, that one.

Danny Anderson: 30:18

It's like a multi-level inversion of at the mountains of madness, in that instead of two male explorers flying above Antarctica, finding the mountains and going into it, there's two female sisters who are under the submarines, under an iceberg and Antarctica, looking at it from above and then they enter it. From this way, it's a literal inversion of at the mountains of madness. These two female submarine explorers are the witnesses to the old one's horror. That's the one that really kind of other than the Poe one stands out as completely different than the other ones.

C. Derick Varn: 31:00

Yeah, it is interesting. It seems like the only, I mean, what ties it to the book is that it's Cthulhu based in that. So many, with the exception of Tosagua and the one about the breaking of barriers. It's mostly that's like a Cthulhu monster.

C. Derick Varn: 31:22

But you're right that actually at the mountains of madness seems to be like the Urtex for a lot of these stories where, like you're playing up different things developing out of the shogoffs, the old ones, it's very much that strain of Cthulhuana or Lovecraftiana, as opposed to like Cthulhu is a weird Flaug God and that story as you get eaten by, if you get eaten by the frogs, you become eternal and absorbed in them and what basically Cthulhu is doing is maintaining an undying memory of all life and once you get eaten you're in it.

C. Derick Varn: 32:12

So you're part of this collective consciousness of things that have been eaten and absorbed into it from all over the universe. And the person that it happens to is like an old woman in a suburb outside of the Bay Area. But the rest of them are mostly like shogoffs are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are reality breaking down and stuff like that. They get wild. I mean I will say this, I mean a lot of these stories, I think the most, the most rooted ones. You know, fat Face is kind of interesting because it is the most limited in what it's dealing with when you get it Way earlier than most of them too.

Danny Anderson: 32:58

Yeah, written way earlier, yeah. Oh yeah, it's written like the 80s, early 80s, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 33:02

Very early 80s, before he even lived in the Bay Area, and I think most of these these stories were written in the 90s.

Danny Anderson: 33:11

I'm getting, and even into the 2000s, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 33:13

Right.

Danny Anderson: 33:14

Yeah, you know, a copying squid does that too. There's some person who wants to be like absorbed into the the oneness of this, of this being, and there's some ritual that he has to bring someone as a witness to it, and so that that that's kind of the premise of that too, and it's, I'm sure that we want to talk about that. My urge separately a little bit, since it's quite that's actually new to this volume. I was previously in of published, but it's like, I think, one of the most profound horror stories I've read in some time. It's really, really interesting. So what we're talking about is like an inversion of what's going on with them. I urge so yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 34:00

So this is actually one of the things that I was going to point out that so many of these stories are inversions. So you get fat face and then you get. I forget the title of the story, but about the woman who, who has the shag off, who's put into the pool and she dives in and gets dissolved.

Danny Anderson: 34:18

The pool.

C. Derick Varn: 34:19

Yeah, yeah, but then, like beneath Bivmore and under the shelf, are parallel. I think Demiurge and coping and Copping Squid are parallel. He tends to. He seemed to have written stories and then and then picked an element of them and reverted it or changed the class of the person it was affecting. Are so, for example, and Copping Squid versus the one, I think it's the one I mentioned before, and no, sasagwa is the is the one with the frog, and then Copping Squid is the one where someone wants to do it, and then Sasagwa is just it randomly happens to you, like they're both ultimately the same result.

C. Derick Varn: 35:05

Yeah, but the, the, the voluntariness seeking it out versus being a random victim, are played with. There's all these. He seemed to have written like a lot of these, but, like he said, I have a theme, I'm going to roll the dice on how I'm going to set it up, and then we're going to get this theme three different ways, and then he would do it with another set of characters and a theme from Lovecraft, so as if he'd be like, well, this is all the stuff that would happen if we took this seriously and Lovecraft and really fallen it through and in.

Danny Anderson: 35:39

Yeah, you know, one thing that I think is really interesting about this collection and I've read this, and I've read his sequel to the color out of space, which is the color out of time, and I think I've read the autopsy separately, but so this kind of got me into those, though, but and honestly, I think you were the one, carter stepper, I think you both separately at the same time suggested I read Michael Shay, and so I, I think I have I owe you for that but one thing that really stood out to me on this reading of this, this collection, though, is the way that Shay's universe is like at a fulcrum between Lovecraft's and ours, so it is not only like a development of Lovecraft's ideas in our world.

Danny Anderson: 36:33

His world actually assumes Lovecraft's world, or Lovecraft's writings, exist as well, Right, and so it isn't just inspired by them in a separate ontology, right? The Lovecraft himself is a figure in some of these stories, and, in fact, he seems to be like the progenitor of these religious texts that people are using in incantations. That's the, the. The idea behind the presentation is they're inspired by to create this mural of mythos, inspired and when they say mythos, they mean Lovecraftian mythos images that will open up this Lovecraftian horror, and so it's like he's actually made Lovecraft. He's not only used Lovecraft fiction, he's actually made Lovecraft part of the fiction, and so he's really kind of blurring the lines between the kind of the cosmic horror that Lovecraft brings and the world that the cosmic horror is aimed at, and it's really, I think, a fascinating artistic move.

C. Derick Varn: 37:27

Yeah, what I find interesting about that is we kind of like that's done so much now, like, if you think about like Lovecraft being in a, like a couple episodes of Supernatural, that show from the ox, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 37:43

Like there's that Edgar Allen post, that Netflix, the bluest eye that brings Edgar Allen Poe into the story.

C. Derick Varn: 37:48

Yeah, and I'm not saying it wasn't done before then, but I think that we have to like put Shea in the context of like 70s and 80s meta fiction, of which he is definitely not really writing in, but incorporating some elements of.

Danny Anderson: 38:06

There's a little bit of Philip K Dick in him, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 38:08

Oh yeah, there's a lot. Actually, that was like the amount of like, narrative intrusion and like, but I was also thinking about some other cultural phenomenon that were happening in the 80s and 90s. For people who don't know, I mentioned it at the beginning of the show, but Danny used to host a Christian podcast that I used to be guests on all the time. So if Danny does not know about weird occult stuff, I would not be surprised. But there was a occultish movement in the 70s and 80s tied to chaos magic that actually did believe that basically they were edragores in Lovecraft and like, even though that these figures were not real, that they were made real by Lovecraft creation of them unless they were suitable to be used for your own magical evocations. That was a strange belief system of a subcategory, of something called chaos magic, which was, like, developed by Thiel Hein and Peter Carroll, and this is, you know, some weird occultist. Yeah, crawley, but this was actually kind of a response to Crawley, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 39:21

But it's consistent with that whole thing. I mean that's interesting. I hadn't heard of that, but that's actually really interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 39:28

And when I was reading some of this I was like, does Shay know about that? Because it feels it feels similar. But, like you know, I'm also like, well, we do live in a world where anything said in fiction might actually show up as a weird religious belief somewhere. So like, yeah, I don't know. I have no, I don't know that that nitty gritty of Michael Shay's life. To know if he was aware that that was a real thing at the time that he was writing that people really did think that maybe you could go read horror fiction, particularly Lovecraft, but any of like almost any horror fiction to start playing with those entities as real entities. So, although I've always like, why the hell would you play with those entities? Like I'm going to mess with cosmic forces that actively do not give a crap about you, they don't even hate you, they're just like you're not even, you're not even worth antipathy, really Like it's a very strange worldview when I think about it that way. But like, yeah, she does so much with this and I read Demiurge and I would say it's kind of like whatrelated cinema and the ratings of the movie she wrote under it.

C. Derick Varn: 40:45

It's kind of it's a lot. I mean it's long. It's a novella, effectively, and it's a good portion of this collection. It's the only thing that's new to it. I think most of these stories, if they weren't available in some Lovecraftiana anthology, they're available in the coping squid. I mean the coping squid are, I think most of the coping squid there's. I feel like these stories were collected multiple times.

Danny Anderson: 41:24

Some are in Weird Fiction. Some of them came out in that magazine, Weird Tales, I'm sorry. And so yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 41:30

Yeah, oh, yeah, I think. Yeah, a lot of these were. The other thing that is similar to Lovecraft is Shay was still writing, where there was significant magazine markets for short stories, which there are today for literary short stories if the literary magazine has an academic sponsor to keep it a print. But in general, there's not really that much of a market for these kind of short stories. In the same way, unless you get it Interestingly, I think the market for a lot of these stories now is like the horror anthology podcast, where people will submit stories and someone will read them out loud. Yeah, I don't think there's much of an actual magazine market for them anymore.

Danny Anderson: 42:20

There's a few out there, but yeah, they are kind of rarer and I think they do. Even those tend towards, like, the literary, and so that's another thing I think is interesting to me. Kind of refreshing about Michael Shay is he's totally not of MFA, land Right and so like and that's not to completely dismiss the MFA, I think you have one right, I do, I do, I do have an MFA.

C. Derick Varn: 42:43

There's a lot to.

Danny Anderson: 42:44

That's not to dismiss that, but that is like overwhelmingly dominating the literary, particularly short story literary market. And Michael Shay is like you're right, writing at a time when just a guy outside the system could sit down and say why the system could submit things to magazines, right, and it doesn't come out of the milieu, that of academically aligned presses, that you know the kind of the taste that you would expect there, that comes with that.

C. Derick Varn: 43:16

One of the interesting things that I would caveat, that is, today the MFA world has been kind of has had, has had the last laugh with the genre writers actually entering it as professors. So like that's become a recent trend that, like people who used to just teach it, like Clarion, or now actually teaching it in MFA, is because there's not enough of a market distinction for there to be like we're literary writers and you aren't, we can't really do that anymore. That's also I kind of feel like that's true in poetry too. But but I still I see exactly what you're saying, because while I would say that Shay is a highly literary writer, you feel like he got that way from reading Dashiell Hammett, not from going to college. Yeah, like I do believe he did go to college, but I don't, I don't think that that's like what's informing his reading tastes like.

Danny Anderson: 44:10

It's similar to like the Stephen King, right. He sort of he's he understands that world, but he's just not of it, and and I think that, yeah, I think in the same way that John Carpenter is like in Hollywood, but not of Hollywood, right, and so, yeah, there's a way, there's like a sort of an inside or outside or aesthetic to what he's doing there, so which I appreciate at this point in my life.

C. Derick Varn: 44:34

Yeah, I like it too, and I like it because it takes risks and I think most of them work but he takes. So I wanted him. We're saying he's literary in the sense that he's not like a pulp author where there's not a lot of characterization and there's not a lot of concern over line by line Like craftsmanship. He he's not like. He's not like a flashy stylist, but there's enough difference in the styles of the stories and then the voices that you can tell that he really does think about it and it's. They are cleaned up and refined. They're not slapped dash off like I don't know, like an August door left story are one of. You know, you know, you read those there's. There's some weird fiction in the cathedral mistos world that's really like, sometimes so aggressively mediocrely written that it's like wow.

Danny Anderson: 45:32

Yeah, they're mimicking Lovecrafts prose, and when she does that, it's for comic effect almost yeah it's always a joke Like yeah, but he's not.

C. Derick Varn: 45:45

I would agree to like this. Is not Michael Shabone writing Lovecraft stories? You know, michael? Shabone everyone's favorite, like MFA author who also does genre work, but only as, like, you still know that it's from an MFA author and it feels like it, right, like.

Danny Anderson: 46:00

Yeah, yeah, jonathan Letham is another one right, and yeah. I love both of those, are two of my all flowing favorite writers, but but, yeah, but you're totally right about that.

C. Derick Varn: 46:09

This doesn't feel like that, like it doesn't. Nor does it even feel like like, say, new science fiction, like JG Ballard, where there's been all this literary influence it, but they're really more concerned with moving into literature and less in staying in genre. Like I get the feeling it she just doesn't care and he likes genre stuff, so that's what he's writing. Yeah like it's good.

Danny Anderson: 46:35

And then I have a little journal here. I try to jot down phrases that I really think are interesting sounding, and so when I was reading this, I got a couple from him and so, like, this is from the presentation, and I think what stood out to me is it is it's got this like street language knowledge, but it's also like beautifully crafted and vividly imagined. So the man was beautifully dressed and so like some guy in vogue, lusciously suited alligator shoes, his face, a handsome vacancy, right it's. It does sound like Hammett to me in a lot of ways, right, and so, yeah, and just some guy like that's it doesn't turn that in a program, would, would beat out of you, right and so, but but he but he uses it really really well, and so, yeah, I just love the style as well as the story telling.

Danny Anderson: 47:25

Now, I have to say it gets so psychedelic in some of his imaginings of these creatures that my imagination can't keep up and I have a hard time picturing what he's describing. I think that some of his point to, I think that some of what happens when you're trying to describe the indescribable unlike Lovecraft who just says I can't describe what I saw it does describe it and then you can tell that you doesn't make any sense to the human mind, right and so Right, yeah, lovecraft always has these kind of like the the whole what you can't see is is more scary than what you can, and then just tells you that like, whereas Shay seems to be like, no, you can't see this, let me show you this.

C. Derick Varn: 48:07

Like you just can't picture it right, just like it's like, and you do feel like, okay, that still works, because I still can't really imagine what you're describing. But now I have a hint that it's even wilder than I could have thought it was. Like there's a whole lot of that I was thinking about.

C. Derick Varn: 48:28

Shay's stories often seem really violent in some ways but, not with a few exceptions, not in like a murdery way, but they're also kind of like a I'm going to be using director analogies, so much my audience must forgive me, but they're kind of like a Toby Hooper movie have you ever watched? Like you know, check the same song, what you think is the most brutal movie you've ever seen. And then you go back and watch the scene by scene. You realize there's barely blood in it, yeah, and and it's like, oh, this is intensity and I see the aftermath, but I don't actually see what's happening. And or when I do see what's happening is Shay, I can't comprehend it.

C. Derick Varn: 49:11

Like, there are plenty of times where you do see it, you're like I don't even know what's going on, what, what is like? I don't even know what's being described to me, that's happening to this person. Like, are you get it through their point of view? Such as in fat face in the pool, where you're just like Okay, I, because the the end of the pool is wild. Like it's just like it is.

Danny Anderson: 49:38

Yeah, this, this substance being comes out of the pool and absorbs the owner and then goes into the house and there's this oneness of goo Like it's hard to, and you have these working class guys are just there to witness it, and so I think that's kind of like the point and that's a that's another motif that comes up in these stories is just the need for a witness to something right and whereas and it's another rejection of what Lovecraft likes to do is to tell you you don't want to see this, she's like begging you to see it, right.

C. Derick Varn: 50:11

Yes, someone needs to see this like and yeah, you know that's another trope that isn't in shade is in Lovecraft. Nobody's mind breaks when, when this stuff happens, unless they're dissolved into an you know an eternal entity, which which then they can't tell where their mind in there begins. But it's not because they're crazy, it's because literally they're like, the barrier between themselves and others just broke down, and that happens more than once and in Copping Squid that's a good example of that.

Danny Anderson: 50:45

You have this clerk at a liquor store, I think, who's a recovering alcoholic, who worked, who chooses to work in a liquor store. The characters are really really interestingly drawn, as you said, right and so. But he kind of finds meaning working in this liquor store, surrounded by the temptation and and being proud of himself for resisting sort of, and so it kind of gives his life meaning. But but he gets sort of robbed, sort of robbed by a guy who just needs to get cut in trying to get some money from him because there has to be blood money involved in a witness, and so he gets this guy to go with him to witness him being enveloped into the squid and and then at the end he's sort of pondering it and considering, doing it himself. Right, it's sort of the story sort of ends with his just contemplation of that as an idea. It has not broken his mind, he's actually incorporated it into the logic of a human being, which is what a typical Lovecraft story. It's just impossible.

C. Derick Varn: 51:48

Right, yeah, and it's interesting because you sort of go well, has he? He clearly not crazy, but is he crazy? Like it's it, that's a, that's a huge, huge thing. I mean honestly. I've also like, both in the games and in fiction, the way Lovecraft treats mental health. It's just like well, apparently everyone's mind is just about to completely break it any minute. So, like you better roll your sanity check, which is not how this works at all. Like this has a much more sophisticated view of like mental health. And then, when people do seem to lose it, the story tries to illustrate to you why like like it's not like, oh, they just broke, it's like no, like I'm describing this. Do you understand it? So like this is, could you like make mental sense of what you just saw? If you saw this, and in the this you know, shay's answer seems to be well kind of why you can't picture it, though like you can't really construct it, but it's not, like it's totally outside of your realm of comprehension, and I think that's that's an interesting Take on this.

C. Derick Varn: 53:06

I guess this leads us to turn the pivot to the, to the, to the demure, to the, unless, if you want, you want to take the description before we do that, can I bring up one other?

Danny Anderson: 53:15

I think it's connected to this, okay, to this motif of witnessing right. So, like all of these, it's like a ritual that needs to have parishioners to witness in order to be an active, and that's a motif that comes up at time time again, and very often someone has to do it by their own free will. That even goes in the weird post story. They have to, on their own free will, enter these, these spaces where they're yeah, I forgot that.

C. Derick Varn: 53:43

There's like Dracula rules to.

Danny Anderson: 53:46

A little bit, yeah, but there's also like monetary compensation is like a major theme in this. I just talked about copying squid. The guy who gets robbed actually makes money on the transaction because he just has to symbolically give the guy who's robbing him $10, basically, just so some money is transacted in the, some blood money happens and so he actually profits by witnessing it. The same thing with the presentation. All of these artists get paid exorbitant amounts of money to do these murals and then witness what happens with the mural, and over and over in these stories, working class type people are sort of like given money by this Shagothian, these Shagothian entities to actually witness some kind of devouring of the rich, kind of like a motif. And I just think it's a really fascinating Obsession that Michael Shea has that he keeps doing it over and over in these stories and I don't know what to do other than notice it, but I just think it's really interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 54:53

Not all the, the, the working class people are good. That that's pretty clear.

C. Derick Varn: 55:02

Yeah but almost all the not working class people are at least obnoxious, if not bad, it's it's you very much know who he sides within. These characters, like some of the some of the like upper middle class housewives and stuff, are not presented unsympathetically but they're not also presented like as good characters and in some of the rich characters, aka like the wizard we talked about in the presentation, are just utterly even people like they're just bad, and that was one of the things about the presentations like there's no, there's nobody to like in that story and that's not true. Like it's almost the opposite of fat face, where you like almost everybody except for you know the Shagoths, but like in the presentation, you don't really like anybody. They're all pretty bad.

Danny Anderson: 55:55

So in it they're comic artists and I get the sense that there's this in this world. There's this thriving subculture of like comic mag, like underground comics magazine sort of Very 90s in culture like yeah but the guy who sort of profits even when he divides up the earnings.

Danny Anderson: 56:17

He's given, like the bulk of this. He's given like $100,000 or something and he insists on dividing it equally amongst the four of them that are at that table right, and so that seems like a benevolent move. But it's actually the distribution of responsibility, like they all know what they're doing, kind of. They kind of like we've read HP, lovecraft, we know what this is, I can't believe we're doing this. And so by him, like giving them the quarters of the money, it's actually they're bringing the kind of responsibility for this apocalyptic activity upon themselves. So in some ways he seems generous, but in other ways he's just sort of like spreading out the blame, to be right. Yeah, so you're right in some ways, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 57:01

So everyone's going to go down with him. Yeah, it's just. I mean it actually ultimately, that story literally too, but I mean like it's because, yes, it eats the rich first.

Danny Anderson: 57:18

Yeah, you do get an L end with, like the sense that this is just the beginning of what's happening, right? And that was different, right? And so, yeah, yeah, this colonization has just begun. We'll make a lot of money off of it, but okay.

C. Derick Varn: 57:32

Which is interesting because in some ways I think that actually it's a critique of Lovecraftianism, but in another way it's actually also following the pattern because it is relatively prosperous, professor, characters of people who don't have to work, or Bordeaux on aristocrats or whatever, who show up in Lovecraft story. They generated aristocrats in some way or form another, and in this story it's like well, they get eaten first most of the time not all the time, but most of the time. But the strong implication is that it's eventually coming for everybody, unless you can really try to put some kind of resistance to it together, and usually you can't so like yeah, the one that kind of like the story that really puzzled me that I don't even understand well enough.

Danny Anderson: 58:15

Literally what happens to kind of talk about is the battery, and I do get a sense that there's some sort of like old one defender of this world out there, but I don't understand, and so there's some battle about which old one is going to be taking control here, and so that one is a very complicated story and it doesn't take place in San Francisco. I believe that one's on the East Coast somewhere.

C. Derick Varn: 58:40

Yeah, that one's far away. And it's funny. I blocked that one from my head because it's like wait, we got. We have great old agent being fan, cult battles, basically, like I think I'm not quite sure, but that seems to be what's implied here Like it's almost like a Kaiju movie at that point, right yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 58:59

Yeah, it's. Sometimes some of these stories also like, like we said, some of these stories are harrowing. Some of these stories are quite funny yeah, some of them are both, but I find it interesting how many of them stick with me, even though they also kind of bleed together and it and I say this with, with the, with the pronouncement, like it when you read the copying squid or when you read the pool, these narrators are very different. Like they're not. This is not an interchangeable voice, that's one thing I think people should. But still, because they're all so similar and where they're set, except for beneath the shelf to a lesser degree, fat face, although I will say like.

C. Derick Varn: 59:47

The one thing I kind of realized is I feel like when I said that Shay is trying to make like a Bay Area noir, it does feel like like LA is like the, the, the cinematic and fictional depiction of LA is like his model for how he's going to depict the Bay Area. Yeah, and while he gets the, he gets all the. I mean, like I said, he gets down to what roads are where, right, I mean he knows the city. That feel is very different. I think it was interesting, one of the things I, when I was reading about his life, I discovered that, like you know, fat faces are early story, but he actually was living in LA when he wrote it. It's just, most of his stories came after he relocated to the Bay Area, so it's not even like a thematic thing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:39

It seems like he was writing about what was immediately at hand to him and, and I find that very interesting, I also find like beneath the shelf very interesting in that it's not it's, you know, not set in the Bay Area, but it's pretty, it's pretty believable, despite the fact that we're, you know, going up in a summering with two women into, you know, you know, old, one territory like it's, it's, and you get your plant monsters, your star thing, plant monster things, yeah so, yeah. So let's get get dimmer, just interesting, because dimmer is arguably also, do you it? How mythos that you do you think the dimmer novella is. That was the question I had it doesn't feel as much right.

Danny Anderson: 1:01:36

It almost feels like if it is, it's like a completely unique, almost completely unique take on it. Now there is the one point in the story where the, the voice of the story, the, whatever you want to call it the the narrator uses as an exclamation by Cthonos, and so he actually evokes the name of a Cthulu, like deity Cthonos and as his, as sort of an exclamation about things. So that is the one moment where you get the sense that there is a creator of this, of this, of this will. And so I guess, before we get it, we have to lay out the conception of what the concept of the story is. It's basically the first person perspective of this kind of like will to, of this kind of life urge that emerges out of the base of the earth and as it is consumed by a, by a creature, by a living creature, it inhabits that creature and then, when that creature is consumed by another creature, it inhabits that creature. So there's a sort of evolutionary time as it works its way through the surface, being eaten by microbial beings and that kind of thing, all the way up to like birds, jungle cats, and then it finds a way to ingest its, get ingested by excuse me a human, and then it starts wearing human beings as a, as its kind of host, and so it's a really interesting inversion, like I said, of the whole copying squid thing, where people are ingested into something else, in this case the life urge, the Demi urge, let's just call it, is it?

Danny Anderson: 1:03:23

It perpetuates itself by being eaten and by its host, the thing that's hosting it, dying and being consumed by something else, and then it spreads that way. So it's very almost, it's almost beautiful when you think about it as just sort of a life affirming concept about the eternalness of life, right, and so it's in that way. It is not Lovecraftian like. Even death is just like the root to something greater, right, it isn't like the result of having come into contact with something greater and then you are annihilated, you're sort of assimilated into something ever growing and forever perpetual. So it's very kind of like beautiful and optimistic, even though it's kind of horrifying the way that the urge what it does to people, like as it inhabits them. So there's a little bit of a thing, kind of thing going on in it, but kind of a arguably positive spin on that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:23

Yeah, it's interesting because it is like if the thing was also maybe the creator of the universe maybe you're not quite sure and you got the story from the things point of view in Not Curve Russell's Like, and it's wild. One of the things that I mentioned I mentioned Satagwa is also that I think what ties it in is there's one mention of a Cthulhu being and then there is the fact that that theme has shown up in his other Cthulhu stories. But it does feel very unique and it's long. I mean you get more of this than you do for most of the other stories in this collection.

Danny Anderson: 1:05:03

And this being enjoys people like it actually is fascinated by humans and wants to learn to speak in everything, and so it pays again a teacher to actually give it language lessons and so that it can actually learn to speak, and so it doesn't have this antipathy towards life. It has this vibrant love for it. I'm sorry, I didn't have to do that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:24

No, no, but I think this is interesting because it is sort of like well, what if something loves life so much that the boundaries, that the boundaries between end in life break down and also it absorbs everything? But it's actually sincerely interested in you. It's not, it's not apathetic towards you at all. In fact, this danger to you is that it actually cares, like it's. It is sort of I kept on thinking I couldn't think if this was like a kind of physicalization of a gnostic thing or if it is just like an exercise of inverting lovecraft or both Like.

Danny Anderson: 1:06:03

Well, you did talk about how he mixes genres, right, and yeah, at my beginning, my awakening, I was of the earth, right, and so, like the, this being's first consciousness is, as like, basically the planet itself, right, and so that does sound very gnostic to me.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:24

Oh, yeah, and also, yeah, that's the thing about all the, all your great lovecraft beings. I mean here they're truly extra dimensional, but in Lovecraft they're kind of just really weird ancient aliens who sometimes have godlike powers, but not we don't. A lot of times they have godlike powers just because we don't know how they interact with our universe. Like it's not even because they're necessarily super powerful in their own right. It's the way we interact with them causes that, and this you have like literally something emerging from the earth itself. It's not alien, in fact. That's the point. Yes, it's. And so I just, I remember just thinking like is this a mythos story in so much that it's literally the anti mythos mythos story? Like it's, and it's kind of gnostic in its worldview, but unlike say, I don't know it's like, but it's not like super, it's supernatural. I guess it's not religious, it's not, it's not numinous in that way, so it's still like a physical being.

Danny Anderson: 1:07:42

I am interested in the way in which I mean just coming from a Christian perspective like it is a very, an extreme variation on like the communion, like you know, the Christian communion of ritual, and so like like it is actually spread through the consumption, so it's like an inversion of it again, like you're not eating the body and blood of Christ like or we know you are actually. I guess. I guess it's actually a gnostic extension of like the Christian set. That's how it gets spread, that's how Christ gets spread into the world is when we do communion, like by literally eating the body and the blood. If you're Catholic, then, but in this case that's kind of how the demiurge gets spread to, is it has to be consumed.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:35

Yeah, what I find fascinating about about Shay this is not in this collection, but if we think about the autopsy, for example, there is this theme of like demons and aliens and metaphysical stuff is real, but that's not real in the way you think. They are just physical things.

Danny Anderson: 1:08:55

Like Prince of Darkness by John Carpenter.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:57

Exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:58

Yeah it's like they're real. But, like you, when you encounter a demon, what you actually encounter is like an endoparasite, like, and some of them have antipathy towards humans, some of them have a love of humans. For the human, it gets stuck in it. It actually doesn't really matter which way it goes, but like, like it's not like. The motivations are often quite different and I think that's interesting because there's there's a way in which Shay seems just as material. Well, I guess some of the dimensional stuff actually complicates that, but even his versions of immortality are kind of material in a real sense, but that he he's not as nihilistic and doesn't laugh at human pre-consumptions in the same way that Lovecraft does. Like, like. That's a big difference in their attitudes.

Danny Anderson: 1:10:01

No, totally, and that's like a thing that you know, people, about cosmic horror in general is that it's just indifference to human beings.

Danny Anderson: 1:10:09

And Shay, just in the fact that he centralizes very human character and takes a lot of care in the crafting, in the building of those characters, like he's definitely not, you know, doesn't have antipathy towards human beings, right.

Danny Anderson: 1:10:23

And so, yeah, there are like real human concerns in the story and to the point where the Demiurge itself, it's human host, is grunt, is that what it refers to the man as grunt is not like it isn't like invasion of the body, snatchers, where the Demiurge enters the being and it doesn't have any more free will, it just it's like a puppet like grunt is like fights back, like they're. The grunt is still inside grunt's body with this Demiurge and the Demiurge has to figure out how to kind of convert it, like spiritually almost, to what its will is, and so it isn't like a complete, like takeover, like the thing In this case there is the human being remains inside that, inside that body, and so, yeah, I think that that's a testament to what you're saying about Shay not being antagonistic towards humanity in the way that cosmic horror can sometimes lead people to be.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:21

Right For Shay. Cosmic horror is overwhelming, but it's not. It's not. It's not always anti-human, Sometimes it is. I mean, there are, there are stories where you know these beings don't care. Sometimes they very much care, and sometimes they care out of antipathy and sometimes they care out of out of sincere interest. Usually, if you're human stuck in this you're dead, no matter what. But like like, it's not the same kind of like cosmic apathy that you get in Lovecraft or John Belmack Long or you know whatever, and nor is it the moralism of like August Durleff or any of that either. Like it's it's. It's something else.

Danny Anderson: 1:12:06

And I find it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:07

I find it very interesting. I also, like you, noticed that it has I'm going to make a comparison to ancient world thought Like so if you're a stoic in 300 BCE you believe that Zeus is real but that he's a material being. We're all made out of his material Gods and these cosmic enemies in Shay are like that, like they are cosmic level. They are Godlike in power, but they are actual beings and they are material and so he is still a material list in that sense. But it's nowhere. It's not the same kind of thing as at least in his world I don't know about his own personal metaphysical beliefs that Lovecraft has where, like it's, it's a cold, empty world filled of incomprehensible horror that we just can't even begin to comprehend.

Danny Anderson: 1:13:07

Which is merciful.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:08

Yeah, and it's good, we can't comprehend it, whereas Shay is just like well, you can't really comprehend it. But if that's, that's not good or bad. And he seems to think you can comprehend a whole lot more of it than Lovecraft thinks you can comprehend and in some ways he proves that that's still scary, like well, yeah, because it puts almost human personality traits in these gigantic beings, right.

Danny Anderson: 1:13:38

So to go back to the under the shelf story, at the very end of that the sisters fight off this giant crab monster or whatever it is, and it just sort of like it seems to just let them go out of almost like bemused admiration for them.

Danny Anderson: 1:13:56

I'm just going to read it at the end In the course of those heartbeats they absolutely knew the brevity of their own lives before the long endurance of this Titan. So that's a very Lovecraftian thing. We are nothing in comparison to this thing and knew as well, in commensurate though they were with this colossus, that it's saluted their sentience and their brevity, performed for them this cosmic courtesy salvation and withdrew to the benthos that housed its hunger life. So this being seems to like actually notice them. That's very not Lovecraftian, right, and it's actually amused at their will to live and sort of like it knows that they're a blip anyway and so it just kind of amusedly lets them go. But that is a major variation from what Lovecraft will do and it actually shows sort of a different attitude about our place in the cosmos, I think, something that is much more pro-human. In Michael Shea. There's a very strong humanist like bent to these stories.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:01

Yeah, I would agree with that. That is the difference. It's still cosmic and you're still not going to win, but it's not totally alien, nor totally indifferent, and sometimes it's capricious will can work out in your favor, so like it's almost absurdism.

Danny Anderson: 1:15:20

It's almost like the philosophical school of absurdism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:23

Right, but it is less nihilistic than or at least in some ways it seems less nihilistic than Lovecraft. Also, like there's the obvious inversion Lovecraft had a pension for aristocrats and only kind of softened it towards the end of his life, and he was probably. There's some indications he might have slightly softened his racism, but I mean he was racist even by 1920 standards. So like-.

Danny Anderson: 1:15:51

And he married a Jewish lady, though right, and so that's an interesting complication. It doesn't work out really well, but-.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:58

Yeah, I know very few Jewish ladies and moved to the immigrant card of Brooklyn and then freaked out about it, but yeah, and she went to Cleveland, I think my hometown.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:08

Yeah it's. I've actually always went like there's a lot of speculation about if Lovecraft had not had died of cancer young Cause. I mean, the one thing is we have to raise in mind people, lovecraft. If Lovecraft didn't get to either Danny or my age, so like there is some indication that he could have gone the other way. But I don't like overly speculating on that, cause he could have easily actually doubled down on bigotry later. You just don't know. Yeah, there's a kind of shift in him, which hey. However, there is no love of aristocratic anything. There's no contempt for people of color. There's none of that in here, like in so much that race comes up at all. It comes up as like a positive descriptor of working class people and it's just kind of accepted as a fact of working class life and why there may be tensions between races or whatever. It's not ever the point of the story, nor is it ever like nor is that ever yeah.

Danny Anderson: 1:17:13

That's a black man that comes in and robs the store. But that's not even the point. The black man is a source of enlightenment in that way. In that case, right and so yeah. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:24

Yeah, and so, like you know, it's not as on the head, as like Lovecraft Country is where you're deliberately inverting it. But there is just, shay's concerns are with clearly with people that Lovecraft would not have taken seriously, and it seems like that's why he has the Lovecraftian classes getting first. Yeah, like you know, there's both a kind of class commentary in that, but there's also, I think, like well, also they're the people dumb enough to get close to that. Like nobody, no working class person would go anywhere near that, unless they were really really confused or traumatized, as in fat face, or you know, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 1:18:07

Well, to the point go ahead. I'm sorry.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:09

No, go ahead.

Danny Anderson: 1:18:11

Well, you had mentioned earlier Lovecraft's like paranoia about miscegenation and stuff. Right, the end of Demiurge, it actually it's triumphantly it crossed species breeding across species. Like where he has he gets grunt to sort of mate with a sea lion which is the carrier of some sort of oceanic Demiurge, and then there's this sort of almost yin-yang-y melding of the earth and the water there with that kind of coupling and so like that story ends with a cross-species miscegenation, not just like cross race, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:50

Right, yeah, and that was also the hint that there was some kind of actual Gnostic stuff going on, because Lovecraft would never care about elements.

Danny Anderson: 1:18:58

Why.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was just. It's a fascinating collection of stories and, I think, interesting in a lot of ways the sympathetic portrayal of women, the sympathetic portrayal of working class people, the sympathetic portrayal of even like working class peropouts, very dashel, hamas-style, the nor elements which are all through it, the fact that, like, when you do get like Wellock people, they're basically portrayed as like either loons or crazy people or evil, or even when they're none of those, they're at least annoying. So like that's very much the thing going on and I just I wanna echo Danny's like he's such a good literary writer without feeling like he's an MFA writer. I don't get that anyone's writing about some professors affairs in any of these books Like, and it's refreshing in that sense. So final thoughts Danny.

Danny Anderson: 1:20:07

I really am grateful that you and Carter Stepper, both separately at the same time, pointed me in his direction. I think they're really tremendous and unique additions to something that can feel stale after a while and sort of yeah, I get the point with Cosmic Horror, this is like an utterly unique twist on it and I highly you know like enjoyed reading this and will probably revisit these stories in the future. I've taught like little mini classes on HP, lovecraft and I think in the future, when I do that, I'm definitely gonna supplement some of these stories as sort of counterpoint to some of those stories. And so no, I think it's tremendous One thing to, if you want, I think, a theoretical apparatus, to use an English term, to maybe give you some terms to think about this.

Danny Anderson: 1:20:58

I always recommend Mark Fisher's book the Weird and the Eerie. And when Fisher in that book he basically takes a magnifying glass to Freud's idea of the uncanny and kind of zooms in and gives us a little more supple use of that and he kind of distinguishes the weird from the eerie and when one thing he says about the weird is that it is something brought from the outside to our familiar world, basically, and that's very Lovecraftian, right and I think you can use that idea to look at what Fisher or what Shay is doing here. But Shay makes it interesting because he has a way in these stories of familiarizing the unfamiliar and I think it's a really, really interesting complication on the whole idea of weird and weird fiction For me from my reading history, an utterly unique and fascinating approach to it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:58

Yeah, I'm with you If I was gonna suggest another writer. If you read Michael Shay and you really like him, the only writer. There's only two writers that I think are equally humanistic and will craft the unsimultaneously. One is T E D Klein, or Ted Klein, particularly in the kind of hard to get super long novel of the ceremonies but the short stories. Klein, however, only has two collections out. I mean, it's kind of like two collections and I think two novels, maybe just one novel, I'm not quite sure. And then Katelyn Kearnan, I would also say is also is good reading A little bit more MFAE, I would say, than a little bit less Dashiell Hammett, but still is interesting. The Cthulhu myth though, but still humanistic. So if you're into this, those are also people you might be into. I also think T E D Klein has interesting things to say about class and rural, urban differences and stuff like that. That Resonant Wichey and Katelyn Kearnan has a lot to say about sexuality.

Danny Anderson: 1:23:12

I think they deal a lot with that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:16

I can't remember what their pronoun is. I'm gonna use they to be on the same side, and so those are the people I would tell to check this out, who I wouldn't check out, even though I like their work. Don't read Brian Lumley or any of the other Lovecraftians if you like this, because you're gonna get something very different, more Lovecraft-y than this. And, wow, I like the good racist from Providence enough.

Danny Anderson: 1:23:47

I still love to read Lovecraft, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:52

I guess I can separate. Lovecraft biography is actually interesting because he's both a very terrible and a very good person in some way simultaneously, and I think it's good for people to deal with those contradictions morally, that you can encounter someone who has totally reprobate ideas in some ways but actually kind of behaves morally towards other people.

Danny Anderson: 1:24:14

This is a lot of the living in pencil-tucky, as we talked about before.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:17

Yeah, although I mean in Lovecraft's case it's not like because he's like some. He's not like some working class with mixed values. It's more just like he fancies himself an aristocrat with their presages, is, but isn't actually one. So it's, and he seems to be fundamentally decent when people he actually interacts with, but he avoids interacting with people. So, although apparently one of the most fascinating things about Lovecraft is, he may be the person we have the most letters from period there's more Lovecraft letters on like literature and stuff than most modern authors have, like you know, in all the writing. So I think that's fascinating, which is why we have so much. That's why we know so much about him and what he thought and both his good and bad points. Shay, we don't have anything like that, sorry, guys.

Danny Anderson: 1:25:18

You're tragically young. Yeah 64 or something like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:23

Yeah, yeah.

Danny Anderson: 1:25:24

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:26

And I was about to say of the like I think Kiernan's about Kiernan's younger than Shay would be if Shay was still alive, but like of the three Shays in the middle of the age range of the people I mentioned who are like him. So yeah, it was, he died young and honestly there's the other reason I mentioned he declined is like Shay and him both don't have a ton of material out there, like I think the Shays material that gets bulky is his Niftheline stuff and his Jack Vance, amages and pastesius, but like his short story output I think is basically two collections.

Danny Anderson: 1:26:19

Yeah, and even like the Power Out of Time is quite short. It's a novella. It's not really a novel, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:30

So I think that is what I would tell you to check out and I would also agree anytime you can read. I like Mark Fisher's literary writing more, his literary theorizing, probably a little more than like his political theorizing. I know that's like heresy these days, but I actually think the Weird in the Eerie is a great book.

Danny Anderson: 1:26:56

Really is yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:57

It's really useful.

Danny Anderson: 1:26:58

And, honestly, as somebody who is rightfully accused of being like a obnoxiously generalist and a little even scatterbrained about things, he covers so many topics and in so many ways and in so many interesting ways. He just jumps from music to painting, to album covers, to books, to television movies, and that's just sort of my style of cultural engagement, and so I found that the book to be really really fascinating and short and very readable.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:34

Yeah, I would second that no Fisher book is actually particularly long, except for his collected essays, which are, even for that, not super long. So I would tell people I always read Goodall Mark Fisher and even though I should say that I technically work for one of his two publicating presses that he was associated with, so I have, I no longer get any money from that, so you're not financially helping me, so I'm not corrupt in that way and I hope. Oh, one more thing why I have you here If people are interested on the five year anniversary on the death I mean not on the death of Mark Fisher on the publication of the Vampire Castle essay 2013,. It is an 18th you and I did a discussion on that essay. We are now 10 years out. So if you want to know what I thought about it half a decade ago, from something a decade ago that people still talk about in a way that sometimes makes me uncomfortable, you can go listen to that episode of Danny's old show, Sateria Review, which is all still available, I believe.

Danny Anderson: 1:28:47

Yeah, it's all up there If you go to. Sorry, I wasn't expecting.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:56

That's okay. You don't technically have to plug anymore. It's your ex show.

Danny Anderson: 1:29:00

Castos, castos, and you can find it on there somewhere. I'll tell you what if anybody really is interested in finding the Sateria Review, we'll all be up on your pod catchers too. Still, so I can't remember what episode that was. It was fairly early on. I remember you were like irritated that it was like finally a Christian podcast that asked you to come on and talk about that essay. Yes, it was, I was like oh, shut up, it was me.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:28

I was like, oh so people are writing for Jack a bit magazine about this essay, but like one of the major people who commissioned the piece is like just sitting around and not that. I totally want to cash in on that because I have over time and this is a segment I didn't prep Danny for. But the trajectory of Russell Brand, even since we covered this five years ago, has gotten interesting enough for me to be like. This is even wilder now in hindsight than it was in 2018. And definitely that wasn't 2013.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:17

So much is to be said about that so you can.

Danny Anderson: 1:30:20

Also, if you want to find stuff like that, I have a sub stack now it's called Untaking and you can find that and I mostly do what I feel more comfortable doing and so, and I've been getting into a lot more fiction writing and so for me that's what's replaced sectarian review, but I'm more than happy to shoot you two episodes of that, and you were on gosh, probably 15 episodes of sectarian review. Like we talked about so many movies and one thing I loved about having you. I think everyone calls on you to talk about politics and I would call on you to talk about, like Cohen brother movies and Cynthia Ozick books, right, and I think yes, Carl Brothers-.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:02

I enjoyed reading that side of you and almost we didn't quite complete all of Tarkovsky's filmography.

Danny Anderson: 1:31:08

but we came close. Kind of Tarkovsky movies. Yes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:12

Like I think we did like five of them.

Danny Anderson: 1:31:16

So Solaris Nostalgia.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:20

Solaris Nostalgia Stalker and Romney Rueblif.

Danny Anderson: 1:31:25

Yeah, I think we did those four, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:27

We did four we didn't do Mirror and we didn't do-.

Danny Anderson: 1:31:32

Sacrifice.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:33

Sacrifice and we didn't come and see.

Danny Anderson: 1:31:35

Ivan's Childhood either.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:37

Ivan's Childhood not come and see. Yeah, so we didn't do his first movie and his two last movies, basically, I think. But like, but we did most of them. So yeah.

Danny Anderson: 1:31:48

So all you people are saying to Derek all this time, like ask him questions about art and literature, like, and I've had you on, you talked about your poetry books on that podcast. So yeah, you should go check out the sectarian review and just filter for Varn episodes. There's a whole bunch of them in there for you and so.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:05

Yeah, your podcast suffered from the. You and JG Michael are two people who I think suffered from the. I actually am interested in everything. Yes, that's my problem, Like I think, the wildest episode we did together was you, me and a conservative on the politics show and the Christian Humanities Network was.

Danny Anderson: 1:32:27

Oh yeah, it was Coil, the Coil Coil yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:29

Yeah, and we did it on the scandal of the evangelical mind as applied to American politics.

Danny Anderson: 1:32:36

The Mark Knoll book. Yeah, that's right. I do remember that one, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:39

Yeah that's actually one of my favorite episodes. It's one of the only time I discussed politics with you, but it was from such a strange angle that it was like because I like that Mark Knoll book and I think I'm one of the few non-Christians who's ever like referenced it at all.

Danny Anderson: 1:32:54

No, it's great, yeah, yeah, I actually have this little shelf of all the books that I've covered one way or another on that podcast and so, yeah, no, I did enjoy doing it. I'm not saying it'll never come back, but I have no plans to do new episodes of it, but I'm more than happy to come talk to other people, so I'm really happy that you invited me. It's great to see you again. I always enjoy our time together.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:18

Yeah, me too, and I like talking to you because we talk about other things and this is closer to my day job. So, yeah, and it's definitely closer to yours too, oh yeah, yeah, that's a good difference. Yeah, so in that note we're gonna roll the credits and.