“Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.” – Batman Begins
H.P. Lovecraft walks into a bar, and the result was such that any man would be driven mad by the events that followed. Oh, and there was a rabbi and a horse.
When I was a kid, as I’ve established before, I read. A lot. At least an hour a day on the school bus. I’d read at home, too, since the nearest kid lived miles and miles away from Wilder Mountain, and occasionally Ma Wilder ran out of pork chops to tie around my neck so the dog would play with me.
Reading, though, held a very special place around our house, and was something that was revered by both Ma and Pa. One example? While I technically had a bedtime, Ma Wilder actively encouraged me to stay up as late as I wanted to if I was reading.
Game on.
What did I like reading? Science fiction was number one on the list, and horror was number two. (I also read a few fantasy novels, mainly Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open when I say most fantasy outside of Tolkien and Howard is just junk. Oops, I just did.)
Stephen King named his son Joe. No, I’m not joking.
The problem with writing horror is that it’s even harder to find good horror authors than it is to find good fantasy authors. Stephen King was just about the best – it’s important to remember that at one point the guy really could write a good story that was scary. I lost more sleep to ‘Salem’s Lot than any book, ever. Even though there were approximately twenty people in a ten-mile radius of where we lived, I was pretty sure that at least five were vampires when I was twelve. And most of the people were old – can you imagine the sound when the dentures with fangs sloshed around on their gums? And then they’d offer me hard candy after they exsanguinated me. I still shiver when I think about it.
I found Edgar Allen Poe disappointing. Not scary. I think it was his enormous head, which was counted as the ninth planet until astronomers had a vote.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment to me?
H.P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft had such a reputation for being scary. Sadly, the man just couldn’t write.
H.P. Lovecraft’s cookbook was called the Necro-nom-nom-icon.
I bought several Lovecraft books while I was growing up, and perhaps because of the prose in the format of “great creeping masses of undulating nouns that, if stared at, would drive a man to madness,” the stories just never caught my imagination. They weren’t scary to twelve-year-old me. I never felt that I’d die because of a “color out of space” or that creatures from the “mountains of madness” would ever threaten me, except for boredom.
As I got older, I discovered that there was one thing that Lovecraft was good at: amazing ideas. And when good writers finally took his work, they produced some amazing fiction and movies. I rented the VHS tape of Reanimator without knowing that it was a reworking of an old Lovecraft tale. It was amazing, though I don’t recommend it AT ALL if you’re a horror lightweight. Of people who figured out how to really bring Lovecraft to life, Brian Yuzna is the winner.
But Lovecraft’s ideas remain. Those are actually interesting to read about, even though he didn’t do a great job executing on them. Perhaps Lovecraft’s most famous idea is that of Cthulhu. What’s Cthulhu, besides the sound my toilet made after Pugsley flushed 142 novelty-size bars of soap (this really happened) when he was three?
I read a horror book in braille once. I could always feel when something bad was about to happen.
For those of you that aren’t familiar, Cthulhu is an Elder God – one of the creatures of the distant past. I’ll let Lovecraft himself describe Cthulhu
There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless [Chinese guy] had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
The really scary idea, to me, is that these Elder Gods are amoral. They couldn’t care less about men. We are, for the most part, as insignificant as the wrapper on a Whopper® to Oprah when she’s in an Oprah Whopper™ Frenzy© – trust me – keep your arms and feet away from the Whoppers™ when this happens.
Face it, we all knew that the Zuck wasn’t really from this time and dimension, right?
And, these Elder Gods couldn’t even live in our time, because the “stars weren’t right” and had to wait until the stars were right again. That was an especially creepy thought, because who knew when that was going to be? Was it next week? Next year? It was certainly going to happen, but when?
Lovecraft may be long dead, but our current economic situation makes me think that we’re living in what I’m calling the Cthulhu Collapse. It’s a collapse that’s out there, frozen as the guy who went to absolute zero – but don’t worry about him, he’s 0 k. Just because the Cthulhu Collapse isn’t living and breathing right now doesn’t mean it’s not real.
It’s just waiting for the stars to align. Here are some of the stars moving into position:
- In the fiscal year just ended, we had a deficit of over $3 trillion. This is more than all of the last three years. Heck I know some people that don’t make $3 trillion in a whole year.
- The overall public debt increased from somewhere around 75% of GDP to over 100%. Also in just one year. The current public debt is higher than the highest year of World War II, and we didn’t even invent a cool new bomb or 99,465 fighter planes. I’ll go on the record as saying that producing 99,465 prop-driven fighter planes would much more cool than bailing out a Wall Street firm. Any Wall Street firm.
- The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve® (which is neither Federal nor a reserve, discuss) has increased by $3 trillion. Wonder where all that money went? PEZ®. That must be it.
- For those of you keeping score on our home game, that’s a total of at least $6 trillion in additional money sloshing around. This year. No wonder they didn’t have enough cash left to pay to make coins.
The shortest horror story so far? 2020.
- Gross Domestic Product has dropped by 5%, at least. That means the economy produces less than it did last year, by at least $1 trillion. But real math says you have to subtract the deficit and the Fed balance sheet gains, so my money says that the economy really dropped by 35% last year if you drop the financial steroids that have been pumped into it. But a plane isn’t like an economy, since planes only crash once.
- At least 80,000 small businesses shut down between March and late July, 2020. Small business’ fail, a lot, right? This number is at least 36% higher than normal. One report I heard said that more than half of San Francisco’s small businesses closed so far this year. The theaters are re-opening as libraries filled with novels that have been made into movies – they’re calling it paper-view.
- Businesses that are staying in business don’t need to rent (as much) real estate anymore. Put simply, it’s far cheaper to have the wagie workers go home and work than rent the 37th floor of the Hastur The Unspeakable Tower in downtown Chicago. Or was that the Chase® Tower? I get confused when I compare monsters of unspeakable horror and fictional creatures that Lovecraft wrote about. Regardless, the lowered occupancy rates have knock-on effects. Lowered car and transport consumption. Lowered gasoline consumption. Lowered tire use. Lower number of excuses on what you were doing late on Tuesday night. The result? Even lower GDP. Even more lost jobs. Lost lingerie sales for mistresses.
- As Federal funding (giveaways) to businesses dry up, businesses are cutting workers, permanently. In many cases, these are very good jobs. The bright side of having your financial life collapse? I heard about a guy who lost his wallet and then had his identity stolen. The crook sent him a note in the mail: “It sucks to be you.”
Do I think the economy is in serious trouble? I do. I’ve said that for years, and this is nothing but an acceleration of trends that were already in place. The general consensus is that the printing presses should go into overdrive to print more money to give to people: this is nearly the only thing that nearly every politician agrees on in 2020.
The Mrs. wants me to make more money. Turns out you need a special paper for that.
Part of the problem is that so much of the money is sloshed into the stock markets in ways that aren’t at all clear. This is on purpose. How many dollars have been pumped into the market to keep it stratospheric? It’s not a coincidence that this is the year that the billionaire class has seen the biggest gains ever in their wealth. Elon Musk alone gained enough money this year to buy Albania. I’m hoping he reforms the Albanian Navy – their submarines have to resurface every two minutes so the rowers can breathe.
So, even though Lovecraft’s ideas are great, his stories aren’t scary. But when the Cthulhu Collapse hits, after the stars align?
Lovecraft put it this way:
When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Horror movies don’t scare me. What scares me? Looking down at my phone and seeing five missed calls from The Mrs.
See? Not scary.
But the Cthulhu Collapse? That’s something that’s scary. Have fun getting some sleep tonight – I hear the stars are simply lovely!
