Pierce Mostyn is back in an all new adventure! A creature feature extraordinaire: In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness.
I’ve been sharing snippets with the folk on my mailing list. If you want to get in on sneak peeks and exclusive never-before-published content, sign up for my VIP Horror Readers Club. Plus, you’ll get the exclusive novella, “The Feeder” — which is not available in stores.
And if you haven’t yet discovered Pierce Mostyn, take a look at the books and pick your monster!
This time around, Mostyn and his team are sent to Antarctica to investigate why a Russian base has suddenly gone silent. Once they find out why, Dr Rafe Bardon, the director of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, sends them off to the subglacial Gamburtsev Mountains, also known as The Ghost Mountains. Because Dr Bardon thinks they fit the coordinates of the infamous Mountains of Madness.
Those familiar with the stories of HP Lovecraft will immediately recognize where the inspiration came for my story.
Lovecraft welcomed other writers to write in his Cthulhu Mythos universe. And many took him up on the invite, and many more continue to do so today.
I enjoy working in the Mythos. It’s a walk in a world where we are not at the top of the food chain. It’s a world where there are forces at work much bigger than we are. Beings to whom we are not unlike the ants on a sidewalk. Blithely stepped on without a second thought.
The universe of the Cthulhu Mythos puts humans in a place where we are not only not equal with nature, we are less than nature. It’s a universe that makes me stop and think about all of our petty squabbles. It makes me realize how, in the big picture, our troubles and problems are truly insignificant.
I’m looking at the 25th of March as the launch date of In the Shadow of the Mountains of Madness. Stay tuned!
Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!
Next week Pierce Mostyn and the OUP gang ride again, in another terrifyingly action-packed tale of cosmic horror.
The Rub’ al Khali, or the Empty Quarter, is a fascinating place. I find it almost as intriguing as Antarctica.
What makes the Rub’ al Khali so interesting? It is the largest sand desert in the world. It covers some 250,000 square miles of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The desert is larger than France and somewhat smaller than Texas.
This vast expanse of sand is home to the lost city of Iram, which is mentioned in the Qur’an, and may have been an important city in the ancient frankincense trade.
The Empty Quarter is the setting for Lovecraft’s story “The Nameless City”, and is also the setting for Demons in the Dunes, Pierce Mostyn’s newest adventure.
Did Lovecraft’s story play any part in the origin of Demons in the Dunes? It did. HPL’s story gave me the idea to set an adventure in the Empty Quarter, with Iram as the focal point.
However, the Nameless City of Lovecraft’s story is clearly not Iram. Consequently, the story line of Demons has no direct influence from Lovecraft. Although it is Lovecraftian to a degree.
Little is known about the actual city of Iram. It may have been located on the frankincense caravan route. Legend has it that it was built by giants to challenge God by creating a paradise on earth greater then God’s paradise. God, of course, destroyed the giants and the city.
Iram is called Iram of the Pillars, but we don’t know why. One Internet source, attributed mystical connections to the city. According to this view, Iram actually occupies several planes of existence, and, in accordance with the mystical position, an alternate reading of the city’s title is Iram of the Old Ones. No self-respecting Cthulhu Mythos aficionado can walk away from that tidbit of info and not have the cogs whirring in his brain!
Out of those seeds, Demons in the Dunes grew. I had great fun writing it. I hope you have great fun reading it.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
The insignia of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena
The other week someone asked me about the symbolism behind the emblem of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena (OUP). The fictional agency for which my paranormal investigator Pierce Mostyn works to save America and the world from those things that make big bumps in the night. It’s a good question, because the design wasn’t haphazard.
The creator of the design was none other than Crispian Thurlborn, who is no stranger to you if you are a reader of this blog. He’s a fabulous writer. In addition, he’s a superb book cover designer, andtrailer maker. He designed all of the promo materials I use for the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation books.
So what does all that stuff on the above emblem mean? Let’s take a look at the symbolism.
The red triangle on which the circle is placed represents the depth of the OUP. It is in the background of our daily lives and it’s reach is very deep. It is behind everything.
The shield covering the eagle’s body represents defense in the air (the stars), on the land (the mountain), and on the sea (the waves). There is also a Lovecraftian dimension to those three aspects in addition to the normal heraldic symbolism. The OUP protects us from all things deep under the sea (where Cthulhu sleeps), in space and beyond (where the Great Old Ones originated), and under the earth (where Tsathoggua sleeps).
The all-seeing eye in the pyramid on the shield symbolizes the ever vigilant nature of the OUP.
The eagle itself is a bird of prey, but has for a very long time symbolized nobility, strength, and bravery. The wings in the displayed position symbolize protection. And the rays, or rayonnee emanating from the eagle’s head symbolize intelligence and enlightenment.
The olive branch and the arrows show that all of the traits are present in both peace and war.
And now to the eagle’s head. Why is it facing to the eagle’s left? If you notice any symbolism which uses an eagle the head is usually turned to the eagle’s right. The right hand symbolizing honor and nobility. At least most of the time.
But what does it mean when the head faces to the left? That is an excellent question. Our word “sinister” comes from the Latin word for left. Hm. Gives one pause to think, doesn’t it?
Does the eagle’s head facing left mean the OUP is a sinister organization, one that actually doesn’t do good? Well, the eagle on the US President’s seal faced left until President Truman changed it to the right. More food for thought.
For the OUP, the left facing eagle symbolizes the fine line the agency walks in protecting us from that of which we aren’t aware. The all-seeing eye, the rays of enlightenment and intelligence, and the sinister facing eagle together imply the danger of the OUP’s mission and methodology and the wisdom needed to thread a very fine needle, or walk a very fine line.
It is a case of fighting fire with fire. Of fighting the forces of darkness with darkness. Of using the two-edged sword which can cut both ways. Fighting evil by frequently having to resort to using evil.
All of this is, of course, perfectly in line with the Lovecraftian base underlying the Pierce Mostyn stories.
The Great Old Ones, while appearing evil to us because they mean the end of the world as we know it, are not intrinsically evil. They simply exist as we exist. They appear evil to us because they are unlike us and appear to be at cross purposes with us. They are aliens, foreigners to our universe. And by nature we tend to feel uncomfortable with what we do not know or understand. But perhaps most damning from our perspective is that we are to them as ants are to us. Nothing. A mere nuisance.
If ants bug us, we exterminate them. The same with the Great Old Ones. To them we are pests.
For Lovecraft, human beings are not the apex of all creation. We are essentially nothing in the face of the great cosmos. We are a highly developed primate, having evolved on a tiny speck of rock and dirt, orbiting a star of no particular significance. Our position in the universe is so infinitesimally tiny, we are in essence insignificant.
Prior to Lovecraft, Nietzsche posited our essential meaninglessness.He cites, in The Birth of Tragedy, the story of Midas and Silenus. Midas asks the god what is the best thing for us. And Silenus answers him by saying that the best thing for us humans is to never be born. Otherwise our best course is to die soon.
Nietzsche goes on to posit that when we gaze into the deep black abyss and come away knowing our insignificance, our meaninglessness, our essential lack of any objective purpose — it is then the words of Silenus come home to us.
However, Nietzsche didn’t leave us in the depths of despair and nihilism. It is why he advocated we must create our own purpose. We are the creators. We are the gods. Not the beings we fashioned in our own image. We must embrace our senses and emotions, we must resort to art to find our own meaning and purpose. If left to our rational nature alone, we will sink into despair. We will go insane.
The Great Old Ones are not rational by our standards, which is perhaps why so many go insane immediately upon seeing them.
Dr Rafe Bardon, the OUP’s director, and Pierce Mostyn have gazed into the abyss and survived. They realize that the eagle facing to the right will not save the planet from the roiling insane chaos (at least by our standards) threatening to over take it.
Only by facing the sinister is there any hope for survival.
Stop by this Friday for the fourth installment of The Medusa Ritual. Lovecraftian adventure coming your way, as Pierce Mostyn and the OUP battle a nemesis hellbent on opening the gate for the Great Old Ones.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
Pierce Mostyn fighting inter-dimensional beings. Photo from a secret OUP file.
The other week I ran across a magazine called The Occult Detective Quarterly. Since the occult detective is a relatively new interest of mine, I loaded a couple issues onto my iPad for a read.
I’m about halfway through the first issue and I can honestly give the zine a big thumbs up! I hope they get the money they need to publish issues 5 and 6.
The occult detective has a long and venerable history. I outlined a bit of that history in a previous post. I also noted that it was Seabury Quinn’s occult detective, Jules de Grandin, that saved Weird Tales magazine from going under very early in its history.
Today I’d like to focus attention on my own occult, or paranormal, investigator creation: Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena.
I’m a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, vampires, werewolves, re-animated corpses (whether they be creations of Dr Frankenstein, Herbert West, mummies, or old-fashioned zombies and zuvembies), and, of course, ghosts. Pretty much anything supernatural gets my vote, and even a few things that aren’t exactly supernatural but can be classed as weird.
Pierce Mostyn, paranormal investigator extraordinaire, and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, led by uber-mysterious Dr Rafe Bardon, are America’s ultra-secret fighters whose mission is to stop and destroy those things it is best for us not to know they exist.
In Nightmare in Agate Bay, Mostyn and his team meet an off-shoot of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in backwater Agate Bay, Minnesota. Which Order was the same mysterious cult that plagued poor Innsmouth. We meet fish people and a shoggoth. Some of our favorite paranormals.
Mostyn’s next adventure, Stairway to Hell, takes him and his team to the subterranean world of K’n-yan. Where we find a super-race of fickle and sadistic beings, who just so happen to be worshippers of Cthulhu and his buddies.
In K’n-yan, while trying to find a way to escape, Mostyn encounters the beautiful and seductive H’tha-dub, who gives him a Faustian choice that could save his team and at the same time destroy his budding romance with team member Dotty Kemper. Duty or love, that is Mostyn’s choice. The choice should be easy. But is it?
We all know that while Cthulhu is a pretty gargantuan bad guy, he isn’t the only monster on the block. In Terror in the Shadows, Mostyn and his team encounter a family that has degenerated beyond the classification of human. A family that has undergone reverse evolution. The classic term for such a being is abhuman. And Mostyn encounters lots of them in the hills of Appalachia. For their part, the abhumans recognize a good protein source when they see one.
And if the monsters of natural degeneration aren’t enough, there’s Van Dyne’s Vampires — the product of modern science and the laboratory. Mostyn and team must face hordes of these lab-cultured demons who’d just as soon chomp your liver as suck your blood.
Evil never rests. After all, if it did, what would we paranormal writers write about? Which brings me to the upcoming Pierce Mostyn paranormal investigation: The Medusa Ritual. As an experiment, I intend to serialize the working draft of this short novel here on the website prior to its publication in book form this summer. But more on the serialized novel and The Medusa Ritual in the next couple weeks.
The first Pierce Mostyn investigation went public a year ago. And in the 12 months since I’ve had great fun getting to know the central gang: Mostyn himself, Dr Dotty Kemper, Willie Lee Baker, DC Jones, Helene Dubreuil, Dr Rafe Bardon, and the newest addition, Kymbra NicAskill.
I encourage you to take a look at my interpretation of the occult detective. You’ll find everything you love about the paranormal and good stories in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations. There be monsters here!
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
Logo of the Office of Unidentified PhenomenaShare This!
HP Lovecraft was the creator of the cosmic horror subgenre. I find cosmic horror much more terrifying than some crazy axe wielding maniac jumping out of a closet and chopping up someone.
We want to have value. Today’s educational system is busy trying to build children’s self-esteem. “We’re all winners.” “Everyone has value.” “You have a purpose.”
And while those are indeed lofty sentiments, in reality the children taught those sentiments are going to have a difficult time when they encounter their first selfish SOB out in the real world.
When I was in fifth grade, I lived in terror of the bullies who every recess when we were outside pantsed wallflowers such as myself. Those bullies didn’t give a fig about playing nice, or that everyone had value, or that everyone was a winner. They operated on a primeval level. Those who were stronger got their way. They were the winners.
Lovecraft’s point was no different. We humans sit on this speck of dirt and tell ourselves how important we are. That we have intrinsic value just because we’re human. However, the universe isn’t listening. And it isn’t listening because it doesn’t care. We don’t matter. It’s indifferent to us. We have as much value as the ball of ice orbiting our sun known as Haley’s Comet.
Everyone in the tiny Greek city-states was important (if you weren’t a slave, that is). When Alexander the Great suddenly expanded the world across a huge chunk of Asia, those same Greeks were suddenly faced with an identity crisis.
“Who am I in this huge new world?” they asked. The Epicurean and Stoic schools of philosophy arose in response to that question and attempted to provide answers.
Today we are faced with the same question. For the sake of literary convention, Lovecraft personified the universe’s indifference to us in The Great Old Ones. For Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Mythos was an attack on religion and it’s false hope. And the irony should not be lost that Lovecraft gave The Great Old Ones worshipers.
Lovecraft was throwing down the gauntlet. All of our cherished beliefs are false. We have no objective meaning. We are living in a dream world if we think we do.
And the terror comes when we suddenly awake and are confronted with the meaninglessness of reality. That’s why I think The Great Old Ones and their minions are described as insanities, contrary to nature, blasphemous, and the like. They are contrary to everything that we think is normal.
Those bullies on my playground didn’t care about values or artificial constructs of behavior. They were contrary to everything that was considered normal behavior. If they could catch you, they would pants you. That was their reality. And their laughter at your pain and embarrassment was a reminder that the universe did not play fair and did not care.
Lovecraft’s heroes are basically helpless. They can do nothing to stop The Great Old Ones. All they can do is warn us that they are coming.
Pierce Mostyn, then, is not your typical Lovecraftian hero. He fights back against that cosmic indifference. He does so out of a sense of duty. Much like the Stoic who lives his life according to the principles of virtue and duty. Duty arises out of our being part of a whole, and we have obligations to that whole. Obligations that the virtuous person is bound to discharge.
Mostyn doesn’t see himself as helpless, even when facing an entity such as a shoggoth (one of those walking insanities that is a blasphemy of nature). He’s willing to admit there is a lot out there that we don’t understand. And maybe can never understand. He uses reason, and approaches the problems of life rationally. Not unlike the Stoics before him.
Dr Dotty Kemper, Mostyn’s main sidekick, on the other hand is a materialist. She believes science has all the answers. She’s a paranormal skeptic. It is science that replaces superstition with knowledge. Sometimes though she has a rough time of it, especially when science has no explanation.
In a sense, the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations aren’t pure cosmic horror. Because in the face of the universe’s indifference, and I do agree with Lovecraft on that, I think Marcus Aurelius provides us with a ready answer. Namely, that life is opinion. Or, if we expand the translation, life is what you make it to be.
I hope you enjoyed this little discussion of Lovecraft, cosmic horror, and Pierce Mostyn. The series, Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations, launches in 3 weeks on the 29th. So mark your calendars!
The emblem at the top of this post is the emblem of the Office of Unidentified Phenomena (OUP), which is part of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which is a child agency of the US Department of Homeland Security. But don’t Google it, or check Wikipedia. You won’t find it there. Maybe if you went to the dark web…
Comments are always welcome, and, until next time, happy reading!
Dr Dotty Kemper trying to prove the efficacy of this dimension’s lead bullets and physical laws versus the physical properties of other dimensional beings.Share This!
