Corporate Cthulhu Needs Your Kickstarting

But why would I want to encourage anything called Corporate Cthulhu, you ask?  That sounds horrible!  Look, it's okay ... it's just an anthology of Lovecraftian horror stories set around the concept of big business, it doesn't really mean that ancient evils from before time are trying to control every aspect of your life through the medium of capitalism.

Although..............

Wait, let's not get distracted!  The point is, there's an anthology being Kickstarted right now, and my story The God Under the Church is in it, along with work from nineteen other fine authors, and it's going to be all sorts of great, I'm sure.  Look, the Kickstarter page is probably going to do a better job of explaining this, so maybe go have a look there?  And to save you a little time, here's the blurb:

Of all bureaucracies, corporations are the most powerful, seeming to have a life and will of their own. They're privately held with a multi-national reach, seemingly bottomless resources, and armies of lawyers jealously guarding their trade secrets. Corporate culture fiercely resists any attempt to change or regulate it, and anything and everything is justified by the bottom line. If ever there was a place for a cosmic horror to hide, grow, and thrive, it's deep within the paperwork of a huge bureaucratic corporation.  Who needs a Cthulhu Cult when you've got Cthulhu, Inc.?

Into this insidious world are thrust our heroes—the curious, the puzzled, and the frustrated. Defying authority, seeking answers they'd be better off not knowing, the secrets they discover threaten their sanity and their lives. Will they become the next whistleblower media hero? Or the next no-call / no-show their coworkers promptly forget? Just remember: it's nothing personal—it's just business.

Now, I'm conscious that we're in the middle of a tug of war when it comes to Mr. H. P. Lovecraft and his writings, for reasons that should really have been addressed decades ago.  And I fully understand that Lovecraft was in a considerable number of ways far less than a brilliant human being, even by the dubious standards of his age.  But he did come up with something pretty revolutionary.  I mean, cosmic horror!  That's an amazing notion right there.  And, as a writer, it's a gift that keeps on giving, a bottomless well of sinister stuff that you can take in just about any direction.  So while The God Under the Church is actually a revamp of a piece that was published some years ago in long-vanished magazine The Willows, I still have plenty of sympathy for what it was trying to accomplish: namely, to map the scariness of cosmic horror onto the rather more immediate scariness of the fact that psychotic entities known as corporations run our daily lives in ways we can barely imagine and would probably pee ourselves in terror if we ever began to fully comprehend.

And Corporate Cthulhu is a whole anthology built around that idea!  That's cool, right?  I think it is.  I actually really want to read this book, and I'm eager to see it succeed.  So why not grab a copy in advance, and help a rather exciting project to succeed?  I know I would, if evil corporations hadn't sucked up all my money and expelled it into some fathomless void of existential darkness.*  Anyway, here, once again, is the link to that Kickstarter page!





* Okay, yes, I spent all my money on weird nineties anime.