Corporate Cthulhu Open For Business

If there really are merciless elder gods from beyond time and space hovering on the fractured fringes of our reality, it makes perfect sense that they would find themselves in the world of big business.  I mean, really, where else would they wind up?  Why sleep away the eons in the frigid depths of the ocean when you could be drawing down a six figure salary just for turning up to a few meetings?  Why spread madness and horror from some dingy cavern or dream-dimension when you can wreck the sanity of whole nations with a little malpractice in the world of high finance?  Why scour the earth of sentient life yourself when you can set up a corporation to do much the same and rake in a buck or seven trillion while you're at it?

Yup, as strange as the tales gathered within the anthology Corporate Cthulhu: Lovecraftian Tales of Bureaucratic Nightmare surely are, the strangest thing is that it took so long for someone to put the two concepts together.

Well, okay, this certainly isn't the first time - though to my knowledge it is the first time anyone's thought to use the combination for a themed collection, so credit is still due to editor Edward Stasheff and publisher Pickman's Press for taking a good idea and running with it.  But I know for a fact that the concept isn't one hundred percent new because I wrote my own story pairing the twin nightmares of the Mythos and rampant capitalism way back in my early years as a writer.  The God Under the Church was born out of the same impulses that led to many of the stories in my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, and was even a near miss for that book, due to the fact that I didn't have the time at that point to polish it up to my satisfaction.  But I didn't want to miss another opportunity to get it back out there, and there couldn't have been a more perfect fit for a tale in which a new corporate director starts to discover the very-sinister-indeed history of the company in which he's worked.

If that sounds like your idea of fun, you can pick up a copy of Corporate Cthulhu here on Amazon UK and here on Amazon US.  And here's the full table of contents:

DEATH PLEDGE by Jeff Deck
WELCOME TO THE R’LYEH CORPORATION by James Pratt
SHADOW CHARTS by Marcus Johnston
CASUAL FRIDAY by Todd H. C. Fischer
THE GOD UNDER THE CHURCH by David Tallerman
REFUSAL by DJ Tyrer
DAGON-TEC by Adam Millard
ESOTERIC INSURANCE, INC. by Evan Dicken & Adrian Ludens
CAREER ZOMBIE by John Taloni
BOEDROMION NOUMENIA by Andrew Scott
INCORPORATION by Max D. Stanton
THE LOPONINE EXPLOITATION by John M. Campbell
FESTIVAL PREPARATIONS by Justin Bailey
MARYANNE’S EQUATIONS by Harry Pauff
WHOLESOME LABOR by Sam Rent
LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR by Wile E. Young
TINDALOS, INC. by Charlie Allison
CLEAN UP AISLE FOUR by Josh Storey
FORCED LABOR by Peter Rawlik
THE SHADOWS LENGTHEN in the Close by Ethan Gibney
IT CAME FROM I.T. by Gordon Linzner
RETRACTION by Marie Michaels
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT AT DAGOCORP HQ by L Chan
NO DOVES COME FROM RAVEN EGGS by Mark Oxbrow
APOTHEOSIS by Darren Todd

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.