Because I’m sure that’s an endless source of obsession for many.
On July 20, I made a post asking for a trio of reviewers for a little story I wrote. The reviews were positive and I dare say enthusiastic; a story I’d scribbled down just for giggles turned out to be something that at least three people on the planet declared was worth fleshing out. And so… I’ve been doing that.
As mentioned repeatedly before that, a little while ago I finished writing a novel. That was a sci-fi yarn that took something like a year and a half to write, and is based on characters and a future world I’ve been tinkering with for a quarter century. I think it’s pretty good, though I also bet it could use a good editor. Still… I wrote a novel. Woo. With luck it will be read Any Day Now by a recognized science fiction author who will then give it a thumbs up or down.
Having finished the novel, I had a few other ideas rattling around, one of which came upon me fairly suddenly and which I wrote down in a matter of just a few days. This was what was positively reviewed, and which I’ve been somewhat feverishly working on expanding. It is… “The War With The Deep Ones.”
Anyone who reads my first novel but who hasn’t read any of the bits I’ve published on my blog will be introduced to an entirely original (as in, I dreamed it up) setting. But “The War With The Deep Ones” is an unabashed sequel to H. P. Lovecrafts “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” from 1931. There, Lovecraft introduced a species known as the “Deep Ones,” an amphibious race of ocean-dwelling humanoid critters. Unlike a lot of the entities Lovecraft wrote about, the Deep Ones are straight-up biological entities, largely conventional in biochemistry. You can kill them if you put a little effort into it. They are also Not At All Nice, they worship Cthulhu and look forward to the day when Mankind is wiped out. Like a lot of Lovecrafts tales, it ends with the looming threat of something big and horrible happening at some undefined time in the future, but doesn’t actually show that.
Because why not, “The War With The Deep Ones” shows what happens when that day in the future comes. Sequelizing another authors work is typically not something I’d do, but in this case I think it’s fine… Lovecraft was *very* open to the concept of shared universes, and welcomed other authors of his day to use his creations and add to the “mythos” he invented. So I’ve carried his story forward a century and expanded upon what he described. I’ve tried to not change the things he invented, but I have added to it where he left blanks. Lovecraft was a fan of science, so the advances in science and technology that he simply could not have foreseen change the ways in which mankind would react to something like a planetwide invasion of “fishmen” and just how vulnerable we’d be to them, their allies and their servitors.
“War” will not be a standard novel, but is instead a collection of short stories. I have already completed a further three stories, with two more in progress; since late July I’ve already written about *100* novel-length pages. My plan is to polish a few of the stories and post them here; depending on how the prior novel goes and how the “Deep One” stories are received I’ll give further thought on what to do with the complete collection. It would of course be great to get that published, but self-publishing is becoming a more interesting way to go.
As an aside: for those of you who are fans of Lovecraft, are there any artists impressions of the Deep Ones you find to be particularly accurate to the description, “realistic” looking *and* downright scary? The sort of creatures you’d lose bladder control is you saw them coming up out of the waves?