Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we cover Remy Nakamura’s “Wet Dreams in R’lyeh,” first published in Frances Lu Pai Ippolito and Mark Teppo’s 2023 The Cozy Cosmic anthology. It’s a fun, fast read—go pick it up! Spoilers ahead.
“A wave of horror washed over us. This home had clearly not been remodeled since the seventies. How was that drab olive wallpaper ever a thing?”
In a rundown Capitol Hill Victorian lives a chosen family of “lovely weirdos,” among whom narrator Ivy feels “almost normal.” She’s a trans woman who once belonged to an “off-brand offshoot” Mormon sect in Idaho. ZeroRaven is a giant albino penguin from a lost city in Antarctica. Minnie is a member of the crustacean-fungal-insectoid Mi-Go race, exiled for protesting her peoples’ habit of stealing brains. Punch, a “cerulean blue-haired, spiked-pierced-tattooed wonder,” flaunts their gills when not in public; formerly they were part of a secret Dagon sect in Kyushu.
Tony R reminds Ivy of “the toxic cismen” of her uncle’s Mormon sect, with the “never-fading smiles” that cloaked their nefarious behind-the-scenes activities. Apart from the smile, however, Tony’s a good guy. He rescued all the housemates and now leads their cell in the Anti-Cult League Worldwide (ACLW.) Today he has a new mission for his crew: They’re headed to Anaheim to “help contain a Cthulhu cult.” No worries: This won’t be dangerous like their rescues of kids from hardcore sacrifice-loving groups. They’re just going to sneak into the cult’s HQ and plant some surveillance equipment. Punch protests that this sounds like black ops work, which Tony has assured the team they won’t be doing. Ivy, who has a silent crush on Punch, privately backs them up after the briefing, but Tony follows a reminder of what she owes the League with a request that she keep an eye on Punch for him. After all, the Deep One worshippers of Dagon do have ties to the Cthulhu cult.
On the flight from DC to LA, Ivy sits beside Punch and tries to reassure them that Tony “wouldn’t steer them wrong.” Punch says they don’t know about Tony, but the rest of the team are “survivors” who should trust their instincts. Ivy wasn’t just “rescued” from her sect, she chose to leave it, and she—all of them—deserve credit for that.
The night before Operation Save the Cultists, Ivy shares a motel room with Minnie and all Minnie’s “charges,” dying mice and birds and bugs to whom she’s gifted immortality by transplanting their brains into tiny robots. Ivy confides to Minnie her worries about the pending mission—maybe Minnie and ZeroRaven should “hang back”. Minnie calls over one of her friends, a roach transformed into a robot scarab and named Eustace. He’s equipped to transmit audio and video and, hidden in Ivy’s pocket, can let Minnie and ZeroRaven keep tabs on the raid from the team van.
In Anaheim, Tony and Ivy and Punch, disguised as Cox Cable techs, enter the Cthulhu cult’s safehouse. To their horror, it’s decorated in 70s-era olive and mustard. Marginally worse is the surprise attack by black-robed cultists and the revelation of Tony’s double-dealing—it’s he who commands the cultists to subdue his teammates. Punch fights with superhuman strength but is overwhelmed. Ivy’s knocked unconscious.
Ivy and Punch wake in a soundproofed room in which cultists pore over computer monitors and Tony grins at them. They’re strapped into dentist chairs, their heads covered with metal colander contraptions sprouting wires. Tony admits that he never really left the Cthulhu cult and has run the ACLW to recruit new members. The only cell he couldn’t convert was theirs. The ranch house cultists, Tony recruited from rescued engineers and code monkeys. You see, he villainsplains, magic hasn’t worked to find and wake Cthulhu, so he’s decided to try science. The contraptions on Punch and Ivy’s heads are linking them neurophysiologically, so that Ivy will feel the pain Tony inflicts on Punch, as well as their emotions. And vice versa. Neural amplifiers will increase their shared torment to exquisite levels. In minutes now, undersea drones will land on sleeping Cthulhu’s head and through neural transmitters inject their agony into his dreams, rousing the god and bringing about the End of the World!
Ivy can’t tell if Eustace is still in her pocket. She hopes he’s returned to Minnie and ZeroRaven, and that they’re speeding inland from the “global coastal devastation” about to occur. On the monitors she can see Cthulhu’s mountainous head and redwood-massive tentacles. The drones have landed. Tony begins to torture the linked Punch and Ivy with common kitchen utensils. The tech cultists report promising response from the Great One, and Tony crows in triumph. Ivy can only look at Punch and pray he can read her goodbye and wish I could kiss you final thoughts.
Then chaos erupts as Minnie, ZeroRaven and the miniature robots burst into the room. The robots attack panicked cultists. ZeroRaven punches Tony out, then directed by Punch, goes to the monitors to detach the drones from Cthulhu’s head. Minnie scrambles to free Punch, but Ivy’s panicking, and her amplified panic is being transmitted to Cthulhu! But Punch leaps onto Ivy and kisses her until she’s “floating, sinking, settling into deep deep bliss.” Her drone transmitter remains on Cthulhu, while Punch’s drone swims off, giving them a view of the Great One. He is indeed Great, to judge by the “towering, cyclopean”… response… displayed by his lack of pajama bottoms.
Ivy’s blushing furiously, but before ZeroRaven frees her drone from Cthulhu, she sends the still slumbering god all her “relief, calm, and yep, desire” along with this message: Since he’s now having such a wonderful dream rather than troubled ones, hadn’t he better put off rising and “descend into the delightful deep”?
There will be plenty of time for him to rise in another eon or two.
What’s Cyclopean: Ahem.
The Degenerate Dutch: Tony reminds Ivy “just a teensy bit of the toxic cismen I’d left behind.” He may never get mean or scary… but maybe you still can’t trust someone who’s served both Cthulhu and QAnon. (Or NXIVM, a now-defunct multi-level-marketing scam/self-improvement cult/trafficking organization/racketeering scheme.)
Weirdbuilding: I spot guest stars from “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “Whisperer in Darkness,” and “Mountains of Madness.” And, of course, “Call of Cthulhu”.
Anne’s Commentary
In the 1960s, a popular saying was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” That won’t do for the DC ACLW cell, since several of its members may be hundreds if not millions of years old. For Ivy and crew going forward, I expect the motto will be “Never trust incessantly smiling cismen.” With Tony gone, maybe they can recruit a Yith tired of hopping the millennia and wearing someone else’s body. It and Minnie could have a great time up in the safehouse attic.
As its title pretty much guarantees the reader, “Wet Dreams in R’lyeh” is a romp rather than a harrowing tale of god-level aliens crushing humanity under their cyclopean pseudopods or, er, reproductive members. I can’t say I ever envisioned Cthulhu donning pajamas. He always struck me as too comfortable in his own rubbery integument to require clothing; therefore I assumed that any erectile organs he possessed would be allowed to sway free in the icy abyssopelagic currents. Presumably he’d have sufficient minions to keep deep sea organisms from nibbling his unprotected tender bits until such time as he rose in glory. Although Nakamura’s point may be exactly that, given adequate stimulation, Cthulhu could rise in glory even when asleep. How that does humanize him and contribute to the “cozy” nature of the story! Dreaded C, you big old plushy, you!
Ahem, you big old ages-18-and-up plushy. Let’s not even imagine Dreaded C inflatables. The most devoted cultist must have limits, right? Or not, as may be another of Nakamura’s points. Tony R doesn’t scruple to cultivate for future sacrifice the people he’s rescued. Nor does he have the rudimentary decency to save his HQ from hideous 70s decor. If he’s got money for super-high-end technology and unlimited energy drinks, he has money for fresh paint, carpets and furniture. Have some pride in your lair, man! No one’s suggesting you blow your cell’s cover by redoing the place in Super-Villain Moderne, just something from IKEA or Crate and Barrel, damn.
I’ve hated on Tony enough. For the rest of this dynamic horrors-hunting team I have nothing but love. And curiosity. For me, the most surprising member is ZeroRaven. The albino penguins Lovecraft created in At the Mountains of Madness were basically shoggoth-fodder. ZeroRaven is not “your typical penguin.” He’s the team’s tech wizard and an expert gamer. Also, he wears mirror-shades, perhaps in ironic awareness of his trope. In one sentence, Nakamura suggests the source of his peculiarities: Ivy “marveled at how [ZeroRaven] handled the controller with his weirdly pseudopod-like, prehensile wingtips.” Could he be a cross between penguin and shoggoth? Yes, please.
Minnie may get her name from being smaller than the classic Mi-Go, only the size of a crow. Could her diminutive stature indicate a normal developmental stage or morphological variation in the species? Or might “full-size” Mi-Go regard it as a defect? If so, that could have added to her outsider status. Within the DC cell, she’s found a chosen family and (like Bladerunner’s J. F. Sebastian) she has lots of friends—she makes them, from scratch. Well, not quite from scratch. Some of her friends have “bodies” made from “$80 mini-drones from Amazon,” and all of them have the brains of little creatures saved from death and housed in neat jars, Yuggoth-style.
Punch comes from a secret Dagon sect in Kyushu, Japan. Presumably, it’s a group old enough to have produced human-Deep One hybrids, which is what Punch seems to be—they can pass for human as long as they keep their gills hidden, and their superhuman strength. Punch, with their voluntary body modifications, declares themself the rebel of the group. Not surprisingly, they’re the one who questions Tony’s plan for the Anaheim mission. Later they remind Ivy not to idealize Tony—she must give herself credit for choosing to leave her “podunk little town” in Idaho. Everyone in the cell deserves that credit. Punch and Ivy, that is, and ZeroRaven and Minnie. Tony’s is the name Punch leaves out. They turn out to be right about him. Should the telepathic and empathic Minnie have sensed his deception, too? Maybe she did, and in collecting “brain-jars” she was making not only friends but a miniature strike force, should one be needed.
Tony aside, Ivy’s the normal member of the family, or “almost normal” as she puts it. Does she plume herself on this comparison, treating normality as a superior virtue? I don’t think so. I think that, for Ivy, abnormality is a good thing. Her mates are “lovely weirdos,” and they are her people.
One’s people can’t get much less homogeneous or indeed less anthropocentric than Ivy’s folks.
There’s another catchphrase, or catch-lyric, from the 1960s: All you need is love. In the end, what defeats Tony’s plot is love, or at least lust. Poor Tony. He planned to wield amplified pain and terror as the stimulants to jolt Cthulhu out of his dreams and send the Great One ravening for more such delight. Instead what Punch and Ivy delivered was tech-concentrated love. Or at least lust.
I guess we should be reassured that Cthulhu could prefer the bliss of wet dreaming in R’lyeh to stomping us human ants to so much sticky ick. At least for another eon or two, long enough for Nakamura’s chosen family to grow and thrive, brain-jars included.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Deep Ones are everywhere, and it’s at least occasionally possible to track down a wayward Mi-Go. But giant albino penguins? Those you don’t see every week. If only there were a freedom-fighting shoggoth, the team would be just-about perfect.
Really, the team is just about perfect anyway: I can’t resist a ragtag band of misfits trying to get by, get away from their pasts, and get their crushes to notice them. Or trying desperately to avoid their crushes noticing the unreasonable length of time for which they’ve been mooning, because it couldn’t possibly work out. Eighties X-Men vibes all the way!
Unlike in 80s X-Men comics, the queerness here is totally overt, with trans woman Ivy blushing over Punch in all their punk non-binary Deep One glory. Punch is eminently blushable, kicking cultist butt and standing up to Tony’s manipulation. And thinking very fast when they get a chance to save the world. Ants, as we know, can attract serious deific notice under the right circumstances.
My favorite, though, is Minnie, who gets massive points for—unlike the well-resourced main body of her species—giving her brains in jars mobility. Dormice with paper-clip legs! Birds in mini-drones! Chickens in teeny Baba Yaga houses! This is a dramatic improvement over being at the mercy of whoever’s leading the Azathoth Tour this week. I kinda wonder if she’s a kid, given that most Mi-Go are considerably bigger than crows; if so she’s awfully precocious with her engineering skills. Then again, maybe Mi-Go are born(?) as mechanical geniuses.
Beyond the mooning, I love seeing found family with varying abilities and vulnerabilities, taking care of each other in whatever individual ways they need. Some people (Minnie, Rogue) don’t like to be touched. Some people (ZeroRaven, Punch, Nightcrawler) need a place where they don’t have to pass as human-normal. It is, in fact, not too dissimilar from living in a big neurodiverse household with lots of people with disabilities and/or superpowers. (Where superpowers may include being able to make phone calls, recognize faces, and/or get a giant found family’s worth of food to fit in the fridge.)
My least favorite character, of course, is Tony, who combines the worst of several varieties of cult including Silicon Valley business-speak. I have, in fact, taken the Clifton Strengths test and I don’t do badly at adaptability. All the strengths have ways they can go bad, but I have to admit that my training didn’t include anything about them going this bad. Getting to see Tony punched by a giant albino penguin is very satisfying. Now do the other billionaire techbros.
I met Nakamura at a science fiction economics meeting, which is not the circumstance where you’d normally expect cosmic horror to come up as a conversational topic. But I asked about his writing, and he told me about this anthology, and I knew Cozy Cosmic had to be an instabuy. Cosmic horror has long been comfort reading for me—something about putting my problems in perspective—and I couldn’t resist the idea of stories that deliberately aim for that sweet spot of snuggling under the apocalyptic covers. I started with Nakamura’s own piece, but have been dipping in elsewhere since. I’m looking forward to one in particular that he mentioned, about making sourdough bread during the rise of the elder gods.
Next week, we head crossroads-ward in Chapters 19-20 of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit.
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as [email protected], and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
