Connections - A Guest Post by Leigh Kimmel

You can find my post over on Leigh's blog today, about the Hatrack. But Leigh also has a new book out, and you can find The Secret of Pad 34 here. 

One of HP Lovecraft's interesting innovations was his practice of encouraging other writers of dark fantasy to include references to his various fictional places and entities in their own works. By doing so, he hoped that their works would increase the verisimilitude of his own works, and thus their power to create a sense of profound dread in the reader.

This was especially effective with the names of his various monstrous entities such as Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. So if a reader who was a fan of both Lovecraft and Robert E Howard were to pick up a new Conan the Barbarian or Solomon Kane story and find the protagonist fighting an order of corrupt priests with an idol called Kutulu or Thool-hu. The name would echo Cthulhu enough to feel like a worn-down version of the name, perhaps confused by generations of oral transmission, and create a sense of shared universe that extended beyond the bounds of the story at hand. Ideally, this effect would leave the reader wondering if it really was just a story, even when the rational mind knew it was purely fictional.

As I was putting together The Secret of Pad 34, I realized just how many ties it had not just with the original works of HP Lovecraft himself, but several of my own works of cosmic horror. In particular, anyone who has read Beach House on the Moon will remember that the protagonist had been at Cape Canaveral, researching the Apollo I fire, and particularly a rumor that someone may have seen a mysterious occult symbol inside the burned-out spacecraft, but lacked the background to recognize it for what it was.

It also ties with Time Slips, which featured the theme of eldritch entities trying to keep humanity in its place. It is easy to read the events of the two works as forming a continuous narrative, albeit from two different points of view. Combined with "Beach House on the Moon," they form a sort of Space Race Trilogy.

However, there are also ties with "Red Star, Yellow Sign," my very first work of cosmic horror to see publication, in the anthology Historical Lovecraft by Innsmouth Free Press. Like that story, "The Secret of Pad 34" has the interspersed transmissions between the sunken city of R'lyeh and its various operational bases (and the Leningrad base in "Red Star, Yellow Sign" may well be the same one that is mentioned in "Time Slips.") The two stories also share the theme of Communism as a self-limiting tyranny introduced by the Great Old Ones as a method of taming the Industrial Revolution and keeping humanity within its place.

Interestingly enough, "Red Star, Yellow Sign" shares some common elements and references with several other works of mine, including ones that are not works of cosmic horror. Think of them as Easter eggs, little tidbits that reward re-reading, rather like the three little pop-culture Easter eggs I slipped into "The Secret of Pad 34."