Sometimes it's just hard to let a long weekend go.

For those of you still wallowing in despair since Dubya and Co. did a little smash-and-grab at the Electoral College, fear not! The Mighty Cthulhu is planning to run for President again in 2004, and the Great Old One doesn't need to hire image consultants or put on a phony Southern accent in order to drive a feeble-minded Texan mortal incumbent out of office and into stark raving insanity. IA! IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!

But of course Cthulhu has a softer side as well, and isn't afraid to show it. I wasn't aware that someone out there manufactured plush Cthulhus, but I sure as hell want one now...

H.P. Lovecraft is an old favorite of mine. I know he's poo-pooed by a lot of serious scholars, but that's more a sign of their own bias and snootiness than anything else. H.P. is a master storyteller, who almost single-handedly invented the genre of supernatural horror fiction. Ask any of the horror greats - Stephen King, Clive Barker, et al, and without fail they will mention Lovecraft's stories as a primary source of inspiration. But whereas the modern claimants to the genre have necessarily watered down their product for a general audience, H.P.'s works are classically-constructed and mythologically dense almost to the point of impenetrability. But you see, that's the point. In most modern horror writers, the evil that plagues the protagonists can most of the time be named, understood, then contained (much to the relief of the general public); whereas in Lovecraft the evil is so beyond the scale of human reckoning that it's not even fair to call it "evil". The Great Old Ones like Cthulhu are manifestations of the infinite slithering amorality of the cosmos, and the horror is one of scale and awe, when the progressive modern investigator, armed with his multiple translations, his gun, and his derring-do, runs smack up against a universe that isn't actively hostile towards him but almost blithely unaware of his existence as it chews him up and spits him out. I've thought a lot about this sense of "cosmicism" that pervades the Lovecraftian oeuvre, and the more I read, the more I become convinced that his stories are less an epic battle of good versus evil than a latter-day tale of Apollo versus Dionysos. Apollo is the rational world of today, with its science that purports to explain everything and its benevolent anthropomorphic gods who reward the good and punish the bad. Dionysos is the reality that lurks beyond the sheltering sky of rationality, where entire galaxies can be ripped apart by titanic forces that don't listen to reason - he is a god of many terrible aspects whose heart is not moved by tearful prayer, only the maddening yet irresistable beat of the cosmic dance. Hop on his merry-go-round with a pure soul and you might just enjoy the ride, but ignore Dionysos at your own peril - for like the Great Old Ones, he existed long before we conjured up any of our shiny happy modern gods, and he will still remain when they have all faded into the stuff of myths and legends.

There's a book in here, I just know it: Cthulhu and the Classical Tradition! Nyarlethotep would be proud....