Night & Demons by David Drake

Author:David Drake [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery & Detective, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, Traditional British, Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781451638479
Google: j2aEtgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1451638477
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2012-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

THAN CURSE THE

DARKNESS

I’m an HPL fan and started my career writing for Arkham House, the publisher founded to preserve Lovecraft’s stories in book form, but “Than Curse the Darkness” is my only Cthulhu Mythos story. (“Denkirch” is Lovecraftian, but its model was HPL’S early—pre-Mythos—story “Polaris.”) Ramsey Campbell, the unwitting spur to me writing my first story for publication, commissioned this one for an anthology he was editing for Arkham House, “New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.”

Something that’d always puzzled me about the Mythos is why the Great Old Ones had human minions, since it was explicitly stated that if the Great Old Ones returned to Earth they would blast away all present life. Why would humans serve something that in human terms was absolute evil?

Writing a story is a very good way to focus logically on a question. I found an answer that satisfied me in human history. I set my story in the Congo Free State while it was still the personal possession of King Leopold II, but I could have picked any number of times or places. (Knowledge of history isn’t an altogether cheerful accomplishment.) Things got a little better in the Congo after Leopold defaulted on a loan and the Belgian government took over the running of the colony, but only a little better.

At about the time this story was set, my friend Manly Wade Wellman was born in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), just south of the Congo. (His parents were medical missionaries.) Manly retained a deep interest in Africa all his life, and his library contained many volumes about the continent.

Histories looking back at a period can explain what happened at a time and place, but contemporary works do something even more valuable (at least for a fiction writer): they explain what people at the time thought was happening. For the story’s background I used books from Manly’s library like Actual Africa—The Coming Continent, as well the works of missionaries protesting Belgian atrocities and modern overviews of the “development” of the Congo Basin.

Does that sound like a lot of research for a fantasy story? Well, maybe, but it’s a habit I’ve kept throughout my career. I think it’s stood me in good stead.

One writing difficulty I had with the story was in deciding on the viewpoint character. I wrote about half the piece, stopped, and threw out the whole business to start again with a female scholar instead of a male adventurer as my main protagonist. Things fell into place then.

The title, by the way, is from the motto of The Christophers, a religious society: It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

What with the research, the rewriting, and the fact that I was working a full-time job as Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill at the time, “Than Curse the Darkness” took me five months to complete. This had an unexpected but very beneficial side-effect.

One night shortly after I’d sent the story to Ramsey, the phone rang. By “night,” I mean my wife and I were asleep.

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