Sunday, December 29, 2019

Unexpected treat; CS Lewis HP Lovecraft mashup


I actually have a grand plan in mind for the CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft series, wherein we delve into some wild theories about their inner mind and homosexual tendencies and all that spicy stuff, but before we do that I have to re-read the books again.  But before I do that, I believe it’s time for a mashup, wherein we attempt to tell a short story as if the two of them got together for some kind of literary retreat in 1925, when Lovecraft was falling apart financially and about to leave New York, and Lewis had just become a professor at Oxford. For the purposes of the mashup, in this scenario they get married. Why? Because it seems to me that the differences in the philosophies of the two of them would ordinarily make it extremely unlikely that they could ever willingly collaborate, but people tend to overlook all types of differences if they have romantic feelings for someone, so I believe they would have fall in love and get married in order for the mashup to happen. After getting married they live in England where Lewis can support them, since Lewis in reality had a far better job than Lovecraft did.
And they write a story together:

Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet
I write these sentences supine, lying in a bed in the Miskatonic University Center for Invalids and Convalescent Scholars. The daily effort to lift pen to paper drains the last vestiges of my waning strength, yet a fierce desire to warn the public of the threat from within, while seeking to protect and advocate for the furry peoples of Malacandra, impels me to my painful, remorselessly damaging daily toil.
For the Reader’s sake I will attempt to organize and cohere my tangled memories into an understandable narrative.
To begin: My name is Elwin A Ransom. I am a professor of linguistics at Magdalene College, Miskatonic Campus. Until recently, I had been immersed in my studies and my teaching duties, living my quiet, inoffensive life, writing the occasional short story about magic elves and sharing them with close friends and never dreaming that I would someday visit another world where I would meet ghastly aliens that turned out to be Anglicans and perfectly reasonable if you overlooked their tendency to be a bit judgmental and a kind of purposeful abtrusiveness that set me on edge at times but I’m not really a people person and I’ve come to terms with that.
My adventures began when I - against my better judgement - accepted an invitation for late tea from an old schoolmate who I ran into at a tavern whilst on a walking tour of New England. He claimed to live on an estate, which turned out to be true, with his friend , a genius named Weston, which turned out to be only partially true. The estate was an old mansion, filthy in a grand old way, one of those old houses that looks as if it had somehow enjoyed more weather than any of the houses around it. Weston turned out to be a sociopath, but not in an interesting-conversation-over-bottle-of-wine sort of way. I was drunk enough to misconstrue his offer to show me “the spaceship” and follow him into the backyard, where I passed out. I came to on the spaceship, on route to Mars, if you can believe it. Pretending to have Stockholm Syndrome to get their guard down, I cooked a delicious lasagne, with the unintended result that my old friend Devine developed reverse Stockholm syndrome and tried to set me free immediately, and Weston developed Oslo syndrome, consuming so much pasta that he could not fit through the kitchen doorway, in effect kidnapping himself. At this point Weston admitted that they had planned to sell me to the native Martians for meat, which is what atheists do. Devine said he was sorry and told me I could go and tried to push me into the airlock. We fought, but the ship crash landed on Mars at the exact moment that my knee liberated his front teeth. “Take that, Dicky!” I shouted, and regretted it instantly. I spent my first day on a new planet trying to think up a better line. Eventually I sought Devine out after dinner and shouted “Welcome to Mars, Dicky! Love, the Tooth Fairy!” I tried to kick his mouth again, but he dodged and heeled my instep, dropping me like a sack. We stopped speaking after that, except for making fart noises whenever Weston asked for help moving supplies. Weston eventually produced a pistol and motioned me into the nearby trees, where we met several inhumanly tall, monstrously countenanced creatures who intoned unnerving syllables in a ghastly, unknown language. Sensing that my end credits were commencing to roll, I resolved that my screams would haunt these abominations to the end of their unearthly days.

And so on... it’s a special thrill to read the collaboration of these Gand masters!

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