Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Spoilers
Introspectre is a re-telling/modernisation of The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft. That much should have been obvious to any Mythos fan from the Mythos tag and the names of some of the characters.
As with Cichol’s Children I was looking for a way to make the Mythos scary again and the best way to do that is, I think, to bring a bit of uncertainty and change back into it and never to truly, explicitly, name the creature.
Cthulhu was once the great symbol of existential horror and madness but through popularity has been debased to the point where he’s no longer scary. He’s a proto-kaiju, a Hello Kitty with tentacles, a cliché.
So what if you strip Cthulhu back to the base concepts and then build it back up? Cthulhu is apocalyptic, madness, incomprehensible. He is a threat we cannot understand and as much an infectious madness as anything else.
So the sea becomes the human mind. The time is right when we talk too much, when the ubiquitous chatter of the modern world becomes the neural pathways of a monster that is us, but is more than us. When the stars are right, it is our fault and a neurological singularity takes us all with it.
I hope you enjoyed it and get the reasoning behind the idea and the desire to recreate a classic in a way that can be scary again.
Introspectre was written in one sitting with no prep, only an idea that’s been lingering a while. If I decide to publish it, it will be rewritten and expanded.
Grim's Tales 