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Chicago 1922, and Henry Johnson was having a bad morning. He had been found unconscious on the streets and was taken into hospital for treatment. While examining him, the doctors discovered something shocking- his testicles had been removed very recently. Where his man plums should have been swingly freely, there was just a clean and fresh wound, very neatly stitched up.

Johnson could remember little of the night before, other than the fact that he had been out drinking. This looked like it would be just a thoroughly odd but unique event for a while, but four months later another freshly-castrated victim was found passed out on the Chicago streets. The next year there were two more similar cases, and a panic struck the city.

The police set out searching for the renegade surgeon who was merrily harvesting unwary knackers. It was believed that the pilfered nuts were being used in an illegal form of "gland transplanting"- a business that made a number of sugeons very rich around the turn of the 19th/20th century.

Gland transplanting was an attempt to regain youthful, spunky vigour. It was born in the 1880s when French physiologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard mashed up a hellish gloop made from semen, dog testicles and guinea pig testicles. And then injected himself with it, the lunatic. Not only did he somehow survive, but he claimed to have experienced youthful vigour for the next few days.
As you would expect, injecting a spooge-and-animal-bollocks puree into your veins is not without its side-effects, so it never really caught on as a popular cure. However it got other doctors thinking about refining the process, which is where "Gland transplanting" was born,. It was thoroughly championed by the trail-blazing Dr Serge Voronoff.

Voronoff's approach was to slice out sections of testicle from a donor, and then surgically graft these onto the testicles of his patient. The primary aim was to restore youth and vigour, but if it also had the side-effect of bestowing erections that could carve glass I'm sure the patients wouldn't have complained at all, even if the polite society of 1910 America would never have mentioned anything so beastly. He started out using the love spuds of executed criminals, but these were in short supply. So he moved on to using the testicles of animals traditionally associated with lustful behaviour- monkeys and goats. In the 1920s Voronoff became seriously rich from stitching severed monkey bollock-matter to the undercarriage of his wealthy clientele. Even the great poet W B Yeats had the operation, in a bid to revive his flagging libido. However goat and money nuts were still seen as a bit of a budget option.

So with big money up for grabs, and a demand for human danglies established, it was only a matter of time before some unscrupulous surgeon started setting up a trade in stolen goolies. And that's exactly what struck Chicago in 1922-23, leaving the good gentleman of the city terrified of drinking in public for fear of awakening less encumbered in the groinal region. Had kevlar knickers been available at the time, I'm sure they'd have done a roaring trade in Chicago.

Showing their usual skill for investigating serious crimes, the Chicago police completely failed to identify who the Testicle Thief was, and the trend in sudden eunuch-hood could have exploded across the country. However at about the same time, recipients of Gland Transplants had started complaining of a complete failure to restore youth and reliable erections, combined with some pretty nasty side-effects of tissue rejection in the scrote. Demand for the controversial treatment collapsed, the world saw sense, and the predicted explosion of Bollock Bandits across the world never occurred.

So, when you gentlemen retire to your beds tonight, reassure those plums that they are quite safe and give praise for the advance of medical science.

H. P. Lovecraft revolutionized the horror genre with his tales of cosmic terror, and the mythos that he created is one that has captured imaginations for generations. Lovecraft was also an undeniable racist, and much of the horror in his stories is rooted in his outright xenophobia. (Examples range from the extremely blatant racism in "The Horror at Red Hook" to slightly more subtle metaphors about the dangers of outsiders and miscegenation that pervade his works.) But just because the man was rather morally reprehensible doesn't necessarily mean that we can't enjoy his works or engage with his legacy. In fact, in recent years many writers have been using Lovecraft's own mythos to turn his bigotry on its head. Here are a few examples of books that bring a new perspective to Lovecraft's mythos and subvert its more problematic aspects:

1. Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys

Talk about telling Lovecraft's stories from a new perspective. This book is told from the point of view of Aphra Marsh, an inhabitant of Innsmouth and a descendant of that town's notorious "fish-frog" people. While these folk are the villains in several Lovecraft's stories such as "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Thing on the Doorstep," making one of them the protagonist of this book gives it all a new meaning. Emrys sets her novel in the years after the end of World War II and draws clear parallels between the fear and prejudice directed at Aphra and the treatment of Japanese-Americans during the war. As Aphra seeks to reclaim the sacred texts of her people, she teams up with others who are fighting their own battles with discrimination and oppression, including a Jewish FBI agent whose loyalty is questioned by the government and several female students who are denied the guidance and resources that their male counterparts receive at Miskatonic University.

2. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

This novella retells the story of "The Horror at Red Hook" from a black man's perspective. The protagonist is Charles Thomas Tester, a jazz-age hustler living in Harlem, who is invited by the occultist Robert Suydam to play guitar at one of his underground soirees. The second half of the story switches to the point of view of Detective Malone—Lovecraft's original protagonist, and the man responsible for investigating Suydam's occult dealings. The juxtaposition of these perspectives pits the cosmic horror of elder gods against the day-to-day horror of pervasive racism.

3. She Walks in Shadows, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles hit upon a goldmine when they decided to put together a Lovecraft-inspired anthology with stories written entirely by women from around the world. Funded by an Indiegogo campaign, the collection grew to contain 25 different stories, each with a unique take on Lovecraft. Some stories focus in on the few female characters that make an appearance in Lovecraft's writing—Asenath Waite, Lavinia Whateley, and the eldritch goddess Shub-Niggurath—while others invent new, original characters to flesh out the world that Lovecraft created.

4. Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Returning to similar themes to those explored in The Ballad of Black Tom, Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country explores Lovecraftian horror in conjunction with anti-black racism. The story is set in the 1950s when Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation and discrimination throughout the country. Atticus Turner is a young black man who cannot be dissuaded from his love of science fiction, despite the fact that many of his literary heroes would have hated him based solely on the color of his skin. When Atticus's father disappears, leaving mysterious instructions to follow him to Massachusetts, Atticus joins his uncle and a family friend on a road trip. There, they are faced with a blend of supernatural occurrences and New England's particular brand of racism.

Have you read any of the books mentioned here? Do you have some other new takes on Lovecraft to recommend? Share your thoughts in the comments!



Written By: TheGothicLibrarian