I Write Stories So I Can Do Homework

Director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Norseman, Nosferatu, and the soon-to-be-released Werwulf) makes movies to do his homework. Eggers uses filmmaking as an intense historical and folk-culture research project, obsessively burying himself in manuscripts, archaic dialects, and regional lore to recreate the past. I get it. I write stories so I can do homework.

Last night I wrote notes for PROJECT MARTENSE, which meant doing a deep dive on Azathoth. Who is Azathoth? He’s the supreme deity in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I know, I know, you thought it was Cthulhu. So did I. Azathoth is the blind idiot god, the primordial chaos beyond angled space, in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void. Kind of hard to crochet a plushie out of that.

I copied down Lovecraft’s various descriptions of Azathoth, and I gained a new appreciation for the man’s skill as a writer of cosmic-horror. Check out this sentence:

There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

Wild, right?

As I mentioned, I’m still in the note-taking phase, jotting down ideas and lines of dialogue here and there, but I’m thrilled to be playing in Lovecraft’s dread universe. One thing is for sure: I know the occultists in my yarn will jam on drums and flutes during their ritual to summon Azathoth.