art by Steve Santiago
“Whatever you do, don’t call me Ishmael.”
This is the opening line to one of the best stories I have listened to in a long time, I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee is a genre bending story by Christopher Reynaga. It is the story of Moby Dick and is also unabashedly Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu.
In this tale it turns out that the story we know about Ahab is all wrong, that the man was not a vengeful insane sea captain we all thought he was. He is insane, and he sails to his death to fight the white beast he has hunted, but that beast is no whale.
As Ahab says himself:
“It is not a whale we hunt, but a god. A tentacled and winged god, greater than the greatest whale that ever lived. You must think me mad, and I am, but mad with knowing whats in store for this earth…It means to kill us all, and not because its the Lord’s instrument hailing the end of days, this beast is the end of all gods and men.”
Ahab is dying, his first encounter with the Leviathan has left him marked, the peg-leg is more than what meets the eye, and he hunts the beast for his wife and son. He does not believe that he can kill it, but only seeks to buy time, if only a few minutes, he will not have died in vein.
The story ends as Moby Dick has always ended, but again the light cast on Ahab is much different
Ahab rode through it, like a titan going forth to meet a god, buoyed up by the strength of his unnatural leg; his blessed spear gripped in his had “from Hell’s heart I stab at thee” Ahab cried…
I do not know why that great man sacrificed himself for you, but no man here deserves his Providence. You believe Ahab is mad; he is the Christ come to try and deliver us all, and there’s not enough blood in him to save us.
Like all cosmic horror it delivers in the ending, dooming us all to the utter destruction at the hands of Cthulhu. This is an amazing piece of writing and is performed fantastically by Graeme Dunlop. It can be found at the DrabbleCast, here.
For me this is the story of a monster hunter. The monster hunter is one of more fascinating aspects of the horror genre. I have a great deal more to say about it in an upcoming post, but suffice it to say, the horror psychology in play here is largely existential. The hunters are men and women who have found their will-to-meaning and let nothing deter them in their steady march toward it. Ahab found this in this story where as Ishmael does not. Interestingly even in literature the will-to-meaning makes itself apparent plays out as it does in real life. Those that have it find strength to go on or die trying, and those that don’t fall into despair.
Go take a listen to the story above, the whole podcast is only 30 mins long and is well worth your time, and by the end I can only hope that you, like I, are left horror struck.
Horror Struck 