#shoggoth

by Francesco de Stena

So. I knew Fat Face through reputation because it was the story that inspired Shoggoth Lords from the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, shoggoths that can control their cellular makeup to look like humans. And the twist in Fat Face is that shoggoths have been hiding amongst humans in Los Angeles, and at the end of the story one of them eats the protagonist.

The tone of the story is grit. It’s grime. It’s sleaze and sexual violence and drug abuse on top of cosmic horror. It wants to be taken seriously so bad.

But here’s the thing about the shoggoths: they have a business.

They have two businesses they run out of an office building in downtown Los Angeles. A shoggoth is a primordial blob of eyes and mouths and flesh and hunger, and the idea of one of them at the LA Office of Finance registering an LLC is already. Great. Perfect. No notes.

The business is a front — and again, that’s great, a shoggoth went, “I want to do some nefarious deeds and not get caught by humans; I know, I’ll register a fake business that’ll be a front, and no human will ever suspect” — because the actual interior of this office is a room of pools of water made from black and ancient Antarctic rocks so that shoggoths can relax in their original blobby forms and eat stray animals that they’ve caught.

So it’s basically just. A place for shoggoths to unwind after a long day of pretending to be human. It’s portrayed as cosmic horror, but it’s shoggoth Cheers. Sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your shape.

Here’s the kicker. The front of the business is a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.

When they decided to make a front for their secret lair in an LA office building where they hang out in pools of water and eat stray animals — the front they prominently display and advertise — they decided to go with a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.

That is Goosebumps shit. The rest of the story reads like a tone poem about the sleaze and violence of Los Angeles, and the main twist of the story reads like R.L. Stine.

But that’s not even the detail I can’t stop thinking about. Because the story reveals that this business — which again, is a front made by alien blobs to eat stray animals like an ALF-themed buffet and hang out in jacuzzi tubs of Antarctic rocks in an LA office — has a flyer.

This is a really hard question. I have a hard time picking favorites among anything, and monsters are one of my favorite things, so I had an extra hard time choosing. But if I have to pick just one, I'm going to go with the shoggoth:

(Image © Paizo Publishing: this is the PF1e illustration)

The shoggoths first appear in the HP Lovecraft story "At the Mountains of Madness". In that story, they are the creations and slaves of the Elder Things, a species of vaguely echinoderm-like creatures from another planet that came to Earth in the primordial past. The shoggoths are shapeshifters, capable of taking on whatever shapes they need for the Elder Things' tasks. The Elder Things are credited as the progenitors of life on Earth and so the shoggoths are living versions of the "primordial ooze". It is suggested, therefore, that shoggoths are either an offshoot of, or are, the common ancestors of all life on Earth.

In the story, the shoggoths are amorphous blobs of eyes, tentacles and teeth: without the commands of the Elder Things, they're not bothering to take on any specific shapes. This is not how future authors have interpreted them. John W. Campbell was seemingly disappointed in a story about a shapeshifting alien in the Antarctic where the shapeshifting isn't the point. Shortly after taking over Astounding Stories, the magazine that serialized "At the Mountains of Madness", he wrote his own story for that magazine with a similar premise: "Who Goes There?", the basis for The Thing. In "Fat Face" by Michael Shea, sapient shoggoths disguise themselves as humans and eat lost pets and the occasional person who stumbles upon them. In "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear, a black marine biologist in the build-up to WWII who discovers that the shoggoths are sapient, and sympathizes with them as also being the descendants of slaves.

You follow an arcane formula you pulled out of an ancient tome (or the collected essence of all human knowledge, with the aid of a scrying device) to perform a ritual that creates a squirming, amorphous mass of life. You feed it, you give it a little water, and it bubbles and burbles and grows and shrinks and changes shapes. Occasionally it tries to escape, or outgrows its container, and you have to brutally cut its tentacles off.

But then you mix the tentacles with your other ingredients, bake them and eat the results.

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