Panel: Eldritch Evolution- the future of cosmic horror
The mythos was always a shared universe, but shared to a very exclusive set of authors, namely white men. People of color were cast as the villains in these narratives, blamed for all the ills troubling mankind (if they were given a part in the story at all). Women were absent from these early stories, unless of course, they too were cast as villains. Invisible were the faces of our LGBTQ community in this tapestry of horror. How did outsider creators fall in love with something that casts them in such a negative fashion, and why do they (we) feel it's important to change its direction?
Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction and one comic book. His highly Lovecraftian novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, won the Shirley Jackson Award, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award. His novel, The Changeling, won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Dragon Award for best horror novel. His comic book, Destroyer, won a Bram Stoker Award for best graphic novel. He has also been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City with his wife and two kids.
Photo by Teddy Wolff
Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer, whose fiction work has been nominated for several awards. You can find her fiction in places like F&SF, Year's Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Tor.com. Her next book Nothing But Blackened Teeth is coming out in 2021.
Follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/casskhaw
Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story "Summer Skin" in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax's Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story "Night Sun" was published on Tor.com. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2021 Clarion West candidate. You can find them on Twitter @intelligentwat.
Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013) and A Spectral Hue (Word Horde, 2019) and the forthcoming collection The Nectar of the Nightmares and Other Stories (Underland, 2022). He writes in his native Washington, D.C.
ROSS E. LOCKHART is an author, anthologist, editor, and publisher. A lifelong fan of supernatural, fantastic, speculative, and weird fiction, Lockhart is a veteran of small-press publishing, having edited scores of well-regarded novels of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He edited the anthologies The Book of Cthulhu I and II, Tales of Jack the Ripper, The Children of Old Leech (with Justin Steele), Giallo Fantastique, Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Eternal Frankenstein, and the forthcoming Tales from a Talking Board (October 2017). He is the author of Chick Bassist. Lockhart lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife Jennifer, hundreds of books, and Elinor Phantom, a Shih Tzu moonlighting as his editorial assistant.