Tentacular
History: An Overview
In
"First Watch," my interwar novella, Earth is populated with at least
two types of sentient creatures: humans, and Lovecraftian horrors from the
depths. Both kinds of creature are historical, in that they remember and relate
past events, and both kinds of creature are political, in that they make
alliances and wage wars to enforce them. This is all well and good, except for
one crucial flaw in my master plan: Human history and politics--at least, as I
know them--are completely devoid of tentacle monsters.
Of
course, human folklore has always had a place for things that go bump in the
night, and our fairy tales are full of the things that live in darkness. For
most of human history, this is exactly what my eldritch horrors were--night
terrors, beasts that preyed on the unwary and feasted in plague-ridden streets.
They gorged on those who died at sea and were thrown overboard; they passed
like shadows between the moon and the earth on winter nights, and their eyes
shone beyond the glow of the hearth fire. Their relationship with humans was
purely predatory, and not in the least political. They were the stronger
beasts, the more powerful and brutal, and they consumed us without a pang of
remorse.
Along
the Pacific rim, humans had been making alliances with and waging war on these
creatures for centuries, but in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, tentacled
beasties were more slow to emerge. As I envision it, two developments pushed
the Atlantic Lovecraftian horrors out of the sky and the sea. The first was
human incursion on their spaces, as signified by the 1858 completion of the
transatlantic telegraph cable and the development of commercial flight in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second, and perhaps the more
pertinent, was the rise in deadly military campaigns during the nineteenth
century; as scavengers, these creatures were drawn to our regiments of the dead
and the dying. They began to understand as they never had before how delicate
was the political balance between human factions ... and how tasty our
casualties were, when the balance got tipped.
On the
battlefields of nineteenth-century Prussia, Russia, Turkey, and Virginia, the
soldiers and the camp-followers began to speak of creatures moving over the
corpses, all mouths and rope-like limbs. They spoke of beasts like harpies
spiraling over the thick smoke of battle, waiting for the smell of the dead to
rise. Soldiers returned from the battlefield with marks like tattoos, but what
of that? Soldiers returning homeward always had tattoos and scars that had
never been there before. There were strange new men in business and in
politics, pale-faced and smooth-cheeked, but what of that? One politician was
as bad as another, and at least these were well-groomed.
The
first photographs--and even a few early, uneven films--emerged during the Great
War. No one could mistake what the images displayed, although naysayers claimed
foul play and photographers searched for signs of tamper. The soldiers knew,
though, beyond the faintest shadow of doubt.
They
had seen the creatures moving in thick, gelatinous masses over the spent shells
and the bodies of the wounded. They had heard their comrades screaming as they
were eaten alive ... or worse, seen their comrades return to them with the
rising sun, their newly-healed flesh marked with characters in an unknown
language.
Here's a blurb from my book,
First Watch, at Riptide Publishing:
What
price would you pay to survive?
Do you
want to live? In the darkness of a
WWI battlefield, young Legionnaire Edouard Montreuil lies dying. As teeth
nibble his flesh, a voice whispers, Do you want to live? Frightened
and desperate, Edouard bargains his freedom for a second chance.
Aboard the Flèche, a grim submarine captained by the nightmare who
granted Edouard new life, Edouard pays the price for his survival. Each night,
he gives his body to his captain as the bells sound first watch. But surviving
is not living, and as the days stretch into months beneath the waves, Edouard
grows desperate for escape.
Can Edouard’s old comrade Farid Ruiz help him break this devil's
bargain, or will Ruiz fall to the same fate, trapped beneath the waves at the
mercy of a monster whose hunger knows no bounds? Edouard and Ruiz served
together once before, and slept together too, but courage and passion failed to
save them from the eldritch beasts who roamed the night. This time, the cost of
failure is nothing so clean or simple as death, and the spoils of victory are
not just life, but love.
To read an excerpt
and to purchase First Watch, click here.
About Peter Hansen:
Peter Hansen is a
teacher, writer, and former spelling bee champion who lives a stone's throw
from the Erie Canal. He got his start in publishing with his college newspaper,
where he was forced to write "I will not rake the muck" one hundred
times on the chalkboard before they let him write editorials. With that gritty,
real-world experience under his belt, he promptly turned to science fiction and
fantasy. He spends his days teaching young writers about the pathetic fallacy,
his evenings mainlining iced tea, and his nights building a time machine in his
basement.
peter.hansen.writes@gmail.com
