Cthulhu Cthursday: The Human Epitaph of “Trois Freres”

This (currently) three-part short story documents the personal experience of a simple English teacher, caught in the blood-oiled gears of a Cthulhian apocalypse.

The story takes place in an alternate, but similar timeline to our own, and Derek C. F. Pegritz (the author’s) adjustments to world history are both clever and frightening:

When I was a kid, growing up in the ‘80s—that Last Great Decade before the recessions and the ever-escalating war with the Azifists in the Middle East began, before the end of the Reagagnostic Era and Gorby’s suicide and the revelations of all the horrors the superpowers had dug up in Antarctica and Australia and the Pacific during the Colder War—when I was a kid, like I said, I was an apocalypse junkie. Kind of hard not to be when every night the news had something more to say about tamed Russian shoggoths used against the Afghans, Azifists crashing planes into skyscrapers in order to create psychic shocks powerful enough to coalesce transdimensional polypoids, R’lyeh rising a foot a year, Reagan’s Project Stargate estimating the casualties resulting from thermonuclear war with Russia or a return of the Antarctican Elders at 99%.

Trois Freres will be ongoing, says the author, and will hopefully be joined at that blog by the works of other horror authors, such as Cait Kiernan.

This bit of fiction stands as the only non-Lovecraft-written Cthulhu Mythos work I’ve ever enjoyed. Well done, sir.

Trois Freres [Footnotes to a Species Once Called Humanity : shoggoth by Dennis Sibeijn]