Cthulhu in the Deep South

Cthulhu in the Deep South is the audio home of Kirk Battle's Lovecraftian horror series, and it offers three distinct kinds of listening. The first is the fiction. The Book 6 chapters carry credits to Battle and Jada McDaniels, with production by R. Alex Murray, and the story takes place in South Carolina. Battle calls it the sixth book in a series whose main job is wrapping up plot threads. It is framed as a settlement. Its narrator, once the property of the Wadham House, apologizes to a room of lawyers for the state of that house and offers a fuller version of events than she gave the judge. Then she begins where the story ends: with Mom Ruth. Nobody owned her. Some dismissed her as a story, yet the root doctors whose spells people truly feared spoke of her with respect. In Chapter 3, the narrator sleeps on the hard boards of a cabin she has not entered since she was 14, unnerved by cicadas that once comforted her, and dreams of falling from a starry sky into a black ocean. Morning brings a little honeyed cake that tastes like her grandmother's and a frank exchange about finding work in Charleston. The second kind of listening is Battle explaining his choices. In the Book 6 author's notes he describes the old racist custom of refusing Black elders the titles Mr. or Mrs. and calling them aunt, uncle or mom instead, and how he turned 'Mom' into a title for a sorcerer in this world. He names the Lovecraft story he leaned on, admits one of its creatures never fit, and mentions August Bilby and the other Yith as threads he might return to. A talk recorded at the Mont Eagle Chautauqua pairs a lecture on the thesis behind These Hallowed Halls and Cthulhu in the Deep South with a reading and audience questions. One answer turns to Faulkner's The Mansion and the hard New South years. Elsewhere he describes looking for an alternative to a familiar pattern, in which farm life is interrupted by a racist incident and then simply carries on. The third kind is Tentacle Talk, the loosest and most profane material in the feed. Alex Murray frames it as a place for whatever he and Battle have nowhere else to put. Battle, who introduces himself as a practicing attorney, turns research for a planned fantasy series, working title Trial by Combat, into scripts he reads aloud. 'Tentacle Talk - Why do we Flush? with Kirk and Alex' traces how cities required plumbing in new construction first while old buildings went without, then detours into New York gas lines. 'Tentacle Talk - DUI or Don't We?' mixes blood alcohol findings with role-playing-game jokes about perception penalties and memories of drunk goggles in high school. The chapters carry the dread; the notes and the Chautauqua talk carry the history behind it.