I read Fat Face by Michael Shea last month and it was. Fine? It was a Cthulhu Mythos story written in the 80s, it was very edgy and it had a lot of tropes I’m not a fan of, I don’t really recommend it, but I have to talk about one detail I have not stopped thinking about since I read it.
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.
Which means there’s a shoggoth with a passion for graphic design
It’s not them/their circle’s table and they mentioned it in the tweet’s replies it was the サークル主 (basically the actual person who applied for the table) who was arguably selling something more amazingly insanely impressive and i’m not talking about the R-18 Click acrylic stands but the faux blood/doping sample chips (acrylic charms)
This has happened to me a few times and I never know what to make of it
STOP I’ve had this exact thing except the other way around. I’ve known my neighbours since I was 8 and they’re old as fuck now so they saw me transition and knew about it and they’ve looked me dead in the face and told me to “be careful with [whichever girl I may happen to be seeing], you’ve gotta be extra safe now you’re on those hormones, doubt you wanna have to pay child support at your age” and I just. I just don’t have the heart to tell them that’s now how it works and thank them for their concern—
sorry i started doing that yesterday and then promptly forgot to post them x_x i wouldn’t recommend most of these authors anyway since their books are shit
i don’t even know if that’s all of them bc i got a bunch of error messages but yeah notable ones: pierce brown (red rising saga LOL), taylor jenkins reid (her books are NOT good stop deluding yourself people!), a bunch of booktok word writers cuz they sure know how to align the words but they fail at making them actually sound interesting, idek who else. gabrielle zevin is one that has an Israeli characters who says some questionable shit but idk if i’d go so far as to say that it’s outright support for Israel for example. the screenshots on alice oseman are from 2015 i hope she pulled her head out of her ass in the meantime but who knows. i see the sarah janet maas screenshot didn’t make the list but she was like yay IDF a few years ago and depicted Israel kind of like this magical beautiful place (and not the settler colony that it is), same for rachel lynn solomon. I’ll go back to my original post tomorrow and then list all the names that were shared in the thread on twitter
A map of the depopulated Palestinian village of Jimzu جمزو (ancient Gimzo) hand-drawn from the memory of native Ahmad Ibrahim after its destruction in 1948. Ibrahim labels the names of streets and individual neighbours where they once were.
joe biden, rishi sunak, ursula von der leyen, keir starmer, kamala harris, justin trudeau, emmanuel macron, leo varadkar, suella braverman. these are the names of western leaders who have the power to stop this senseless violence and choose not to. do not ever forget these names as we enter a new era of history. do not forget these names as we recount the horror the palestinians are going through.
ALT
