When a story is Lovecraftian but not Cthulhu Mythos, it can slip by your notice. “The Flabby Men” by Basil Copper is such a story. (From the collection, And Afterward the Dark) It is dark, brooding, ultimately depressing, and one that H. P. Lovecraft would have fully approved of. Now Basil has written actual Cthulhu Mythos stuff. “Shaft Number 247” comes to mind. His novel The Great White Space (1981) is more in the same vein as “The Flabby Men” with Lovecraftian elements but not a Derlethian pastiche. For more on this novel, go here.
Right out of the gate, the author piles on the atmosphere. In the first paragraph he describes the sea: “The lava-like rubble of the shore stretched drearily to an oily, slime-washed sea and against the dark yellow of this sullen background foul, scummy pustules burst and reformed.” You learn as you read this isn’t figurative description but the world has gone to apocalyptic squallor. The ocean is green and the sky burns orange at night. This dark future makes the story science Fiction, though Copper’s intentions are those of horror writer, no Asimov or Heinlein. The environment has been destroyed by nuclear radiation. The sea and land is poisoned and mutants are popping up at an alarming rate. Reproductive women have become rare and are called “Breeders”, identified by number. Probably the closest Science Fiction vision of this terrible future is in Philip Wylie’s later stuff.
The plot follows a scientist who has come to a remote island to study something the locals have witnessed. Later he meets a girl who smells of perfume but has a fluorescent growth on her abdomen. She disappears but he encounters her again when she and several other blob-like creatures attack one of the outpost.
Another attack shows the scientists that strange sea creatures have come onshore and can attract victims with a purple spray. The response to this bio-weapon is the victim willingly embraces the monster, their faces filled with ecstatic pleasure. These Lovecraftian monsters claim and contain their victims, while attacking with tentacles and antennae.
The story ends with the final war on the flabby men as the media will call them. The islanders and scientists, armed with radioactive cannons and flame guns enter the seaside caves at low tide to destroy all inhabitants regardless how human parts of them are. The invaders burn and kill ruthlessly. Some, like the narrator’s friend Rort, become ensnared and are burned along with previous victims. The caves are blown up after the flash gunners retreat.
Copper ends the story with that chilling qualm that any good Lovecraftian writer uses, not in italics, but in conversation. The narrator has a final talk with his boss, in which he tells how he saw a previous victim, Dr. Fritzjof, encased in the body of one of the monsters, his eyes begging for death. The narrator has to wonder though the mission was a success, if his old friends who were taken might not still be alive inside the collapsed cave, destined to a living hell. His boss, Masters says, “Who knows, my friend, who knows?”
The ooey-gooey terror of this story reminds me most of the original Alien film. Ridley Scott’s chest-bursters and face-huggers would use the same biological terror to freak out audiences two years later. Both of these stories are Lovecraftian in the best sense of the adjective (sometimes over-used and misused). I really enjoyed The Great White Space and now “The Flabby Men”. I will definitely be searching more Basil Copper stories for this brand of cosmic horror.
