🐙 Cody Goodfellow is an American author, editor and screenplay writer who has written a number of stories set in the H. P. Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos.
Goodfellow has written or co-written 12 novels. His first two collections, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action, each received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene films "Stay at Home Dad" and "Baby Got Bass". As an actor, he has appeared in numerous short films, TV shows, music videos and commercials. He is also a cofounder of Perilous Press, an occasional micropublisher of modern cosmic horror. He lives in San Diego, California.
Cthulhu Mythos[]
"Lovecraftian fiction has comprised about half my fictional output since I began writing for money, twenty-two years ago," Goodfellow writes in an introduction to his collection Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales:
I have never found a more effective vehicle than Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to unmask not just the horror of the Other, but the tragedy of us, and the horror that is.... Lovecraft invented the perfect monsters for the modern era, and took the preternaturally modern stance of making his proprietary mythology into shareware.
Describing his own approach to the Mythos, Goodfellow writes:
I have struggled to repay my influences with interest and tried to make Cthulhu Mythos stories that don’t just offer the secret handshake to the initiated, but drag the unwitting into the cult; and to stay faithful to the spirit and intent of what Lovecraft did, by aggressively making it my own.... I have striven not to use the Cthulhu Mythos as a stock set of adversaries from Outside to distract from the very real threats humans turn a blind eye to every day. As HPL and the best of his successors did, I try to weave the Outside with the Inside, the Other with ourselves to unmask the horror that is, hiding in plain sight.
He describes what he sees as a distinction between Lovecraft's writing and his own:
Lovecraft’s greatest fiction tapped into a problematic vein of repulsion and alienation from the natural world and his fellow humans, a revulsion so powerful as to become obsession. As a mutant product of the evolution of the weird fiction genre into the diverse, militantly inclusive community it is today, I have tried to invert that ratio, to stare wide-eyed into the forbidden and find terrible beauty, as well as all the unspeakable, gibbous, rugose and amorphous horrors you’ve every right to expect from a book like this.
Selected Bibliography[]
Editor[]
- Deepest, Darkest Eden (2013)
- New Maps of Dream (2021, with Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.)
Author[]
Novels[]
- Radiant Dawn (2000)
- Ravenous Dusk (2002)
- Jake's Wake (2008) (with John M Skipp)
- Perfect Union (2010)
- Spore (2010) (with John M Skipp)
- The Last Goddam Hollywood Movie (2013) (with John M. Skipp)
- Repo Shark (2014)
- Skyrizer (2015) (with Phillip Buchanon)
- The Snake Handler (2017) (with J. David Osborne)
- Sleazeland (2018)
- Scum of the Earth (2019)
- Unamerica (2019)
- The Flying None (2021)
- Vertical (2023)
Collections[]
- Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (2009)
- All-Monster Action! (2012)
- Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales (2016)
- Strategies Against Nature (2017)
- The Man Who Escaped This Story (2019)
Short Fiction[]
- "In the Shadow of Swords" (2002)
- "Grinding Rock" (2005)
- "Cahokia" (2005)
- "The Nether Collection" (2006)
- "To Skin a Corpse" (2006)
- "Rapture of the Deep" (2010)
- "Inside Uncle Sid" (2011)
- "Earthworms" (2011)
- "The Shape of a Snake" (2014)
- "The Anatomy Lesson" (2015)
- "Red Americans" (2015)
- "Garden of the Gods" (2015)
- "Broken Sleep" (2015)
- "König Feurio" (2015)
- "Green Revolution" (2015)
- "Archons" (2016)
- "Swinging" (2016)
- "Hungry Ghosts" (2016)
- "Strangers Die Every Day" (2017)
External Links[]
- Cody Goodfellow at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Cody Goodfellow at Goodreads