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E.J Cousins' debut collection of short stories , The Rioting of Inferno invites readers to delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche in a dazzling collection of stories that challenge the boundaries of reality and human morality. Hauntingly macabre tales such as "The Surgeon", "Resolution", "The Crying" and "The Masks of Stolen Skin" skilfully blur the line between the bizarre and the conceivable, the beautiful and the gruesome. With stunning original artwork by Anwot, the spinetingling and mind-bending tales that comprise The Rioting of Inferno will unsettle and linger long within you.
E.J cousins tell us about his Lovecraftian creative process behind the cave dwelling creatures of the story “ The Cave” page 58-70
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From the Author
When writing a story that I knew would largely revolve around the various creatures my primary focus was how do I design them, and most importantly, how do I make them different and create an enclosed eco-system within this unexplored cave.
To answer the first issue, the first source of inspiration that I went to was the works of H.P Lovecraft. Lovecraft popularized the ‘cosmic creature’ of horror with creations such as Cthulhu and ‘The Colour’ from The Colour out of Space. The way in which Lovecraft described his creatures was of particular interest to me, as he manages to provide enough details of the creatures without providing a clear picture of them, managing to describe them without concretely describing them. For example, in At the Mountains of Madness, the ancient creatures that are found are described as being ‘barrel-shaped’ with ‘star-shaped heads’ and ‘triangular feet’. To add more detail Lovecraft only then compares them to existing organisms like coral and vegetables. This method of describing something by emphasising similarities to something else is what struck me upon first reading his short stories. With this in my mind, I used it as a guide in helping create my own ‘indescribable’ creatures.
As a result of my Lovecraftian inspiration, the creatures that in habit the titular cave are described often through their similarities with other organisms. This also helped in solving my second issue, that of making sure the creatures were noticeably different and easy to differentiate. As in real life different organisms and animals will need different conditions to thrive and live. Therefore, I thought that if as the characters went deeper into the cave system, the environment could change with them. This would inherently mean that the creatures would need to be different from each other to believably have survived in the cave.
The entrance to caves close to bodies of water tend to be damp and potentially humid, depending on location so I needed a creature that would thrive in damp and humid environments. As a result, the first creature that I created ended up with worm and slug-like attributes. The next cave section was much drier with a maze of rocky outcrops and tunnels. The following two creatures needed to be less water based then, and so a quadrupedal animal became the basis for one species. If the ground and tunnels would be inhabited by packs of dog-like creatures then anything else there would need ways to stay out of their focus, to avoid being hunted. My solution was to have a creature that spent most of its time on the ceiling, much like a spider. I refer to it in the story to be a crab-like creature, given its primary appendages had pincers, but I did make sure to include that its body housed its young before birth to try and have a passing similarity to spiders as they tend to carry their young on their backs until they moult and disperse.
The description of the ‘tidal wave’ of young ‘flowing’ from the mother’s corpse was also supposed to be reminiscent of the hundreds of young that spiders produce.
The flooded section of the cave was a harder environment to create a creature for. The obvious route was to create a fish creature to terrorise the second group of survivors, but I felt like that was too predictable. Lovecraft’s description of his beings being similar to vegetables is what helped me to come up with an aquatic creature that wasn’t a fish. I went to aquatic plant life. The idea of drowning was, to me, a horrific and claustrophobic why to die so I created something that didn’t necessarily attack, but grab as a reflex, like how a venus flytrap closes its mouth as a response to a fly in its mouth. They’re the elements I drew together to create the seaweed, the least Lovecraftian creature of the bunch.
The final creature that serves as the stories climax was the hardest creature to conceptualise. I wanted it to be the most Lovecraftian in its description and so tried to describe sections of the creature, like the ‘starfish-like limbs’, instead of creating a complete image of it. Its environment was the biggest with the most food supply and so I thought it natural that the largest cavern would house the biggest creature. The design for it has inspiration from many different animals like octopi, starfish and eels. As it was amphibian and came out of the water, Cthulhu was also at the forefront of my mind to try and help guide me to create a creature that could be pieced together by the reader, rather than described parts that could not be put together to form a whole.
“The Cave” out of the rest of the stories in The Rioting of Inferno required the most inspiration and research to make sure that I could create varied creatures that feel like they could potentially inhabit some forgotten cave somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. When basing my writing in something real like a medical condition or a type of animal research is always crucial to my process of creating stories, and “The Cave” is a prime example of how it can impact and guide how I form and populate the world of my fiction.
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