While each of the stories in Notes from Underground is linked in some way with my conception of the Hollow Earth, not all of them take place within it, or even adjacent to it. Some involve other phenomena that merely intersect with the Hollow Earth, including two stories preoccupied with a “post-human beetle race” briefly mentioned by H. P. Lovecraft in The Shadow Out of Time.

“After man there would be the mighty beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.”

The first story drawn from that altogether brief quotation actually came about before I ever knew that what I was writing was a series of linked stories – or that they would have anything to do with the Hollow Earth! Sometime around 2015, Ross Lockhart approached me to contribute a story to the anthology Cthulhu Fhtagn!

By that time, I had already written who knows how many Lovecraft-inspired stories and pastiches – and that’s not even touching upon how many others had been penned by other writers over the years. What, I wondered, could I possibly contribute to an expressly Lovecraft-themed anthology, without any other trappings or diversions, to give it a sheen of novelty?

I settled upon that quote about the “post-human beetle race.” I had always liked the idea, and I remembered something not dissimilar in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in which the narrator hurls himself so far into the future that the Earth’s sun is dying. There, on a desolate beach, he encounters not beetles but giant crabs.

“Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters’ whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front?”

(And after all, what catalogue of Hollow Earth influences would be complete without a mention of The Time Machine, whose subterranean Morlocks may not inhabit a Hollow Earth proper, but nonetheless cast their shadow over every cadre of industrious monsters who dwell underground?)

All of this was in my head as I wrote “The Insectivore,” but it wasn’t until later, when I was writing “Veteran of the Future Wars,” with its exploration of the various eras of Earth’s history and future, that I realized how this coleopteran race was linked to my interpretation of the Hollow Earth.

As I already mentioned, the Hollow Earth in Notes from Underground is a space as much metaphysical as physical. Notably, it is a place that touches all points in time at once. An eternal realm that is nonetheless subject to entropy and decay. Meaning that the spider-like ghouls who “currently” inhabit my Hollow Earth can go to war with the “post-human beetle race” who will claim the surface after humanity has died out due to climatic disaster.

Of course, while I am generally reluctant to write actual Mythos tales, “The Insectivore” and “Veteran of the Future Wars” are far from the only times when my work in general and the stories in Notes from Underground in particular brush up against the work of the Old Gent from Providence. Whatever your opinion of Lovecraft, the industry that has grown up around his legacy and that of writers like him has proven my bread and butter for many years, and I’ve contributed to as many Lovecraft-adjacent anthologies as not.

In point of fact, three of the stories in Notes from Underground were written for Lovecraft-themed anthologies of one kind or another. Besides “The Insectivore,” which found its first home in Cthulhu Fhtagn! from Word Horde and “Veteran of the Future Wars,” which was written for Tales from Arkham Sanitarium, published by Dark Regions and now seemingly out of print, “Pandora,” the story that closes out Notes from Underground and ties all of its many threads together, was written for and published in New Maps of Dream, an anthology of stories inspired by Lovecraft’s Dreamlands cycle, put out by PS Publishing and edited by Cody Goodfellow and the late Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

You won’t find many tentacles in Notes from Underground, but you will find plenty of time slips, strange cults, body swaps, ghoulish visitations, and views of a world – both interior and exterior – that is much larger and stranger than we can imagine. That probably owes at least a little debt to Lovecraft, like it or not.