Downward to Darkness: A Cthulhu Mythos Novel

by Brian McNaughton

Brian McNaughton's career spanned thirty years; he had the sort of talent that ought to have made him a household word. Even so, chances are good that you've never heard of him. Brace yourself, if you haven't: you're in for a very special treat, because Brian McNaughton is the secret master of horror.

"Downward to Darkness" is a subtle, highly readable, fast-paced Cthulhu Mythos novel. (And if you like it, check out the sequel, "Worse Things Waiting," or his thematically similar novel, "Gemini Rising.")

Genres: Horror, Lovecraftian, Fiction, Cthulhu Mythos

141 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Brian McNaughton was an American writer of horror and fantasy fiction who mixed sex, satire and black humour. He also wrote thrillers.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a sneaky, subtle, sly little novel. the Laughlins now live in an awkwardly converted mill, passed down generations to the mother in this family of three. strange things are afoot: sensual yet horrible dreams featuring a beautiful woman plague and arouse father and son while the mother is figuring out her own life, and how much impact her cult-leader father has had on her. McNaughton excels in making all of them - and their neighbors, colleagues, and love interests - basically agreeable or at least very understandable people. and so it is a gradual process revealing the layers of disturbances beneath the surface, whether it's an obsession with the Lovecraft mythos displayed by the family lawyer, or a history of incest or a repressed desire for the same sex or actual powers displayed by the friendly and urbane Satanist next door, or most importantly, the subsuming of one character by his long-dead ancestor. the author's elegant but unpretentious prose makes the book move smoothly along, until we are in the middle of the novel's extended set-piece: a Halloween party that turns violent and horrific. and suddenly we are there, a light novel (in tone, at least) turned exceedingly dark, and then after the party we are suddenly in even deeper, down in the sub-cellar, in a battle taking place inside and out of the mental space, all the horror hinted at now made visceral, and all is madness and magic and murder, blood and guts and sadism, arcane books stolen and doorways smashed, bodies ripped apart, bones melting, everyone become victim or villain or both at once. and yet it still remains sneaky, subtle, and sly, as if the author always has still more tricks to play. it is like McNaughton was smiling when he wrote this, except that smile is not a very nice one.

review for sequel: Worse Things Waiting

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

1981 Star mass-market, with art by Gino D’Achille (who is perhaps best known for the early 70s Ballantine editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series).

1980 Carlyle mass-market, artist unknown (no great loss there).

I already reviewed this under its original title back in 2017: Satan's Mistress, which has its own listing on Goodreads. This is pretty much the same as the earlier editions, only closer to the author’s original vision, without editorial interference. I couldn’t really tell much of a difference between the two while reading other than a few more modern references, though this one seemed slightly more graphic as far as its erotic content is concerned (I was always under the impression that McNaughton was forced to sex-up the narrative back in the day, but maybe that was only for Satan’s Love Child). This reread — as well as my recent rereads of Throne of Bones and Satan’s Surrogate (aka The House Across the Way) — has only reinforced my opinion that McNaughton was in the upper echelon of horror boom-era writers.

And I know I’ve mentioned this before, but no one topped him when it came to writing epic Halloween parties gone very, very wrong.

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

McNaughton was a class act. He wrote with such clever talent, that I’m drawn in after a mere minute’s reading. I adore his ability to create a fully-developed, and characterized, story in a page or two. Plus, there’s the creeps, the gore and the mystery. Granted, I’m a huge fan of the pseudonymous Harry Adam Knight, so take my opinion as you see fit.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although much more graphic in terms of its unadulterated eroticism, this late 70s reissue via Wildside Press under a new title (and apparently updated for the new millennium, which to me, was unnecessary), delves headfirst into the Cthulhu mythos, but takes a while to get there. But when it does...watch out.

The Laughlins acquire an old stone mill that has long been in the family. But as soon as they move in, bizarre occurrences transpire. Young Patrick begins to dream about a ravenous and ravishing woman with red hair. And during the Halloween party, he starts to behave oddly...which is only just the beginning of the horror that befalls them.

I first heard about Brian McNaughton from Edward Lee, who cited him as an influence, and while McNaughton is not nearly as graphic as Lee, I can see the connection. The book ends rather abruptly, which leads to a sequel, called Worse Things Waiting.

Recommended for Lovecraft fans!

[Carpentermt · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the pornographic Satan's Lovechild, I had written off Brian McNaughton's four mythos influenced short novels. James Ambuehl, noted mythos maven, responded that the author actually had better intentions than his editor allowed, and that I might actually like these books. So I gave them another try.

Downward to Darkness was originally published in 1978 as Satan's Mistress by Carlyle Books. This corrected text/title was published in 2000 by Wildside Press. Page count of this trade paperback is 141, with text starting on page 7. There is a too brief but entertaining minibio of the author on the last page. Editing was good, production qualities were good, and the cover had no art, just the title in large type. I did not do an exhaustive comparison of Satan's Mistress and Downward to Darkness, but a very cursory examination shows that there was not really anything too much different or very objectionable in Satan's Mistress, not when compared to the difference between Gemini Rising and Satan's Lovechild. There was frank sexual imagery and taboo acts referred to, but not in a pornographic sense. Rather, it was important to the strange atmosphere the author was trying to build up. Considering my modest expectations, I was quite engaged by this book. With the relatively short page count, the clever plot and the very readable prose I polished it off in one day. The way the book is written, the twisted nature of the plot is not really made clear until at the very end. It does not start off with any particular Lovecraftian elements, but eventually it all comes together in a fiendishly clever sort of way. The characters do not know what they are in the middle of until the end, and even at the end maybe only one minor character has figured it all out. Downward to Darkness is not a sequel to Gemini Rising although it has some similar thematic elements.

Patrick Laughlin is an awkward intellectual high school student with odd parents. His parents are among the intelligentsia; his father Frank is a commercial artist and his mother Rose has a PhD in English. Unlike many mythos books, these characters come alive. The author has a gift for putting you inside their point of view so the most outrageous things make a sort of sense. They live in an old mill converted into a studio for Frank, as well as their home. The mill was inherited by Rose; it later turns out it was home to an ancestor of hers, Mordred Glendower, a reputed evil magician. He and his daughter, Mirdath, lived there, and apparently she was worse than he was. Eventually the town got tired of disappearing babies and burned the place (and Mordred) to the ground. Mirdath was accorded a fate deserving of a witch, she was hanged at a crossroads. Well, time has passed, and the crossroads and adjacent potter's field have been converted into the town dump. A local Wiccan (or better, pagan), Howard Ashcroft, has had his eye on the mill for years because Mordred's library is purportedly still there. Unfortunately Rose claimed her property when her father died and moved there with her family. Ashcroft can do some low grade magic, like cast glamours, and he and his followers are still trying to maneuver their way into the mill. Unfortunately his dabbling has in effect resurrected the spirit of Mordred into the genetic make up of his male descendant, Patrick. Shades of Ephraim Waite from The Thing on the Doorstep, he is trying to get control of Patrick's body. He begins by sending Patrick visions of his red haired daughter, Mirdath, as a seductress. This bleeds out into everyone, so that Rose is rummaging about the basement looking for a hidden treasure, and Frank can't help drawing pictures of a red haired woman. We meet some other characters in the town: nosy Jane Miniter and her dogs, and naïve daughter Amy, Rupert Spencer a youngish writer who is not so successful and lives with his father, an older lawyer named George, Shana Jennings a blonde high school beauty who manipulates Patrick to do her schoolwork and her boyfriend Bruce Curtis, and an unpleasant teacher of theirs, Bob Bamberger. Ashcroft invited Amy and Patrick to a pagan celebration/black mass that Patrick counsels against going to, as he understands a virgin's virginity is usually sacrificed to everyone. This is a very similar image to the pagan orgy in Gemini Rising that was used to achieve a kind of power. Everything comes to head on Hallowe'en (sic), when the Laughlins hold a big party at the mill. Everyone and a lot of other people show up, and events really spin out of control. Thanks to Ashcroft's manipulation, Rose breaks into the cellar where there is a copy of the Necronomicon and Mordred completely seizes control of Patrick. In a very tautly written scene in the kitchen at the party, Bruce and a thuggish friend, Duke, with a very drunken Shana, are tormenting Bob Bamberger, Amy Miniter and Patrick. When Bruce is about to beat the crap out of Patrick he utters the First of the Ten Words of the Litany of Hastur. Now Mordred in Patrick's body attempts to resurrect Mirdath, who was even more a Master of the Runes than her father. Mordred was always disorganized, impatient and sloppy with details. This means he does not separate Mirdath's body from any other fragment of human/animal/plant tissue...What rises is feeling a bit peckish. Now Mr. McNaughton takes a plot device I usually can't stand and makes it really work. HPL was writing the truth, tweaking the collective nose of the world's intelligentsia that refused to accord him the same consideration. I usually hate this concept but McNaughton's prose is so good and it is so organic to the plot that it all really worked for me. George hears about all this and talks a disbelieving Rupert into tracking down the Necronomicon, but instead he has a less than productive encounter with Mirdath. George comes to realize the Necronomicon is real and really wants to get it to head off certain danger. At the same time, Patrick, still alive in a corner of his own mind, somehow manages to wrest control partially back from Mordred. Unfortunately, as Patrick-Mordred attempts to placate the Mirdath thing with a snack, Mirdath no longer recognizes him as the spirit of her father....When George arrives at the mill, among other things, he finds Rose, who has only been semiconscious since Hallowe'en, and a distracted Amy Miniter. There is a denouement of sorts in a very good final scene.

Brian McNaughton provides a terrific reading experience with this book. He puts us in the viewpoints of all the major characters, and makes them all become alive on the page. The plot comes together liked a finely wrought piece of clockwork, the action scenes are quite invigorating and the entire story has a very creepy atmosphere. This is what I expected from the author of The Throne of Bones! It is a corking good read and certainly merits a few hard earned Cthulhu bucks. I liked it so much I dove right into Worse Things Waiting, and it's even better!

[steven duane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A true modern horror classic

This is the book I have read by this author. I was lucky enough to pick up a 1st/1st of his earlier novel "Satan's love child's at a going out of business sale for $.10. It just moved up to next on the read list.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting short novel reminiscent of Lovecraft's "Case of Charles Dexter Ward".

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Profoundly odd but mostly compelling slice of Lovecraft but in an 80s, gloopy, Re-Animator style.

Apparently a big influence on Edward Lee. I can totally see it.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Per Jack's review, this 2000 edition is a slight reworking of a novel McNaughton originally published in 1978 as Satan's Mistress; but that title and cover were obviously too awesome, so I found myself reading this cover art-less edition that is for some reason also 6 x 9 as a paperback. Come on, Wildside Press- I felt like I was reading a menu.

I hesitated, as well, when I saw the Lovecraft epigraph- as much as I like the idea of reading Lovecraft (and I love a few of the stories), that prose can sometimes also be a real struggle for me- and hesitated again when I saw the subtitle (absent from my copy, which otherwise appears the same) "A Cthulu Mythos Novel" here on Goodreads. Well shit, I thought, I guess there won't be much mystery here. As soon as something gnarly goes down, I'm going to know big daddy Cthulu's behind it. Where's the fun in that?

An absence of fun turned out not to be a problem at all, however. McNaughton is a great writer of dialogue, and I found the book surprisingly hilarious. It might actually be closer to the idea of reading Lovecraft than reading Lovecraft, assuming that is that your idea of reading Lovecraft is reading his lore re-contextualized by one of those satiric and linguistically-inventive mid-to-late 20th-century writers like, say, Anthony Burgess, who also takes the time over the course of 140 pages to casually reimagine history and reveal things like what Albert Einstein did when he first read The Call of Cthulu.

It's a short novel, and McNaughton packs in a lot of ideas and moving parts, but he balances it all very well. As Jack mentioned in his review, a large part of it is just a set-piece at a Halloween (Hallowe'en?) party that's a masterclass in walking the fine line between hilarity and terror that is also a defining feature of the book. In short, it's lots of fun.

You've also got to love this passage from the "about the author" page: "He [McNaughton] recently ended a ten-year stint as night manager at a decrepit seaside hotel, where he once had the honor of helping his hero, Warren Zevon, break into a stubborn soda machine."

[Christopher Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This full length novel doesn't work as well as any of the stories in The Throne of Bones. It starts off promisingly, with a teenage Patrick having weird visions and extended the unsettling situation to his strange family. Then it jerks around in odd directions, namedropping Lovecraft and many of his works before concluding in an unsatisfying way that seems to say "wow, there sure are some weird things in the world!"

It felt like there were still large parts of the community to explore, like the satanist cult Ashton runs and which we never get to see, but as the narrative runs out of steam the narrator starts telling us or having other characters tell us why certain things are the way they are. Then the destructive force hops out of the story and there's a potential hook of some further twisted doings that would have been more effective if they had been foreshadowed earlier in the story. Of the McNaughton work I've read I think he's more effective when writing short stories, once he gets to novella or novel length things run out of steam.

There's also an odd attempt to update the novel to the modern world by mentioning some contemporary movie stars and other famous people. But even though Bill Gates is namechecked as the prime example of a rich guy, nobody in this world uses computers. The protagonist's father is a magazine illustrator in the mold of those who worked during the 50s to 80s, working off live models with actual paint, as opposed to the photographers or digital illustrators who hold those jobs in the modern day (well, before they started getting replaced with AI.) It would have been better to leave the text alone and let it be a period piece.

[Steve Danner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creepy, well written book in the vein of HP Lovecraft. In fact, I like the "meta" Lovecraft references throughout. Incest stuff always disturbs me, and this was no exception. Indeed, it was the only reason this book didn't get a 5. Fast, easy read that'll keep you turning them pages! Part 2 coming up!