Modern Mythos literature was emerging as well. Kikuchi Hideyuki, known for the Demon City Shinjuku and Vampire Hunter D series, penned the first Lovecraft parody novel, Great Old One Gourmet (1984). The story features your go-to ingredients of trash literature--snappy dialogue, lavish descriptions of gore and sexy chicks--while the narrative plays out like an Arkham House edition of mad libs. Structures are cyclopean. Revelations are maddening. And Cthulhu… he hungers.

Protagonist Naihara Fumio is a master chef in the school of disgusting delicacies. The slimier the vegetable, the more rotten the meat, the more vomit-inducing the seasoning the more brilliant the result. Of course, finding one with taste buds sophisticated enough to appreciate the subtle texture of mold soufflé is another matter altogether. Enter Abdul Alhazred, whose master would be very interested in sampling Naihara’s cooking. You can’t bring forth madness and the end of the world on an empty stomach. But time is of the essence. The constellations click into position like a doomsday clock, and Cthulhu isn’t the only God who hasn’t been fed in strange aeons.

Naihara finds himself as the MacGuffin in a globe-spanning adventure with the U.S. Military and dark cultists vying for his golden spoon. It’s Professor Armitage’s grandson and the U.N.’s Anti-Cthulhu League against the Marsh family’s shipping conglomerate and deprived Dunwich yokels. Can the Whateleys' pickup trucks and shotguns compete against a flood of fish men? Can Dagon punch through the hull of a nuclear sub? And how good does your cooking need to be to make a Great Old One literally eat their heart out?

Weird fiction to be sure, but not in the way that Lovecraft originally envisioned. Many Japanese authors base their worldview on the tabletop RPG, which is based on August Derleth’s cosmology that sorts the alien gods by their servitors and elemental affinity--the sort of bookkeeping that’s good for grooming monster manuals, bad for crafting a sense of dread. And while Kikuchi’s works are as exciting as a summer blockbuster, many authors get caught up dropping names and neglect to drop forbidden knowledge.

The 1990’s: Instability in the Mythos