Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we cover Livia Llewellyn’s “Bright Crown of Joy,” first published in Ellen Datlow’s
Children of Lovecraft anthology in 2016, and reprinted last year in Nick Mamatas’s
Wonder and Glory Forever anthology. Spoilers ahead, but this one is very much worth tracking down and reading yourself.
“After the After, there were waves of tsunamis that circled the surface of the world again and again, remaking it entirely new, there were epochs of monstrous and amazing creatures that thrived and died off in mass extinctions as the planet recalibrated again and again, as we who survived realized that we too had recalibrated, and were part of the chain of change.”