Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
H.P. Lovecraft, the inventor of cosmic horror and proselytizer of weird fiction, did not have a favorable view of Asia outside of Japan. In his fiction, those of “Mongoloid stock” are depicted as debauched cultists in “The Horror at Red Hook,” while “He” envisions a future New York City wherein a mostly Asiatic population oversees massive cultural degeneration.
I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.
Suffice it to say, Lovecraft, if he were alive today, would probably have rather mixed emotions about his popularity in China. Nevertheless, the late Mr. Lovecraft is popular in China, with his work being first translated into Chinese sometime around 2005. However, the important moment in Providence-Peking relations began on December 5, 2007. On that date, a sub-forum devoted to the Lovecraftian tabletop game Call of Cthulhu was launched on the Chinese-language website, The Ring of Wonder (TROW). Before long, members of this sub-forum transitioned from talking about their favorite Lovecraftian games and short stories to actually writing their own fiction. One of the more prolific and talented members of this community, an anonymous user known only as Oobmab (“bamboo” in reverse), began publishing Lovecraft-inspired weird horror tales in July 2011.
The Flock of Ba-Hui is the sole collection of Oobmab’s weird tales translated into English by British ex-pat Arthur Meursault and the anonymous poster Akira. Rather than eldritch New England, The Flock of Ba-Hui is set in China, with mountainous Sichuan and the coastal gem Qingdao singled out for special attention. As with any good Lovecraftian work, Oobmab’s writing approximates Lovecraft’s purple prose well, plus he too has a knack for using lonely, academic types as his main protagonists.
In the titular story, a colleague of the young archaeologist Zhang Cunmeng relates the story of how the brilliant academic went missing high up in the Sichuan mountains. Zhang is missing and presumed dead by the authorities after escaping his confinement in a mental institution. Zhang’s madness came after he found an occultic scroll that laments a fallen and lost kingdom ruled over by serpent gods called the Ba-Hui. While seeking out Zhang’s whereabouts, the narrator stumbles across evidence of the Ba-Hui in a mountainside cave:
This unexpected, looming horror was both sudden and short-lived. We picked our way around the skeleton, using our torches to navigate the bottom of the natural shaft — and were greeted by a maddening sight. Before us stretched an incredibly vast open plain, piled with behemoth platforms of stone. Throughout lay debris fallen from on high among a field of ash-grey bones. We had no way to guess how many had died here, nor what fate had befallen them. Some bones had been piled into small mounds, but most were scattered chaotically around. The dry underground environment had preserved much of their original appearance — the lonely scattered bones were perfectly intact, as if someone had nonchalantly left a body on the floor to decay for millennia.
“The Flock of Ba-Hui” is full of slow and creeping dread, just like the best Lovecraft tales. The Ba-Hui are reminiscent of the snake god Yig from one of Lovecraft’s revisions of Zealia Bishop’s original work. These Chinese snake gods have been deep in the Sichuan mountains for a long time, and as the ill-fated Zhang and others prove, they may be there still, just waiting for the right prey to stumble into their lairs.
The other stories in Oobmab’s collection are just as delectable as “The Flock of Ba-Hui.” “Nadir” is set in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, albeit a Chinese-flavored Dreamlands. The protagonist in “Nadir” traverses the city of Hlanith in order to scale a tower supposedly leading to the Hall of the Gods. Nebuchadnezzar eventually reaches the apex and discovers a cold, impersonal waste. Such cosmic sublimity is worth reading, even if this story does dip into overwrought writing on occasion.
The best tale in the collection, “Black Taisui,” concerns the unique corpse of Lao Mingchang, an ancient man whose dead body decays at an unnatural rate. The narrator, known only as the Historian, uncovers the fact that Lao had discovered dark secrets about the branch of his family that settled in Qingdao. In particular, Lao learns about an ancestor’s School of Longevity that relied on obsidian science to achieve its goals.
The Flock of Ba-Hui is a fantastic addition to the Lovecraftian pantheon. Oobmab writes in a style that is both a mimicry of the Old Gentleman’s prose, as well as an idiosyncratic innovation. These tales would not be out of place in an original Weird Tales issue from the 1920s or 1930s. They are that good. Sadly, Oobmab seems to have disappeared, or at least has disappeared for Anglophone readers. He (or she?) may still be cranking out expertly executed horror tales right now in Chinese. I hope that is the case, for Oobmab is without question one of the absolute best masters of the New Lovecraftian Weird Tale.