Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall, slim figure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed with inherent light … that regal figure; whose proud carriage and swart features had in them the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke and in its mellow tones there rippled the mild music of Lethean streams.
– H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)
The above passage describes an encounter between the dreaming Randolph Carter and the ancient and malevolent god Nyarlathotep. Carter has traversed the landscapes of his dreams in quest of truth and secret knowledge. His meeting with Nyarlathotep is the climactic scene in this story. It is by turns fantastic, overwrought and deliriously and unintentionally kinky. In Lovecraft's fiction, the dark forces who threaten to engulf our world are usually described (if they are ever described at all, as they regularly defy as well as overwhelm the strictures of language) as slimy, shambling and tentacled. Nyarlathotep, whose whispered name usually inspires fear and to whom bloody sacrifices are made, turns out, in fact to be this beautiful, exotic youth. The unhappily married Lovecraft, who has been referred to as being asexual and whose writing is flavoured with a kind of analytical hysteria, describes his cosmic abomination with something approaching slippery abandon.
My own gods straddle the margins of medieval folklore and the Vaseline-smeared meadows and little paths of horror movie interludes*. However, I would like to stress that this may not be merely impudent posturing. There is a sense of something being awry, not quite right, not quite covered. I am not sure if they are brazen in their exhibitionism or just innocently unaware. Their transgressive dress sense is in part inspired by the sleeve of David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World (1970), from which emanates a fey, autumnal musk.
*The pastoral, soft focus moments of relief in certain horror movies when the heroic characters are afforded the opportunity, the sanctuary, to reflect, to recoup and possibly reproduce. (e.g. Witchfinder General, 1968)