THE DEEP ONES: "The Visitor" by Nancy Kilpatrick

"The Visitor" by Nancy Kilpatrick.

Discussion begins March 26, 2025.

First published in Black Wings VI: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (2017).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2307651

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Black Wings of Cthulhu 6

ONLINE VERSIONS

No online versions found to date.

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Kilpatrick
https://horror.org/celebrating-our-elders-interview-with-nancy-kilpatrick/
https://nancykilpatrick.com/
https://tinyurl.com/bdf8kazv

I nominated this story partly to give myself an excuse to pick up Black Wings of Cthulhu 6. I just ordered it, and it should arrive Monday.

I’ll be using it as the excuse to get the e-book.

I've retrieved my copy from a (not the!) TBR pile:

I wondered if the palmetto was supposed to be a time-travelling member of the coleopterous race from The Shadow Out of Time, but palmettos are cockroaches, not beetles, it turns out, so probably not.

I thought the story could have used more development, further hints as to the visitor’s nature and purpose. As it is, I thought it fell a little flat.

I agree that something seemed to be missing. Ian wasn't much of a character, just a dilemma. I found it hard to either care about or be entertained by his misery. The high point was the bug's initial revelation of itself as his "spirit animal," which was darkly comic.

I unearthed my copy of Black Wings of Cthulhu 6 and read the whole thing last week. This wasn't one of the standout stories for me, I'm afraid.

I get that S. T. Joshi applies a broad interpretation of "Lovecraftian horror" in his editorship of this series, and it can take some work to see even a thematic connection to HPL's concerns and themes in some of the works selected. Even so, I'm not sure I see a real connection here. Granted the palmetto is an alien intelligence - in the sense of being a non-human sentient and reasoning organism (presumably not extra-terrestrial). It even offered a questionably happy ending (depending on your view of taking revenge!) with the palmetto seeming to take a kind of Jiminy Cricket role - although, on just leafing through the story again this evening, I wondered if a more sinister interpretation could, or should, be given to the plametto's last words of dialogue"...You seem hell-bent on extinction, and my species has known we can help your species with that problem because we are survivors, if you'd only accept us into your world." Help us overcome this self-destructive drive, or to achieve it?