Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of "The Cult of Alien Gods"

​My first and most influential book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, was published twenty years ago this coming week. If I felt old when I heard music from my college years playing in on the local “oldies” station, I feel doubly old realizing that I wrote my first book half a lifetime ago. I started writing it two years before its publication, when I was half as old as I am today. Soon enough, I will have been an author longer than I was not, and that still strikes me as absurd. Has so much time passed? It was so long ago that I sent out manuscripts on paper and received page proofs in a cardboard box marked up with a proofreader’s red pen!

​Such a momentous anniversary deserves at least some commemoration. I am expanding this piece from the retrospective I published in 2020 on the book’s fifteenth anniversary and various other pieces I have written about the book over the years.
 
When I published the book back in 2005, I received heavy criticism both from those interested in H. P. Lovecraft and those interested in space aliens. Both groups felt I had done a disservice to them by explaining how the modern ancient astronaut theory grew out of the influence of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos on the authors of one of the hypothesis’s key texts, Morning of the Magicians. Nevertheless, the thesis was convincing enough that it appears regularly in books, academic papers, and popular articles. The Cult of Aliens Gods has been mentioned in everything from a book of essays on Star Trek to the Handbook of UFO Religions to various studies on Lovecraft—and even a book on the historical Jesus. But now, after all this time, my conclusion is so widely accepted that some who discuss it no longer credit it to me, for it has passed into the realm of fact. It is an honor, I suppose.
 
Of course, there are also those who don’t believe I deserve any credit at all. Indeed, the New Testament scholar and Lovecraft aficionado Robert M. Price went so far as to accuse me of stealing the central claim of the book from a humorous article he and Charles Garofolo wrote in 1982 in a Cthulhu fanzine jokingly suggesting Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods was derived from the Cthulhu Mythos before declaring it unlikely, if not impossible. I dutifully added the reference in the notes when I learned of it, but that wasn’t good enough. Price complained, ten years after publication, that “he doesn’t give us any credit. His case, though more extensive, is so similar to what Garofalo and I said. I wonder if he even got the idea from there. But it doesn’t really matter.”

The Cult of Alien Gods is not perfect, nor is it the book I would write today. For one thing, it was a lot harder to do research back then, particularly if one did not have a travel budget to visit archives and libraries, and today I could easily fill the book with better examples and a more thorough literature review. I wrote Cult of Alien Gods between August 2003 and March 2004. I took me all of 2004 to find a publisher, and Prometheus picked up the book and began the long editorial process at the end of that year. Prometheus was the only publisher to show interest in the book. I was only twenty-three when I wrote the book, twenty-four when it was published.
 
Regular readers will remember that Prometheus and I did not have the best of relationships in producing Cult—the published text was my first draft, which I had planned to expand and correct with the advice of editors (as major publishers usually do and I mistakenly thought Prometheus would as well), but they instead typeset the draft and gave me no ability to make changes other than for spelling. And we all know that my spelling is terrible. Despite selling thousands of copies, I have never seen a dime of profit from that book. I earned some initial royalties which did not cover the costs incurred writing the book, and since then the magic of accounting has kept the book perpetually shy of the threshold for receiving a check. I think I might have gotten a few dollars for it this year, some two decades later. (Disclosure: Prometheus, which was an independent publisher in 2005, is now part of the same conglomerate that owns Applause Books, which published my Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean last year.) Nevertheless, it both made my reputation and locked me into a niche from which I have only occasionally been able to expand beyond.

I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. For the realm of the mind and for the historical record, it is good that I wrote the book. Without it, I would never have discovered so many secrets about history and culture. But I do wonder if I had held off whether I might have been able to grow my career in a more mainstream direction. The Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, who was also a Prometheus author, contributed the book’s title at the request of the publisher, but when I asked him for advice about pursuing a literary career—I wanted to edit anthologies as he did—he blackballed me (and sent me an email to announce it), presumably to snuff out potential competition.
 
I can remember how proud I was of having a published book when I applied for jobs in publishing back in 2005, 2006, and 2007, only to have editors turn up their noses. They published literature, you see, and I wrote about déclassé aliens. The editor-in-chief of one mid-sized press quite literally told me during an interview that she would not hire me because the subject matter of my book called my judgment and professionalism into question. They couldn’t have me on their staff lest I corrupt their Olympian literary taste. Yeah, but you can Google my name and see how many people have built on what I've done. No one knows who any of those editors are.

For better or worse, The Cult of Alien Gods set the pattern for the books that followed and was my first foray into long-form writing. Without it, there would never have been the books that followed, or, I hope, the many to come.