Books Reading the Weird Extradimensional Digestive Enzymes With Morel Sauce: Yri Hansen’s “Nights and Weekends in the Shoggoth Loop” By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on May 6, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share 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 Yri Hansen’s “Nights and Weekends in the Shoggoth Loop,” first published in the March 2026 Strange Horizons fungal-themed special issue. (Note: Ruthanna has an article in the same issue, on the weird-fiction-to-solarpunk pipeline. It also contains such goodies as a new Sonya Taaffe poem.) Spoilers ahead, but go read! Narrator works in the Shoggoth Loop of an unnamed city at a fine-dining restaurant called Nuth-Shoggoth. Or perhaps Nuth-Shoggoth is the name of the shoggoth entire which “hosts” the restaurant inside its bulk, where its head would be, if it had a head. Where does it keep its brain, then? Here’s the thing, you can’t think about shoggoths as if they evolved in Earth’s plane of existence. Chop its protean mass to bits, and it will just grow back. Its whole body can be a brain. It can synthesize “a million different novel biomaterials.” The Masters who left them behind after they invaded our plane also left behind Runestones that can biomagically control and shape shoggoths; once humans figured out how to use the Runestones, shoggoths became “super hot real estate” in a war-devastated world. The opening finds Narrator working a “shoveling” shift, a back-of-house gig that involves stuffing the shoggoth’s maw with such feed as whole hog’s heads. Sid, the restaurant’s host, taps them to fill in for Lazaro, who’s in hospital after being mugged. Narrator’s going to sub as a runner. Runners get less in tips than server assistants, but shovelers get no tips, and anything’s better than scraping duty. A fiftyish guy chats them up at the bus stop. After trying without success to figure out Narrator’s “gender deal,” he points out a spot in the rubble-strewn street where his favorite bar once stood. It had a killer house band, but then the aliens invaded. He and his buddies tried to band together against the Masters, but the authorities ran them off. Not that the authorities did any better. The bus is late, as usual. Delays at the decontamination checkpoint delay Narrator further; they don’t get to bed until after three a.m. The next day, Narrator fills in for Lazaro as a server assistant. Manager Shane puts two runners on scraping duty, so again Narrator escapes that pit assignment. The base ingredient of all Nuth-Shoggoth’s dishes is the shoggoth exudate called Ambrosia. Fresh from the glands, it’s light and fluffy, but it cools into a super-glue like substance removable only by being hand-shoved through the shoggoth’s pre-digestive pores and scraped against their wiry internal cilia. The reeking pre-digestive enzymes are caustic. Even if you wear gloves, they’ll eventually erase your fingerprints. But caustic, too, are the Molnads, big-money patrons who own not only the restaurant but the whole city-block of shoggoth. Narrator gets stuck with them and their loud demands for every expensive dish, including those not on the menu, which they then barely touch. Worse, a shoveler gets injured, and Narrator must run between the dining room and the shoggoth-maw. It must be fed constantly, or the Ambrosia will run out—it takes sixty grams of raw meat to produce one gram of delicious mush. But at shift’s end, they get a big tip from the Molnads and even praise from Sid, who tells them that tomorrow they’ll start host training. Heading home, Narrator thinks about their first day at Nuth-Shoggoth, which was also the first day they tried Ambrosia. Its irresistible aroma is different for each person; scientists believe it contains a narcotic that stimulates appetite and the memory of the best foods the smeller’s ever eaten. Its taste sets off a brain-chorus of Remember! Food tastes good! Life is pleasure! You deserve this! Narrator cried at their first bite, overwhelmed with “transcendent, revelatory deliciousness.” Too bad the Ambrosia eater builds up tolerance, until it tastes like nothing, or maybe a little like chicken. Wherever the shoggoths originated, their Ambrosia doesn’t need to retain its gustatory impact. As a prey-lure, it only needs to work once. That’s why the glands occur near the shoggoth’s maw. It was an Eastie kid who brought the secret of Ambrosia to humanity. People from East City had become hardened to catastrophes that always fell on them hardest. The coming of the Masters was just one catastrophe more. Shortages, crop failures, environment devastation, famine drove Easties across Shoggoth District barriers. A ragged gang of youths caught the scent of paradise and traced it to its source. Only one escaped ingestion. In the tiny bedroom of their shared apartment, Narrator muses about how they came to the city to become a professional musician. But the restaurant toil that keeps them alive also sucks up all the energy they hoped to devote to music. Lazaro returns to Nuth-Shoggoth battle-scarred but upbeat. Still weak, he starts the night as a server’s assistant and ends up scraping. Narrator suggests that Lazaro could be a good host. Sid’s unconvinced. He says the host station’s too close to the bar, but they know it’s Lazaro’s unaesthetic scars. The conversation turns to the rich patrons, the Molnads in particular. Narrator shouldn’t think they bought Nuth-Shoggoth just for the restaurant income. They should remember that shoggoths aren’t just “mush dispensers.” Remember the killing machines they were during the invasion. Sid’s planning to quit the restaurant. Narrator thinks about how the Molnads court business types, how there’ve been mysterious firings and hirings in management, how the restaurant cash flow doesn’t always make sense. Ultimately, the restaurant’s only “one little compartment in a massive living organism, like an ingrown hair on an elephant.” Lazaro joins Narrator and Sid. He jokes Sid into relaxing a bit. He rests a hand on Narrator’s shoulder, and their “heart stutters, because his hand is big and he’s touching me.” Underfoot, the Shoggoth “clicks and groans,” barely audible over “the sound of clinking forks and tipsy laughter.” The Degenerate Dutch: Weirdly, well-off customers don’t have to go through decontamination leaving the Loop—only the poor people who work there. And even among the servers, there are differences: someone who “looks like an Eastie” is never going to get a front-of-house promotion. Libronomicon: That “New York Times piece on Ambrosia Cuisine” must’ve been one hell of a restaurant review. Maybe literally. Weirdbuilding: Have ye ever heard tell… of a shoggoth? Have ye been down to the Innsmouth Crab Shack? Absolutely delicious it is, just don’t ask where the crab meat comes from. Ruthanna’s Commentary I’m fortunate, among my peers, that I’ve only spent a single season in food service. I was a high school student slinging sides at the seafood shack down the street, one of those clapboard places that only opens in the summer for tourists. It was enough to turn me off cole slaw for decades. The mere sight of dressed cabbage brought back the vivid tactile memory of reaching into a barrel of the stuff, thin plastic glove no protection from feeling the whole slimy handful. Scoop too slow, or place the lemon wrong on the plate, and you’d get snapped at by a manager who wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with this nonsense. The next summer, I got a piecework gig with a friend’s aunt who made cardboard jewelry for TJ Maxx. The smell of a hot glue gun invokes unwelcome memories as well, but I never looked back. Cape Cod’s shellfish scene, at least, carries limits on the size of the tentacles and the grossness into which you can insert your hands. Living and working in the seafood sounds like a whole ‘nother circle of hell. Which is the point, really—how could mythosian horrors take the exploitative, physically and mentally destructive world of food service to its logical extreme? The horror is still human inequality, for one thing. The rich winners, the owners and privileged guests, still come out on top after the Masters abandon their shoggoths, now with extradimensional resources on top of their hoards of money and property. They still treat the people who do the work like shit. Dishwashing’s gotten even worse. Tips still don’t fill the gaps. I haven’t worked in Chicago’s Loop—I had an assistant professor position on the South Side—but liked the area when I was there. I was living outside the city, in a Wheaton College Bible Belt neighborhood, and getting downtown was a treat. My favorite expedition was always the Field Museum—have they added a shoggoth section to the Evolving Planet exhibit, I wonder? Does the stadium next door, already designed to look like a UFO has just landed over the bleachers, now sport a real starship? Has my favorite restaurant, Russian Tea Time, pivoted to ambrosia? That would be sad. I am not an extreme eater—I’ll enjoy my butter-soaked pelmeni as many times as I can have it, rather than try a single unrepeatable taste of perfect Proust Effect shoggoth bait. I’m also pretty sure that the RTT servers aren’t sticking their hands in digestive enzyme behind the scenes, which is always nice. Then again, what is The Bean, really? Could it be an advance scout, a threat of non-Euclidean things to come? Under the surface—which is always where you (don’t) want to look with shoggoths—this is a story about what gets taken from the people being exploited. Not just labor. Not just fingerprints, identity scraped away by the work that the better-off get to avoid. Pleasure, and the memory of it. You can spend all day dishing it out for others, and no longer be able to taste it yourself—and that, like the fingerprints, is something they do to you either on purpose or because avoiding it doesn’t matter. Narrator loses their music. The owners might as well be entities from beyond the stars, with goals that have nothing to do with what they destroy on their way. And under the surface, all the types of exploitation are connected. Food service and real estate and weapons production, and the “Masters” who leave behind unwanted slaves. Or maybe who did so for a reason—not abandoned in retreat but inserted to pave the way for a second wave. Or, perhaps, to push a few already-privileged humans to “ascend” themselves. To be ready to join the Masters, one way or another, as part of the Great Old Labor Exploitation from beyond the realms we know—but which we might all too easily recognize from our own experience. Anne’s Commentary I ate Yri Hansen’s story up as if it were a big plate of Chicken-Fried Ambrosia and Ambrosia Cream Gravy with Mashed Ambrosia and Ambrosial Biscuits on the side. No wonder Nuth-Shoggoth has snagged a Ten Star Michelin rating year after year! “Nights and Weekends” reads, to me, like the first chapter of a novel, but it also works brilliantly as a “slice-of-life” short story, one extravagantly larded with disgusting, disturbing, and sumptuous details. And it features shoggoths! Say no more, I’m in knee-deep and wading deeper. Lovecraft became the Father of Shoggoths in 1936 with the serial publication in Astounding Stories of At the Mountains of Madness. Here’s his canon description of the creatures, in the words of William Dyer, a leader of Miskatonic University’s Antarctic expedition: “Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things?” Viscous Agglutination of Bubbling Cells sounds like a great soup du jour for Nuth-Shoggoth. I’ll take a bowl, please, with extra bubbles! Prof. Dyer can be excused for the overwrought close of the above excerpt. What he saw in the ruined city of the Old Ones would give anyone a touch of PTSD. Hansen’s depiction of shoggoths sticks close to Lovecraft’s, except for the fifteen-foot diameter limitation on their size. Hers are “agglutinations” that can achieve footprints big enough to cover two city blocks at top heights of four stories. On Earth, at least, they have become not just the builders but the buildings themselves. They have laid waste to much of the human city, so is their burgeoning growth an urban renewal plan or just incidental biological sprawl taken advantage of by humans once they acquire Runestones? Or the humans could be intentionally supersizing shoggoths by grossly overfeeding them. Force feeding them, even, like so many geese stuffed for the production of paté de foie gras. Paté d’Ambrosia gras, bound to be a hit with the Molnads. I started sympathizing with Hansen’s shoggoths when I read that the Masters of the invasion abandoned them upon leaving Earth, like superfluous puppies dropped out of the car on a backcountry road. Why leave their killing machines and construction workers behind? Is it so easy to whip up a new batch of slaves from a jar of protoshoggoth ooze? Or is it a precaution against transporting shoggoths on the verge of becoming intelligent enough to rebel? On the other hand, leaving the shoggoths on Earth could be the Masters’ reward to them for services well-rendered. Intelligent shoggoths wouldn’t want to gobble up all the prey items in their new “preserve.” They’d want to husband their resources so they’d last. With their potential to synthesize millions of “novel biomaterials,” they’d be able to mind-control the humans into believing they were the herdsmen, the shoggoths the cattle, while the opposite was true. It could be an arms race, too, between shoggoth intelligence and the humans’ mastery of Runestones. If, indeed, the humans have any real ability to wield Runestones—the shoggoths could merely be feigning submission. The fictional possibilities inherent in Hansen’s take on shoggoth-human relations are as tantalizing as Ambrosia itself. Side dishes that could grow into entrees are the human intrigues Sid hints at and the implied chemistry between Narrator and Lazaro. Hansen’s slice of post-invasion might have come from an Ambrosia cheesecake. It could smell and taste different for each human diner who tries it. Or, that is, for each human reader. Join us next week, along with Arthur’s weak heart, for Chapters 13-14 of Stephen Graham Jones’s Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark] The post Extradimensional Digestive Enzymes With Morel Sauce: Yri Hansen’s “Nights and Weekends in the Shoggoth Loop” appeared first on Reactor.