Inside Uncle Sid

"Inside Uncle Sid" is a short story by Cody Goodfellow that originally appeared in Dead but Dreaming 2 (Miskatonic River Press, 2011) under the title "Uncle Sid's Collection".
The story is told from the point of view of a young woman who lives with her Uncle Sid, a compulsive hoarder who attracts a group of misfits who "came in hopes of being changed, or just helping Uncle Sid to become something to punish the world."
==Characters==
* Sidney Swenson: Known as Uncle Sid, he's "a big, shy loner who drives an ancient primer-gray Ford Econoline van, never been on a date, but a wizard with anything mechanical." He lives near near San Diego State University in California in "a four-bedroom ranch house in the middle of a nice quiet neighborhood" filled with "mounds of exotic forgotten jetsam."
* Dana: Sid's niece, she's been living with him "for three months, since she split up with Tony."
* Ricardo: "Sid’s new friend," he's a "Chilean Allende socialist" who "emigrated to America and became the laziest communist handyman in the free world." He "looks like a bandito gone to seed, with his graying Che mustache and blue bulldog jowls, and his scars."
* The White Man: A character "living in the backyard" who "cooks all their meals." He "looks like a castaway: emaciated, with wild white hair and a Karl Marx beard." He has "the hollow thousand-yard stare and leathery, freckled skin of the terminal homeless, but his white shirt and painter’s pants are always spotless."
* Rhoda: Apparently Sid's girlfriend, a former "mud wrestler and an actress." She is "emaciated, wiry yellow limbs carelessly swathed in flaking crepe-paper skin, concave except for her absurd artificial breasts and collagen-injected lips," with "bleach-blond fiberglass hair and eyes like runny, infected blue sores."
* Dr. Blythe: He is a "once-respected psychiatrist" who "used to treat all the socialite wives in La Jolla" until "a motorcycle accident left him in a coma for a year." He "looks uncannily like Richard Widmark, if he had a coke problem and a stroke."
* Dolores Zuburan: The former tenant of Sid's house, who Sid insists was a witch. She also rented the storage unit whose contents Sid bought, including a weirdly modified bicycle that seems to bring him into contact with eldritch powers.
==Mythos Connection==
The story is more Lovecraftian horror than Cthulhu Mythos, with its theme of an outsider obsessed with secret knowledge (in the form of such books as The Hollow Earth Codex, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, and Phyllis Diller’s Guide to Marriage) undergoing a physical degeneration as the harbinger of apocalyptic destruction. A connection to Lovecraft's shared universe is made when Dana sees Ricardo's message "LAS CANTATAS DEL DHOLEZ" (which she misinterprets as "the songs of sadness") on a notepad. Later Ricardo compares Sid to "the Dholes that eateth the Earth like the worm gnaws the tooth."
==Inspiration==
The story is a fictionalized portrait of Goodfellow's Uncle Sam, whom he calls "a gentle giant," a "hulking, painfully shy man" who was "a compulsive collector" and an "effortless mechanic." "I’ve never known a kinder person who was more stoically cheerful in the face of challenges few could recover from," Goodfellow wrote shortly after Sam's death.Medium, "Outside Uncle Sam," by Cody Goodfellow, May 28, 2021.
Goodfellow noted of "Inside Uncle Sid": I wrote a story about my time staying with Sam...that I glibly described as ninety percent true, but if everything I’ve said here seems like the obligatory preamble to a 'We Never Knew…' confessional about the day we discovered Sam’s murder cellar, I had to invent the other shoe. Again, without meaning to, Sam taught me how easy it is to misjudge goodness that doesn’t constantly advertise itself. 
==Publication History==
The story was reprinted in Goodfellow's collection Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2016).
==References==
Category:Cody Goodfellow works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works