The Outsider and Others: Counter-Lovecraft
As I have discussed in some of my earlier essays on Lovecraftian fiction, Lovecraft is having a bit of a moment now, one that has been a long time coming, but not one that many longtime Lovecraft fans had come to expect or desire. I recall in the 2000s, soon after I found myself absorbed into his idiosyncratic and unsettling writing, among “Lovecraftians” there was much speculation and hope for a greater pop-culture appreciation for his work. In particular, after the prestigious Library of America published a collection of his works in their imprint, alongside such American literary luminaries as Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, Lovecraft’s place in the canon of US literature was cemented in their eyes. Only literary snobbery against genre fiction kept him from obtaining the status he deserved.
Now, as “geek culture” began to take over the “mainstream,” Lovecraft’s importance could be celebrated and there would be fawning scholarly papers of or even high-profile cinematic adaptations of his work.
Perhaps, with HBO’s Lovecraft Country adaptation airing now, that time has come. Lovecraft Country, produced by Jordan Peele and based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel (discussed below) explores the very themes integral to what drove Lovecraft to write, but which for decades was downplayed or denied. When the author is given the level of analysis as an influential literary figure that many fans had been hoping for, any serious discussion of Lovecraft’s white supremacist and fascist sympathies have too often been swept under the rug.
As writers and fans grapple with the outsized influence the Providence native had on the development of the fandom culture of today, contrasting the saccharine nerdery of plush Cthulhus along with the hideous reality of Lovecraft’s genocidal sympathies, how can we reconcile these creations with the monstrousness of the creator? Not merely the requisite outdated social views of a person who was born in 1890 but the dark bigotry of a committed white supremacist, startling even to his contemporaries during a dark time in American race relations. There is something in his writing that speaks to many, some deep well of American and specifically white male American fear that he taps into. We really are Lovecraft country.
Perhaps against my better judgment, his stories remain compelling to me, something in its weird depictions of the mysteries of existence. This has come to be more and more unsettling to me, more so than the work itself even. As, for all intents and purposes, a straightish, white, North American man, I must ask myself, is it because, deep down, just a little bit, I share H.P’s fears? A horrifying thought. I am opposed to just about everything he stood for, so why do I find myself drawn into his xenophobic, genteel horror stories?
This is why I find works subverting and countering Lovecraft’s views using his own creations, lore, and worldbuilding, known broadly as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” so fascinating and refreshing. Over the last few years, I have read many books written from the perspectives of those who were feared, ignored, or denigrated in Lovecraft’s work, reflecting different viewpoints and looking at his world in ways he could never have imagined. As the Lovecraft Country adaptation streams on HBO, I see more and more people discussing these themes and the novels deconstructing Lovecraft’s racism and his place in American society, telling stories both uplifting and chilling in the process.
Perhaps the most prominent of the “genre,” Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country has become the latest prestige streaming series from HBO, dominating a lot of TV pop culture discussion in recent weeks. I haven’t seen it yet, but after reading the book soon after its release in 2016, I’m excited. I am definitely curious to see what they do with it.
The title of this fun but thought-provoking romp is a clever play on words that sets up the reader’s expectations of Lovecraftian horror set in the decaying rural New England towns riddled with cults and monsters of “Cthulhu Mythos” tales, but challenges and defies these expectations. Lovecraft Country consists of a series of vignettes set in the 1950s following a group of Black Americans from Chicago who stumble into investigating the unknown after researching their genealogy, but the novel’s real terror is the injustice and fear the protagonists and millions like them live under. Lovecraft Country is the United States and racism is the cosmic horror that has infected it since its beginning.
With nods to typical tropes of Lovecraft’s stories and the work of other seminal science fiction and fantasy writers, Lovecraft Country is one of the most introspective yet gripping explorations of weird fiction, horror, and American society I’ve yet seen. Ruff does a great job weaving this reality of racism and oppression faced by the characters into the weirdness of the stories, making for a read with thrills, chills, and ideals!
Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a superb and suspenseful short horror novella that takes one of Lovecraft’s most overtly racist major works, “The Horror at Red Hook,” and inverts it, looking at the Cthulhu Mythos through the eyes of a Black man during the Jim Crow 1920s. Here, LaValle takes Lovecraft’s unpleasant short story and transforms it into a nuanced, scary, and refreshing reaction to the genre, one that both nods to, and critiques, the weird tales of Lovecraft.
Charles Thomas Tester is a young black man living in Harlem in 1924, posing as a street musician to make some cash and provide for his ailing father. Hired as a delivery man to bring a mysterious book to a sinister white woman in Queens, he finds himself drawn into a dangerous and occult world after meeting one Robert Suydam and the Brooklyn cop charged to watch him, Detective Thomas Malone. However, the world Tester inhabits is already dangerous and horrific enough. The cosmic indifference of the forces that Suydam introduces him to, the Great Old Ones older than humanity and the universe itself, and a certain “Sleeping King” resting dead but dreaming deep under the sea, proves a refreshing alternative to the relentless hostility of white society.
In challenging both Lovecraft’s racism and the racism of the entirety of American society, The Ballad of Black Tom’s comparisons of racism to a cosmic, and indifferent, horror seems well suited. Even more than Ruff, LaSalle draws into the dark world of the Mythos and ends with plenty of food for thought, filtering those old Cthulhu Mythos trope into a new and disturbing light.
Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a gripping reimagining of Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” one of his most unique and intriguing pieces. His Dreamlands stories are a bit of a departure from his stereotypical subjects, being fanciful, whimsical, and even twee, though still bound up in his dark worldviews as well. A fantasy world away from the painful mundanities of the “Waking World,” Lovecraft’s self-insert character Randolph Carter yearns to return to the comforting dreams of his childhood, traveling across this land of strange temples, talking cats, and mysterious beings he can only visit in his dreams to attempt to rediscover it.
Johnson explores the Dreamlands from the perspective of one of its many inhabitants just trying to live life in the shadow of this great Dreamer from the Waking World, Vellitt Boe, a lecturer at a woman’s university in the city of Ulthar. Boe lives in a world not only ruled by but created by, the mind of a sexist, oblivious old man, and sets out to try to rescue a student from yet another dreamer using their world as their own private fantasy land, following the trail perhaps into the Waking World itself. Johnson really captures the vivid and awe-inspiring setting while calling into question Lovecraft’s views on gender and imagination, in particular, it is both a fun quest story that brooks a lot of deeper questions as well. The novel should appeal to fans of high fantasy in general as much as people who enjoy cosmic horror, and it much offers needed antidotes to many of the common tropes and attitudes of each.
Lovecraft’s creations have also gained popularity outside the United States, and even outside the English speaking world, few places more prominently than Japan, so it was interesting to get the chance to read this interpretation of the “Cthulhu Mythos” through a Japanese perspective.
Japanese horror author Asamatsu Ken’s novel Queen of K’n-Yan takes on some fairly unusual topics, drawing from one of Lovecraft’s more obscure works, “The Mound,” bringing it to 2000s Tokyo and writing from the perspective of a biologist drawn into a secretive Chinese-Japanese joint venture analyzing a prehistoric mummy found somewhere in Manchuria. As is typical in such cases, things go badly (or maybe, according to plan?), but all in all, Asamatsu doesn’t end up doing much interesting with the themes. Unfortunately, I found the work rather derivative and clinically written (though that may be more of a fault of the translation), with many horror cliches and plot predictable to anyone who’s seen The Thing.
More than anything, Asamatsu’s work shows that the problems of uninspired Lovecraftian pastiches do not end at nationality. To make things far worse, the awful introduction by Darrell Schweitzer drops in all the tepid, weak defenses of Lovecraft’s racism commonly trotted out, as though Japanese writers being interested in his work absolves him of being a bigot. Schweitzer’s argument basically amounts to the assertion that Lovecraft just wanted to preserve Yankee culture, just like the Japanese! “America for Americans,” “Japan for Japanese,” in other words. Is it politically incorrect in Lovecraftian circles to point out that that’s basically a white nationalist talking point? Not really a defense I would care to muster. In any case, ugh.
For a more interesting Japanese exploration of cosmic horror, I’d recommend the work of manga artist Junji Ito, of Uzumaki fame.
Ruthanna Emrys’ “Innsmouth Legacy” series, beginning with the novella The Litany of Earth, and continuing with her novels Winter Tide and Deep Roots, is an exciting and refreshing take on the Cthulhu Mythos that really draws deeply into worldbuilding and lore. Emrys definitely writes a Cthulhu fan’s Cthulhu novel, but of all of the critical takes on Lovecraft I’ve read, I feel that she offers among the most lavish and close readings of the tropes of the greater shared “Cthulhu Mythos” universe, utilizing its verisimilitude while turning its attitudes on their heads. Not merely a sympathetic viewpoint of “the other,” Emrys shows how prejudice makes monsters of us all.
Narrated by Aphra Marsh, a survivor of the infamous 1928 Raid on Innsmouth, Massachusetts and twenty years of incarceration at a desert internment camp she came to share with hundreds of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the novels draw deeply from Lovecraft’s stories (to an extent that one might be lost if unfamiliar with his oeuvre in general). With plenty of references and allusions to stories from Lovecraft and other writers, Lovecraft fans get plenty of easter eggs, but to me the more interesting aspect is what Emrys does with them, folding the otherworldly vistas and ideas of Lovecraft’s mythology with the more human horrors of the mundane twentieth century.
As Marsh attempts to track down the lost lore of her ancient people, the deep ones, she is drawn into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage and gathers an electric group of outsiders, both human and other. The large cast of characters can cause the series to feel a little slow, though I think the pace really picks up in Deep Roots. Throughout the series Emrys pieces together an intricate, mysterious history from Lovecraft’s vague lore, using it to tell a much more humane story. While drawing from the same bleak cosmic horrors, she infuses them with a more affirming lens. With all the horrors of the world remaining so pressing, refocusing the misanthropic eye of Lovecraft’s weird fiction to something more positive, if still cosmic, is a very relevant commentary. I’m looking forward to the next chapter.
Hammers on Bone and A Song For Quiet are some of the most pulsing, weird works I discuss. Consisting of the “Persons Non Grata” series, these short but evocative works of cosmic horror contain some of the most affecting and eerie writing of any of the works I read for this collection. Malaysian born author Cassandra Khaw expertly crafts surreal yet terrifyingly grounded worlds that mix a hardboiled noir sensibility with supernatural horror in a way that feels deeply innovative.
In Hammers on Bone, monstrous London-based private investigator John Persons is coerced into aiding a young boy to kill his abusive stepfather, himself something other than human. I found myself unexpectedly moved. However, A Song for Quiet, in which an internet Black American bluesman, Deacon James, is forced to confront one of Lovecraft’s most infamous creations, really impressed me. As Deacon is pursued by Persons around Lovecraft’s fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts, Khaw’s hallucinatory yet punchy prose takes the reader on an unsettling journey. Khaw’s work builds an unnerving atmosphere that draws meaning from multiple genres and uses it to new ends.
N.K. Jemisin’s urban fantasy masterwork The City We Became was, I think, the most pressing and insightful and even just all-around fun work I read for this entry and is a great place to round out this list. An eminently contemporary work of fiction, I feel that of all the books I have discussed so far, Jemisin considers the real-world implications of the malignant worldviews espoused by Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror most fully. Lovecraft unleashed much of full racial hatred on the diverse populations of 1920s Brooklyn, so it is fitting for Jemisin to hit back by making the city itself the protagonist of this novel. A celebration of the city of New York and the people who make it what it is, The City We Became is both an imaginative novel envisioning human personifications of major world cities and an indictment of the status quo of white supremacy and economic injustice. This combination is a hallmark of great speculative fiction, and Jemisin’s joyful yet all too topical novel was one of my favorites of 2020.
Her engaging cast of characters, five New Yorkers who inadvertently awaken to their roles as avatars of each of the city’s boroughs feel completely real, which even carries onto the monstrous being from another dimension who hopes to kill the city before it awakens. Such an interesting twist to have the Cthulhuesque horrors working to try to keep humanity from awakening! Through the course of the novel, Jemisin deals with true sources of existential dread, from gentrification to the looming threat of fascism aided and abetted by a complacent media.
As the first of an upcoming series, Great Cites, I am excited to see what happens in the next novel.
This is only an incomplete list of interesting titles that have been published lately, and I will surely continue my own delving into the Counter-Lovecraft fandom renaissance in the coming months. My partner and I just got HBO, so I will also be seeing how the adaptation holds up. Great Halloween viewing!