Invoking the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is 2017 is no easy task. On the one hand, you have his visionary take on horror, which remains influential to a host of writers; on the other, you have his loathsome racism that’s frequently inseparable from the stories he’s telling. A handful of nods to the Cthulhu Mythos in a story or novel can sometimes feel less like a warm homage and more of an oversight regarding the more noxious aspects of his body of work.
Some of the work that’s followed in Lovecraft’s footsteps hits many of the same terrifying beats, but opts for a very different sort of worldbuilding: expansive cosmic horror, but of a variety that isn’t beholden to a structure of racist or classist beliefs or spurious theories of racial or ethnic superiority. (I wrote about this in greater detail a few years ago.) Others opt for a different tactic: dealing head-on with Lovecraft’s racism while still finding a way to tap into the profoundly unsettling sense of horror and dread that he conveyed in his work. Last year, two of the most memorable cosmic horror books I read represented each camp: John Langan’s The Fisherman in the former, and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom in the latter.
The case of LaValle’s book is instructive for how it hits the expected Lovecraftian story beats while also wholeheartedly criticizing Lovecraft’s racism. In his novella, there are mysterious mystical tomes, secret societies, corrupt public officials, and a central figure looking to gather unearthly power and venture into other dimensions. But the novel also deals with questions of race in 1920s New York City—both by offering a vibrant counterpoint to Lovecraft’s dim views of a multicultural society and, more specifically, by building the story around a black protagonist. And it works on all levels, and showcases a way of folding Lovecraftian elements into a horror story without ignoring the bleaker and troubling side of his work.
LaValle isn’t alone in finding ways to revisit Lovecraft’s work while confronting and challenging his racist worldview. As its title suggests, there are mentions aplenty of Lovecraft to be found in Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country. But in this book, that invocation works on a few levels. There are mysterious societies, otherworldly creatures, and terrifying rituals in abundance here, as well as a setting that’s one letter removed from Lovecraft’s fictional town of Arkham. Lovecraft’s fiction is specifically invoked: protagonist Atticus, a black Korean War veteran, recalls enjoying one of his books before discovering more work from its author that was much more racist. Here, then, the use of the author’s name becomes metaphorical: “Lovecraft Country” as a kind of shorthand for regions where supernatural creatures and mundane racism pose equal dangers.
Ruff’s novel contains a host of other references to Lovecraft—at one point, Atticus and the book’s antagonist, Caleb Braithwaite, debate the proper translation of a book written in a mysterious language. Atticus notes that its title seems to correspond to the Necronomicon. “That would be a book of dead names,” Caleb responds. “The Book of Names is just the opposite. Its subject is life. Transformation. Genesis.”
And that last word is no coincidence: Atticus and Caleb share a common ancestor from many generations earlier, and their relationship has echoes of another pair of relatives whose names begin with the letters “A” and “C.” For all that there’s plenty of Lovecraftian menace in Ruff’s novel, there are also more than a few other loving nods to other works of science fiction and horror from bygone years: one character is the creator of a number of pulp adventure comics, and several of the book’s heroes are avid science fiction readers. And the resulting novel avoids a sense of pastiche and adds a fair amount of spontaneity to the proceedings.
Paul La Farge’s novel The Night Ocean also concerns itself with H.P. Lovecraft, but it employs a very different technique by making the real-life author a central figure in the narrative. It begins in a way that feels archetypal for a certain type of horror story: Marina Willett, the book’s narrator, begins by recounting the circumstances under which her husband Charlie disappeared, after a period of seeming mental instability. There’s a bizarre image involved, and a rumor of a death without a body—but the twists and turns that this narrative takes have less to do with eldritch terrors from other dimensions and more to do with deceptions, nestled narratives, and shifting identities. The terrors here are subtler ones.
Marina is a doctor by profession, and stands as a bastion of reliability, whereas nearly everyone else in the novel is a writer, philosopher, or a pulp enthusiast–and thus far more connected to fiction, speculation, and deception. The novel takes on an increasingly nestled structure: Marina’s story involves retelling the story that Charlie became obsessed with, which involves a rumored diary of H.P. Lovecraft, which in turn leads to the question of whether Lovecraft had an affair with Robert Barlow, who was later named his literary executor. (And if the story of Lovecraft’s connection to Barlow and Barlow’s subsequent life—in which his path crossed with another contentious American literary figure—sounds too strange to be true, it’s not.)
The plot gets even more intricate from there; The Night Ocean may be the only novel in which both Ursula K. Le Guin and Whittaker Chambers have cameos. As does real-life Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, whose meeting with Charlie sets much of the plot in motion. Joshi’s appearance is one of several references made over the course of the book to various communities of science fiction, fantasy, and horror readers and writers. Without giving too much away, it turns out that some of the nestled narratives that Marina uncovers contradict one another. This is, clearly, a danger when dealing with a host of writers: some of them may well end up making things up.
It’s a fascinating way to evoke one of the predominant sensations of cosmic horror: namely, that sense of insignificance in a universe where certain rules in which you believed no longer hold true, or (perhaps) even existed to begin with. La Farge has written a largely realistic novel that evokes a Lovecraftian sense of dread, but there isn’t a shoggoth in sight. And in the bold narrative architecture that he’s established, there are plenty of lessons to learn in how to reference the emotional impact of cosmic horror in narratives that are somewhat removed from it.
Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).
Good article. I need to read The Night Ocean for sure.
You should also mention Cherie Priest’s Lizzie Borden novels. The second, “Chapelwood” deals with cosmic horror and a group of cultists whose front is an “America First” racist/nationalist group. While none of the protagonists are minorities, the antagonists are clearly racist in a particularly Lovecraftian vein.
And David Nickle’s “Eutopia” also treads some interesting ground, dealing directly with the eugenics movement popular in the 30s. Race and ‘racial purity’ play a big role in his novel.
Thanks for writing this.
I can suggest this author: Anders Fager. He is Swedish. I don’t know if his books are translated to English (I’m French), but I know they worth the reading.
Alan Moore’s Providence would be worthy of an article. It explores the Lovecraft mythos while at the same time turning a lot of tropes inside out and upside down.
We should mention Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
“Invoking the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is 2017 is no easy task. On the one hand, you have his visionary take on horror, which remains influential to a host of writers; on the other, you have his loathsome racism that’s frequently inseparable from the stories he’s telling.”
Pray tell, where is this racism found? I’m just curious, as I’ve read a bit (admittedly not a lot) of his stuff and haven’t encountered it.
Google the words Lovecraft and racism, and you’ll find plenty of evidence.
Hell, even the title of one of his stories is, itself, a racial slur.
Twisted genius who elevated horror to cosmic levels? Yup. But a racist.
Lovecraft’s racism has always been an elephant in the room for lovers of his work and style and, in many regards, make adapting or referencing it at tricky task at best. Hopefully without sounding like too much of an apologist, for me I’ve always seen it run a little deeper that just simple racism. His casual use of racial epitaphs and distain when describing “half breeds, negroids, and other degenerate decadents” to be more indicative of xenophobia boarding on misanthropy. I don’t think, in my own readings and understandings of the man and his work, that he bore a particular hate toward any one group or race, but had a rather dim view of humanity in general.
But even in that I think is were Lovecraft really succeeded. In addition to his ability to built atmosphere and tension in his admittedly florid prose, was his ability to take his fear and distain for others and articulate in a way that made the reader understand WHY he found others so loathsome and detestable. What he saw when he looked at them and revulsion they invoked so deep to his core be it through analogy (the half fishmen of Innsmouth, the bizarre Whately family of Dunwich, etc.) or open parallel (Arthur Jermyn probably the most sterling example.)
Let me be clear. It does not excuse nor mitigate what is, even for his time, a very closed minded outlook. But I think it does at least offer some context. He was, at his core I think, terrified of “The Other” and indeed that is probably one of the few real common threads we all share when it comes to fear. Lovecraft, to his credit, was able to give “The Other” a shape and form so repellant it could cut across all lines and cultures in a way few horror authors managed before and fewer still have managed since. It’s what makes his stories more than just simple campfire yarns or ghost stories. He was afraid and makes us afraid along with him. No mean feat that.
But that’s just my take on situation.
Oh, and yes, House of Leaves is definitely worth checking out. :)
Great comment Matt. And one of the better takes I’ve read on Lovecraft and his views. Enjoyed the article, as well, and will have to check out the book recommendations.
I’ll have to check out the Night Ocean after this write-up! I enjoyed Lovecraft Country and The Ballad of Black Tom very much. And PCBushi, if you wanted to know more about Lovecraft’s many many issues with racism, you could follow along with the Lovecraft Reread by Ruthanna Emrys and Anne Pillsworth, which has been excellent. http://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/introduction-to-the-h-p-lovecraft-reread/
Thank you for the recos. I would like to add two books to the discussion
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay – I am a relatively new reader for Lovecraftian mythos, and this book made me get into it.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielweski– It started like Pickman’s model. Many Lovecraft scholars and celebrities in various fields via Interview transcripts. In my opinion, it was very lovecraftian,
I read and loved both The Ballad of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country. The Night Ocean is on my TBR list; perhaps it’ll help me work out how I feel about stories with Howard himself as a character. (Complicated, is how I feel. But would like to be able to articulate it better.)
Lovecraft’s own fears were so thoroughly entangled, a knotwork weave of existential dread and racial insecurity and architecture, that it frequently strikes me as easier to invoke the full power of cosmic horror when the problematic bits are directly confronted than when they’re avoided. Anne and I have covered a few stories that manage the one with no mention of the other–but his racial fears aren’t independent of his other fears, and it’s hard to excise them whole cloth without looking closely at what you’re trying to cut.
Oscar Evinnoff @@@@@ 3: “Furies From Boras” has been translated. So far as I know nothing else has–yet. Link to our review so as not to dump people directly onto a pdf, but you can get to it from there.
I also recommend the Lovecraft Reread. I was honestly lukewarm at best about Lovecraft’s fiction, but the Reread has given me a deeper appreciation for the things Lovecraft did well, while also confronting his odious views on race and class head on.
The Ballad of Black Tom was indeed excellent. John Michael Greer, who mostly writes nonfiction but has a couple of very good, creative sci-fi novels to his credit, is doing a revisionist-Lovecraftian series called “The Weird of Hali: …” in which the cultists, alien halfbreeds, etc. turn out to be the good guys. Unfortunately, they are being put out by a small occult press that will not make regular paperbacks of the first one (Innsmouth) available until they have sold out of the fancy $50 special edition, which still has not happened after, I think, close to two years now. A really objectionable publishing model if you ask me, but apparently readers of occult literature have enough disposable income to tolerate it.
When I read articles about Lovecraft’s “racism” (a purely modern phenomenon), I have to wonder how much the author has read regarding any other pulp material than that written by HPL. As much as we see him as a literary genius today, Lovecraft was, almost exclusively, writing for pulp magazines like Weird Tales during his lifetime, so I think it’s fair to compare his attitudes regarding race to other authors working at the same time, in the same medium. Most pulps, with a few notable exceptions, were decidedly “down market,” written and published quickly for a wide audience, and so rarely displayed the sophistication of their “slick” brethren.
The fact is, the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s reflected the beliefs about race that were prevalent in society at the time. “Yellow Peril” stories were common (read Armageddon 2419, the first ever Buck Rogers story, to see how the Han race (Asians) were portrayed as warlike, subhuman monsters) in everything from the Shadow to the Spicy pulps. Black people are treated with even less tolerance, when they are shown at all. Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and a contemporary of Lovecraft, has been accused of racism in his works, as he frequently writes about black savages and “mongrel” races, not only in his Conan tales, but also in his stories about El Borak, set in Afghanistan, which capitalized on stereotypes of Middle Easterners. And let’s not even talk about the jungle adventure pulps, which indulged in virtually every stereotype imaginable about natives. If reading Lovecraft bothers you, these will likely make your head explode! And then you have the detective and mystery pulps. There were few, if any, leading black characters in the pages of Black Mask or Dime Detective. What people of color there may have been were invariably servants, chauffeurs, maids, etc., clearly subservient to their white “masters.” That same attitude was reflected in the movies of the day as well. That’s largely because of society’s view of minorities, not because everyone writing pulps or making movies was a racist. Sure, the detective pulps may not have been as outrageously stereotypical as the fantasy or jungle pulps, but the assumption that white guys were always the heroes was on full view. Minorities were a clear afterthought, if they were a thought at all.
My point is that Lovecraft was writing in a specific time and place, and largely reflecting the attitude of the times. We live in a different, and hopefully more enlightened, world. But it’s wrong to judge someone by the standards of a time one hundred years or so removed. Imagine our descendants, living in 2117, looking back at the attitudes and beliefs of their ancestors. Will we deserve their scorn, when we write about capital punishment or abortion or child care or any of a million other issues, with them blaming us for not holding ourselves to their as-yet-to-be-set standards?
Remember, too, that racism was very much on the rise in America, beginning in about 1915 with the release of D.W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, and the resurgence and growth of the Ku Klux Klan. What was called “The Great Migration” – black people moving to the North to escape the segregation laws of the South – began at about the same time, and was something of which Lovecraft would definitely have been aware, especially as they represented a new labor force that competed with Northerners for both jobs and housing. This was a big change in the North, and something that would have caused a variety of feelings in the populace. Even after the Civil War, the racism in the North was definitely a force to be reckoned with, as blacks were crowded into sub-standard housing, and presented with sub-standard jobs and education.
So I think the issue of Lovecraft as racist is far more complicated than is typically portrayed. I’m not arguing for racist literature, nor am I saying it does not exist, but I am saying that judging someone like Lovecraft in a vacuum, as many seem to do, misses the point. Yes, Lovecraft’s stories do have racist elements in them, as do the works of many, if not most, pulp authors. To hold him to the standards of our day, however, does service to no one, as it fails to acknowledge the societal truths at the base of the issue. We are all a reflection of our times, one way or the other, like it or not. We have our truths and our opinions and our views of the world shaped by what goes on around us. To deny that is to deny reality. So, with that said, do we judge Lovecraft as a racist, or do we decide that he was alive and writing as part of a highly racist society and thus reflecting the era in which he lived? Either way, the discussion is far more complicated than the adherence of a simple label would suggest.
Lovecraft was a racist. Yes. He was. Whether it was because of the times in which he lived or because he was a massive xenophobe. He was most certainly a racist. A topic too easy to ignore and too awful to omit… Yet I have very rarely seen any mention of the fact that by the end of his life he’d matured enough to realize that he was wrong and gave up such foolish ideas. And stopped being a racist.
Here’s why this line of thinking – that Lovecraft was a “racist” without attempting to understand the social and cultural milieu in which he lived – is dangerous. If we go down this road, then, inexorably we have to accept the following:
*That Jesus was racist, as he never speaks out against slavery in the Bible.
*That all of the Founding Fathers were racist, because they all owned slaves and, in fact, enshrined in the Constitution the clause that slaves were considered to be worth 3/5 of a white person.
*That Abraham Lincoln was racist, as, according to is letters, he never intended to free the slaves prior to the Civil War. The only reason he did so was to gain help from European allies who would not stand with a slave nation, and to destabilize the economy of the South, therefore expediting the end of the war. His release of the slaves was entirely pragmatic.
*That John F. Kennedy was a racist. His cabinet, while he was president, was all white and all male (perhaps we should add misogyny to his list of crimes). Even in the era of Civil Rights, Kennedy did nothing to improve the lot of minorities.
The above examples are, by design, hyperbolic, but one could make any of the above cases as easily as one can condemn Lovecraft or most other writers of the period. If you don’t care for his writing, that’s fine, don’t read it. But let’s take a step back from condemning him, at least without a more thorough examination of the issues. His time is not ours, and it’s always unfair to judge one culture by the standards of another. It’s become very fashionable, and easy, to simply jump on the “HPL was a racist” bandwagon, but I advocate more thought and more actual research before jumping to this conclusion.
Ruthanna Emrys (mentioned above as one of the writers of the Lovecraft reread) wrote a great Lovecraft inspired novella The Litany of Earth available here on tor.com. And she has a novel Winter Tide coming out in April continuing that story.
Slavery and racism isn’t the same thing, except in America. In the time of the Roman Empire (and Jesus) slavery wasn’t about race. If you want other people to look at other times without the bias of their own time, you should learn about other cultures yourself.
“Slavery and racism isn’t the same thing, except in America.”
True enough, but many times, slaves in Biblical times were of other races, or at least of other tribes. Yes, some were debt slaves and the like, but that seems like a small percentage. The fact that Jesus never spoke out against owning other people as slaves seems to me to be worse than anything Lovecraft ever wrote. I’m sorry if my meaning eluded you in an attempt to find something to criticize.
As well, many Christians consider the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God, and the lack of condemnation, and indeed support, for slavery in the Bible was considered by many to be justification for the African slave trade. Hence my comment.
Perhaps you should learn a bit of history before being so rude and condescending.
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