Fantastic Stories of the Imagination #220. Adam-Troy Castro

in my minds eye. He wasn’t an easy read. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for the modern reader, Lovecraft can be a tough row to hoe. Even older fans, used to the workman-like transparent prose, a la Asimov, Clarke, or Heinlein, were bogged down in the adjective-laden, polysyllabic ululating weirdness of Lovecraft. But the feeling of having read him was worth it. Lovecraft makes you feel weird, deep down in your bones.

      Rereading At the Mountains of Madness recently, after listening to a National Public Radio program on the allure of the arctic in the time before we’d mapped every square inch of the globe by satellite, I was transfixed by a line which leapt off the page to smack me squarely between the eyes.

       “South Station Under — Washington Under — Park Street Under — Kendall — Central — Harvard” The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see — for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned — was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform — the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.

      I live a quarter mile from Central Square, the Red-line station mentioned here. Moving from a small suburban hometown to a major metro region, I always found the subway experience transformative, definitive. I loved it. Lovecraft, however, did not. In a recent essay, China Mieville suggests that the urgency of the cosmic horror of Mountains derives from HPL’s discomfort in the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic NYC subway system. The train-like, penile battering ram of disgusting amorphous protoplasm is a metaphor for race-mixing, miscegenation.

      I know. Ick.

      Which brings us to the greater evil of HP Lovecraft; his deeply ingrained racism, sexism, and anti-semitism. Others have written at length on Lovecraft’s deficiencies; I can’t hope to scratch the surface of that topic here.

      Academia now wrestles with how to teach Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and its repeated use of the N-word, even though Samuel Clemens was progressive for his time and in generally regarded as a decent fellow. How much harder it is to read the work of a man who wrote a poem titled “the n-word.” —which is exactly as bad as you might fear it would be. (The poem can be read at Nnedi Okorafor, PhD.)

      Lovecraft is about fear, and his fears are honestly displayed, and racism is a kind of fear, like homophobia, a fear of the other. Lovecraft is a man of his time and place, and a man out of place, appalled by his time, wishing himself somewhere, somewhen else, but knowing, in his heart of hearts, that there is no escape from the modern. His fears tell us more about his time, about our genre’s racist underbelly, than any amount of academic reflection.

      Some biographers find evidence of Lovecraft’s moderating his racist and anti-semetic views over time, but others don’t. In general, I think our community of readers and scholars do a good job of not whitewashing the work or the man, or minimizing the deeply troubling stuff embedded in the Mythos, ineluctably, like flies in amber.

      Like DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film which singlehandedly creates much of the vernacular of modern film (moving camera shots, for example; Griffith movies looked like filmed stage plays) Lovecraft sits near the beginning of three genres, squat, ugly, glorious and immovable. You can’t study film history without watching Birth of a Nation, whose other title, by the way, is The Klansman.

      In the same way, one can’t fully understand genre fiction without reading Lovecraft.

      I had a great professor in college, who ranted at us on the value of a liberal arts education; he showed us famous works of art and the various take-offs on them in novels, film, music, cartoons, editorial illustrations; he discussed recurring Jungian archetypes in a lecture which blew my mind wide open. I’d never noticed, somehow, that Superman was also Moses, was also Romulus and Remus; that Forbidden Planet was Shakespeare’s The Tempest or that The Stars my Destination was The Count of Monte Cristo.

      My professor said that you could ignore the classics, you could ignore roots culture, but the culture wouldn’t ignore you; you would be manipulated by these images and stories, recycled endlessly, through advertising and other derivative works behind a thousand different masks.

      You owed it to yourself to know something of the original. To be educated was to see a thing completely; to dig into its roots, to get to the bottom of things. I don’t think everyone has to read everything by HP Lovecraft; but I do think there’s a lot to be gained in slipping, if only briefly, into his astonishingly fearful mind. A good place to start is Call of Cthulu, a short story. Afterwards you can say, in all honesty, that you’ve been there, done that, and have the t-shirt.

      Wilder books sells the complete works of HP Lovecraft in various ebook editions, click here to see the catalog of titles. Buying Wilder books helps support Fantastic Stories.

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      Jay O’Connell reads and writes and makes things in Cambridge, MA. His fiction reappeared after two decades of ominous silence in 2012 in the first Fantastic Stories of the Imagination Anthology, and he is now publishing regularly in Asimov’s. His first story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction will be on the stands in September 2014, as will his first story in Interzone.