Tales

"I know that for some people Lovecraft might be scarier for his racism. Some people have even argued that his racist discourse is one of the things that filters through the way he writes about the alien Other. These are very valid points, and certainly explain his complex reception, with his profile gradually rising from obscurity to recognition and then to disdain. Ultimately, the message in his stories is that the human does not matter. Lovecraft’s is a very cosmic, materialist way of understanding the world. I like to think of him as a ‘pulp’ modernist. His stories are very much about the difficulty that we have, whether it is linguistic or perceptual, to really understand or capture anything outside of what we know through our senses. His characters go mad or struggle to convey their fear. They can only ever offer partial explanations or descriptions. That’s another reason why I think it’s so hard to adapt Lovecraft stories into films. Much of the fear in his writing comes from describing things obliquely, through parallels, through things that look like other things. His way of writing is cumulative and works in crescendo. I think the closest writer to him is probably Poe. For some people, his writing is really grating—they find it to be purple prose. There are too many ‘eldritches’ and ‘hideous stenches.’ For me, his writing really creates tension and shock. I think Lovecraft was a master of suspense, among other things His view is not necessarily a popular or a widely shared one. And when you drill down, it can be quite horrifying if you believe in the inherent good and purpose of humanity. The idea is that we’re just some speck in the universe that doesn’t matter. You can look at everything we’ve ever done and admire our technology and capacity to adapt, but in the long history of the cosmos we’re just a small evolutionary accident that will eventually die out. Lovecraft was an atheist and ahead of his time in his thinking. The best way I can visualise his viewpoint is that 1968 picture, ‘Earthrise,’ that was taken from lunar orbit. Our planet looks so vulnerable, seen from space. I think this was the first time in history when we looked back at ourselves and truly realised that our little planet is adrift in the void. This is, I think, Lovecraft’s vision of humanity and what makes his writing so frightening. For some people, it really works; others won’t be able to get past what they will perceive as misanthropy. The more physical ones are great amalgams of animals and substances that don’t belong together. There are hints of an octopus here, an insectoid touch there. They’re always sums of parts that defy our sense of perspective and order. And then, there’s the issue of not being able to describe them. I’ve always found the specifics of Lovecraft’s mythological creatures less interesting than the reactions his characters have to them. One of the gods in Lovecraft, Azathoth, is meant to be the god of primordial chaos. It’s described as an “amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”. It’s a very suggestive idea, almost expressionistic or surreal, rather than concrete. “The more physical creatures are great amalgams of animals and substances that don’t belong together. There are hints of an octopus here, an insectoid touch there.” Unlike J.R.R. Tolkien , Lovecraft is not interested in providing a complex chronology, or in writing a history of how his deities came to be. He is a lot more interested in the incapacity of the human mind to conceive of the upending of all the scientific laws that govern our experience of the world. Ultimately, one must look away for fear of losing one’s sanity or grasp on reality. It’s a very powerful concept, and one that has been endlessly imitated. It probably does. There’s no doubt, for example, that an intrinsic fear of miscegenation is something that features strongly throughout his writing. I think you can look at it two ways. You can say that the racist discourse leads to some powerful writing about the incomprehensibility of the Other (i.e., that Lovecraft’s racism allowed him to write about this experiential gap in a way that transcended race and led to great musings about cosmic indifference), or you could say that it underpins his fiction in a non-productive way that simply replicates patterns of exclusion and marginalisation. I would say that both readings have some value. There must be something there that can be recuperated, because there are contemporary writers who are rewriting Lovecraft from very interesting and progressive angles. There’s Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom , which rethinks ‘The Horror at Red Hook,’ and there’s also Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country , which is about to come out as a TV series, produced by Jordan Peele. In the latter, the processes of alien ‘Othering’ mediate the profound racism of 1950s Jim Crow America. The novel is necessarily a critique of Lovecraft—for the black protagonists, the white policemen are scarier than whatever weird creature might be roaming the forests—but it also draws on the power of arcane magic and the metaphysical quandaries so prevalent in his writing."