I speak from time to time of the machinery of stories. You’ve heard it. What I’ve been doing lately, however, is taking some stories and kicking them down the stairs, and listening to the sounds they make as they break.
Lovecraft has been on my mind lately. As a horror author, he is popularly famous, though never so much so he had, you know, cred in his own days that could compare to now. I do think that a lot of what makes his work popular now is its public domain nature and not for much of its own inherent quality. While i do think there are interesting things beating at the heart of his machinery, much of what was built around it was odious and crap.
Particularly, I’ve said in the past that what Lovecraft wrote about was what Lovecraft feared. He was terrified of a world where he, as a white dude, was not the most privileged thing in the world. Scared of immigrants not respecting his ways. Terrified of the ocean’s indifference. Much of the story of Lovecraft, then, is a story that we now should look at, in the terms and ideas of its monsters. Creatures that exist in a world not suited for us; creatures who are here, and older, and more powerful than we have ever been told we are.
I know, I know. I’m white. It’s more than that though.
Lovecraft regarded cultists who feared no god as terrifying. He believed in global, fearsome conspiracies of stabbed hands and blood libels. Monsters, in his worldview, were as much monsters because of what they forced upon you, the possibility that you could be a monster, or descended from a monster. Where you can be ‘born wrong’ and it won’t come out, won’t be evidenced until later in your life. Most fascinatingly to me, though, is this idea that he knew his precious fake-English sensibilities could be taken away from him. Lovecraft knew that at core, all of his ideals and reality were constructed. If he realised he was a fish-man, he reasoned, he would throw everything away and wholly embrace the fish-man self.
This is the fascinating strangeness to me of Lovecraft’s work. He stared great truths in the eye, and rather than spread his arms wide and revel in the freedom and bounty, blanched at what meaning he saw.