Make Lovecraft Not Warcraft

[rynling]

It’s very cool to have gotten a Lovecraft pastiche accepted for publication (fingers crossed). When it (hopefully) comes out, it will be the third Lovecraft story I’ve published in a fiction magazine.

The truth is that I do in fact admire Lovecraft, but I wouldn’t consider myself a fan. Rather, I spent a formative part of my childhood in a small town in the Deep South whose public library was severely limited by budget constraints. The only thing remotely close to fantasy fiction they had on the shelves was Stephen King, the lone second volume of Lord of the Rings, and HP Lovecraft.

I didn’t really have the cultural context to understand Stephen King, and I wouldn’t recommend The Two Towers as a good place to start reading Tolkien. Lovecraft grabbed me, though. Even as a kid, I understood the xenophobia expressed in Lovecraft’s stories. Believe me, I understood all too well. Still, I guess I was young enough that it wasn’t a dealbreaker, especially since there was nothing else to read during the summer where I practically lived at this shitty little library.

I had more resources (and sporadic access to the internet) the following year, after I got accepted into an international school in Atlanta and began to read more widely. But Lovecraft stuck with me, and a small but significant goal of my writing now is to try to capture and explain why that is.

TLDR: Mostly it’s the gay. I don’t know if you knew this, but Lovecraft is extremely queer.

I sincerely believe that people should write whatever they want, but a part of me still worries that I’m going to be judged for aligning myself with the work of such a problematic author.

The truth remains, though, that these Lovecraft stories only occupy a small closet in the house I’m trying to build with my writing. What I’d want to say to anyone who judges me is not to be like the small rural library that only had room for Stephen King and HP Lovecraft, but to create space for original work that does more than facilitate a feedback loop of preset responses.

Comments

[raisedbymoogles]

tbh at this point I feel like the cultural expectation that you have to make a big show of apologizing for liking Lovecraft as a condition of being 'allowed' to take inspiration from him is a) useless at best and counterproductive at worst, and b) really annoying. We all know about the racism, guys, it's been categorized/dissected/memed to death at this point, also he's been dead for a hundred years. This isn't a JKR situation, it's fine to play in the cosmic horror sandbox he contributed a lot of sand to.

(Also he repented of (some of) his racism later in life. I feel like he should get some credit for that.)

(Also also I have never heard Lovecraft and queer in the same sentence before, pls elaborate?)

[rynling]

You’re right, I definitely think it’s important that Lovecraft recanted all the toxic shit he wrote when he was a sheltered teenager (who was 100% definitely on the autism spectrum) and surrounded by horrid wealthy New England white people. I’m not excusing the wretched garbage he wrote in some of his letters, but still – the connection between Lovecraft’s dipshit attempts at humor when he was a (relative) kid and the theme of “otherness” in his later fiction is a chapter-length essay, not a tweet.

In terms of “queerness,” haha well. Lovecraft sure is obsessed with lingering on the hands and fingers and mouths and lips and voices and handwriting of his male characters, most of whom he goes out of his way to describe as handsome. And once you start seeing this, it’s hard to unsee it, from handsome German submarine captains pursuing Greek gods to handsome Egyptian warriors binding Harry Houdini oh so tightly with coils of silky rope.

So in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, for example, the narrator spends a night at a hotel with no locks on the doors, and he’s pursued by a group of big strong men who are grunting and howling like animals as they do everything in their power to catch him in his bed. The narrator escapes his pursuers and attempts to flee the town, only to be confronted with a parade of big strong men in the night, their inhuman bodies glistening with sweat and saltwater. And then wouldn’t you know it, at the end of the story the narrator discovers he’s a fishman too, so he flees polite society, strips off his clothing, and jumps in the warm and waiting ocean to join his people. God bless.

There’s probably another chapter-length essay waiting to be written about how many of Lovecraft’s epistolary correspondents turned out to have a touch of the gay themselves, but like I said, I’m not a Lovecraft superfan. I'm just here for the monsters, and

[raisedbymoogles]

damn, the things I miss finding HPL hard to get through XD

[rynling]

In all fairness, he's very difficult to get through. I appreciate how Hidetaka Miyazaki (the director of Bloodborne) tried to read Lovecraft when he was younger, absolutely didn't get anything but the vibes, and then tried to recreate the experience of reading Lovecraft's prose in one of the most notoriously difficult games of the 2010s. Which is fair.