by Paula Guran
WHEN: MERELY A MAN OF HIS TIMES?
We also must acknowledge how H. P. Lovecraft’s personal beliefs tie in to his work. Lovecraft – as evidenced in his fiction, poetry, essays, and letters – was racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. He may not have hated women (misogyny), but he does seem to have feared them (gynophobia). His abhorrence of sexuality and physicality went beyond the Puritanical.
The author’s prejudices have often been brushed aside as “typical” for a man of his era. Yes, Lovecraft lived an age when racism was more overt and racial segregation was the law, but Lovecraft’s prejudice seems, at the very least, somewhat more pronounced than many of his contemporaries.
To again quote Miéville (from published correspondence):
[The]depth and viciousness of Lovecraft’s racism is known to me . . . It goes further, in my opinion, than “merely” being a racist – I follow Michel Houellebecq (in this and in no other arena!) [Note: Houellebecq is the author of H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, 2005]in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a “poetic trance.” He was a bilious anti-Semite (though one who married a Jew, because, if you please, he granted that she was “assimilated”), and if you read stories like “The Horror at Red Hook,” the bile you will see towards people of color, of all kinds (with particular sneering contempt for African-Americans unless they were suitably Polite and therefore were patricianly granted the soubriquet “Negro”) and the mixed communities of New York and, above all . . . “miscegenation” are extended and toxic.
Bigotry is part of Lovecraft’s fiction. Miscegenation, racial impurity, ethnic xenophobia, “mental, moral and physical degeneration” due to inbreeding, interbreeding with non-human creatures – spawn of degenerate women who consorted with the abhorrent – these were all integral to the fiction Lovecraft produced. Yes, we must consider the context: Lovecraft lived during what was probably the nadir of race relations and height of white supremacy in the US. But whether these were prevalent views of his day is beside the point: H. P. Lovecraft chose to make them horrors to be feared in his fiction, to alarm and distress the primarily male, supposedly “superior” possessors of light-skinned Nordic genes. One must assume Lovecraft never considered anyone else as a potential reader.
Just because we recognize Lovecraft’s racism does not mean we must deny his influence or reject his work, but we must acknowledge and condemn his bigotry. In fact, to be cognizant of his prejudices is necessary to understand his fiction.
Elizabeth Bear – an author who has written a number of New Lovecraftian gems and feels Lovecraft’s views are “revolting” – reminds us: “Authors are read, beloved, and remembered, not for what they do wrong, but for what they do right, and what Lovecraft does right is so incredibly effective. He’s a master of mood, of sweeping blasted vistas of despair and the bone-soaking cold of space. He has at his command a worldview that the average human being, drunk on our own specieswide egocentrism, finds compelling for its sheer contrariness.”
WHAT: NEW LOVECRAFTIAN
What I term “New Lovecraftian” fiction seldom attempts (although it does occasionally) to emulate Lovecraft’s writing style – a style that’s faults are, admittedly, many. Written with a fresh appreciation of Lovecraft’s universe, its writers do not imitate; they reimagine, reenergize, renew, re-set, respond to, and make Lovecraftian concepts relevant for today.
New Lovecraftian fiction sometimes simply has fun with what are now well-established genre themes. Authors often intentionally subvert Lovecraft’s bigotry while still paying tribute to his imagination. New Lovecraftians frequently take Lovecraft’s view of fragile humans alone in a vast uncaring cosmos where neither a good god nor an evil devil exist, let alone are concerned with them, and devise highly effective modern fiction. But there are other themes to choose from as well.
You’ll find a variety of Lovecraftian inspiration here. But you need not take that from me: each story in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu is prefaced with an authorial explanation of their tale’s Lovecraftian inspiration.
WHERE CAN YOU FIND THIS STUFF?
Here, of course. But elsewhere, too. (I’ve compiled two volumes of reprints of twenty-first-century New Lovecraftian fiction myself.) There are so many fine examples of both fairly recent short stories and novels, they are far too numerous to mention . . . both with and without “Cthulhu” in the title.
While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.
– H. P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” (1937)
Persistently,
Paula Guran
Summer Solstice 2015
“If we pare back Lovecraft’s stories,” notes Lisa L. Hannett, “pruning the dense prose, tossing out the objectionable elements, what we’re left with are the tantalizing bits: the sea and the stars, the greatest heights and depths of this world of ours. ‘In Syllables of Elder Seas’ explores our tiny, cramped place within the cosmos, and our inability to ever really get out. And on each page – of this piece, and also Lovecraft’s fiction more broadly – there’s the sense that HPL himself is hunkered down beside us, pressed small by the weight of so many limitations.”
Hannett has had over sixty short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published by CZP in 2015.
In Syllables of Elder Seas
Lisa L. Hannett
——
To pass the wet hours crammed in his bottle, Aitch counts cylinders.
Tonight, only those he can actually see get tallied: not the darkened hurricane lamp dangling on its chain, not the perforated lid screwed tight on his jar. With some effort Aitch can tilt his head back, turn it side to side, but down is impossible with bent knees wedged under his chin. No points for his short thighs, his shorter shins, his cramped toes. He looks forward, left, right. Starts with what’s closest. An easy ten: thin shadow fingers lifted out of the brine. Bobbing on the breath-rippled solution is another: a sealed, thumb-length leather tube, strung from a cord around his neck. Aitch worries the pouch in his cold grip, its familiar squish comforting. The caul that had helmeted him at birth is preserved inside – to protect him, Mother had promised, from drowning.
To the left of his container, moonglow floats in from the room’s ocean-side porthole – the round window itself too high to view – illuminating a bank of bookcases lining the curved walls. On the floor, six glass vessels are now limned silver-blue: replicas in everything but size, perfect cylinders with threaded brass caps. Each slightly bigger than its predecessor, the largest slightly smaller than the one in which Aitch is currently squeezed. Seven in all.
Seven he’s counted a hundred, hundred times.
Seven months, or more, in each – he’s sure, he remembers – and he’s seven years old, at least.
The eighth will no doubt be coming soon, the rate he’s growing.
On the shelves, a regiment of forty-six candles are snuffed, stiff wax digits raised against shushing lips. He double-checks the number, though he played this game yesterday, and the day before that; the amount hasn’t changed since. The Aunts are frugal with supplies, stingy with any light but the
one beacon they shine every night out to sea.
Sometimes Aitch adds that bright beam to his total.
Always, he includes the lighthouse.
He fidgets, as much as possible, a squirming heave in his guts, imagining the view from the Aunts’ lantern room above. The sheer drop from storm panes to ocean. The rocks below, jagged fangs primed to impale. The water’s maw stretching wide, frothing and lashing. Basalt waves gnawing the headland. Salt talons steadily gouging the cliffs, grabbing, yanking . . .
It’s hungry, he remembers saying, staring at the roiling expanse between the lighthouse and reef. Unblinking. Soon after, the Aunts stopped bringing him upstairs. It wants to swallow us.
Don’t be ridiculous, they’d answered, referring to charts on a counter girding the great spinning lamp, marking currents and tides. Eyes filled with stars and swells, ever vigilant. It’s bland as milk out there. Linensmooth sailing. Every seafarer’s delight.
Aitch didn’t think so, but the Aunts still hush him whenever he mentions it. They see calm where he sees squalls. Fair winds instead of hurricanes. Sweet gulls in place of carrion crows. When he’s unbottled and playing in his small chamber, they say he’s at work. Now his tools are scattered on the bare wood floor, next to the washstand: four sticks of brown Conté and nine violet pastels to replace the set he’s scribbled to stubs. These are toys, he tells them, not tools.
It’s like they’re not even listening.
When he draws his dreams, the Aunts interpret squares from his circles. Arrows and directions from houses. Submarines, they say, not the intended sharks. Chevrons and triangles and rampant squiggles – the language is his, he knows its true meaning, but the Aunts read into it whatever they want.
Quietly, Aitch wonders when Mother and Father will come to collect him.
Soon, the Aunts once assured him. Soon enough.
So many cylinders later, he has stopped asking.
Behind him, the door opens. Weird shadows stretch across the floor; yellow light catches in Aitch’s bottle, blinding. Bright semi-circles precede two identical women, tall and black as wicks. They totter in tight-buttoned boots, lanterns balanced on dull pewter salvers. Stovepipe hats erect on slicked heads. Ankle-length skirts binding legs close, blouses buttoned to the jaw. Aitch squints and blinks, following their progression. At a little table beside the narrow cot he rarely sleeps in, they stop and set down their trays.
“What a treat we have for you,” says the one on the left. Seventy? Seventy-one? Aitch has lost count, as he does every night at this point. Perhaps she’s cylinder seventy-two?
“A real treat,” agrees maybe-seventy-three. She retrieves a canteen from the bedside, pulls the cork, then thunks it down on Aitch’s lid. A few seconds later, a long straw scrapes through a puncture overhead; the Aunt pushes it, scratching his temple and cheek, down to his mouth. He drinks greedily, though the tea is weak and tastes of mud.
“Can I come out now?” Aitch asks, already knowing the answer. It hasn’t been long enough, they’ll say, only a few days. “Please?”
“Be good.”
“A few minor aches now for an eternity of joy.”
Through the holes, the women slip eight, nine, ten tiny pellets (eighty-one? eighty-two? eighty-four?) and wait for Aitch to consume them. The things bloat almost instantly. Yesterday, it was bloodworm capsules. The day before, it was kelp and compressed carrot. Other times, squid meal. Chaff and shrimp. The Aunts’ idea of delicious.
Despite himself, Aitch submerges as far as he can and begins to eat the sodden pills. Mid-chew, he presses his face to the glass. Distorts his features. Bugs his eyes. Squashes his nose until snot oozes. Scrunches his brow. Splays hands beside his cheeks and stretches his tongue until it hurts. Gobbets tumble from his mouth, plopping into the brine. If he is hideous, he thinks, the Aunts will no doubt see beauty. Maybe he’ll even earn a laugh, or a smile.
The Aunts watch and wait, and do not laugh.
They never tell him he’s special, the way he’s sure, he remembers, Mother and Father did. They never give him red wine in etched crystal goblets. They never bundle him into handsome four-in-hands, never let jolly horses clip-clop him along to the mayor’s very own private soirées. They never dress him in long satin robes, robes that match theirs, robes that shimmer like precious gems under starlight. They never sing nor dance around him on the shoreline. They never tell him tales, drunk on midnight and comets, of frolicking in a May Eve sea.
Now that Mother and Father are many months and many train rides away, Aitch recalls them through the green-tinted glass of his container. Features warped, wide-set eyes with no lids, pinprick nostrils, drooped and toothless mouths . . . Not quite what they had been, what they are. But he still feels the gentle trace of Mother’s fingertip along his caul scars. The feathered breeze of her breath as she kissed the stripes and ridges along his hairline, the raised dots beside his ears. The salmon-sharp tang of her skin.
We won’t be long after you, Father had said, obviously using the Aunts’ definition of soon.
What skies were above when you were born, Mother had said, voice thick with pride. Such old constellations! Such perfect alignments.
Draping the lucky talisman over his head, she’d promised he wouldn’t drown.
You are so special, she’d said, then sent him away. You are so special, Aitch.
No, he thinks, chill water splashing as he shakes, realigning his thoughts. No, she didn’t call him by letter. That’s his guardians’ method of address. Aitch. The initial a reflection of distance, a refusal of intimacy. No names, they’d said. They were the Aunts; he was barely a fragment of himself, a snippet of prayer uttered in syllables, sputters and remote stops. Nonsense jumbled together, he thinks. Nonsense kept apart.
Aitch had been complete with Mother and Father. He had made sense.
He’s sure he remembers what that was like.
Underwater, Aitch’s heart beats loud, a deep thrum-thrumming to accompany the chanting.
Satisfied that he’d eaten, the Aunts had withdrawn measuring tapes from their skirt pockets, held them up against the tank. Muttering, they’d made notes, given instructions, the routine now stale as the stench of his fish breath. Stretch, stretch child, extend that spine; Aitch had straightened until crown scraped lid, cropped blond hair poking through perforations. Lower those shoulders. Expose that neck. Show us those hands. Turn – painfully – this way and that.
Once they’d finished, pencils and implements and lamps and stern heels retreated. Within minutes, the air in Aitch’s quarters thickens with a familiar hypnotic drone. Unintelligible words repeat from above and, it seems, from below. The endless chorus building, echoing, spinning out of the lighthouse while he weeps, cramped and shivering. Marinating in dark noise.
He begins to nod. Skull clunks against glass; he wilts forward, then clunks back again. Cold leaches, lulls. Dreams beckon him down, down, further down. Ancient fishhook voices snag Aitch’s untethered, innermost self and jerk it from his fragile, prune-skinned shell. They haul so quickly he can’t resist the vertiginous whoosh. Bubbles scream past his ears; he plummets into a realm of coral-toothed beasts, razor-edged fins, pearl-eyed hunters that track by vibration, by liquid scent. Powerless, he is zipped around streets paved with sailors’ bones. Weed-strewn buildings, barnacled castles, fossilized carcasses. Down, down into caverns crawling with neon cilia, through steam-spewing pipes, along an eel-path, a sculpin-trench, a giant isopod ravine. Further down, the canyon gaping before him, night after night, seemingly boundless, and yet pressure builds as he draws closer, lung-crushing, bone-breaking pressure, he can’t swim, he can’t move, he is confined in infinite space, he is suppressed, held under, release me, suffocating, he needs to break free . . .
The bottle rattles as Aitch jolts awake. Pulse choking, whole body trembling. Runny nose dangerously close to the brine.
I won’t drown, he thinks, necklace seized in fist, head cocked. The chant is still tumbling from verse to v
erse, the Aunts’ voices fervent but steady. Lately, they’ve kept him jarred for longer and longer, until he is grey and blue, the pinkie between his legs completely retracted. Not a peachy little boy anymore, not a good boy. A salamander. A jelly-limbed axolotl. A creature designed to crawl.
He waits, listens.
The song’s crescendo is hours off yet.
Plenty of time, Aitch thinks, feeling numbly overhead for the hole he’s worked at for months, the one widened with leather-sheathed determination. There. He grins, shoves his baby finger up, wriggles it through to the first knuckle, hooks, and pushes.
Metal screeches against glass as, slowly, the jar’s lid turns.
* * *
He’s learned not to climb too soon after flopping onto the floor.
It takes some maneuvering, just sliding out, placing the lid silently; then the monumental effort of getting up. Bending at the waist. Trying not to slip, water sluicing down his arms, his naked gooseflesh. Waiting for the blood to rush, the spots in his vision to clear. The pins and needles in his rump, legs, and feet to stop stabbing. The burning ache in his joints to ease. A puddle dries around him as Aitch stretches tip to toe, luxuriating in the sensation of being long.
Time, however, is short.
When it’s safe – raw feeling returned, limbs pliable, balance more or less restored – he creeps across the room to collect his crayons and a sheaf of blank paper. He stops frequently to catch his breath. To listen. Through the roar and hiss of nausea, he hears the Aunts singing, their rhythms redoubled in the wind outside.