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Something Wicked This Way Comes
What to do when you discover that your favorite author (or comedian, or filmmaker, or actor) is a bigot? For some, it inspires a total rejection of the artist, whose work becomes suddenly intolerable. Others reassess their taste, wondering how they were ever able to enjoy a novel with pedophilia at its center, or the stand-up routine filled with misogyny. Still others try to quarantine the art from the artist, as if one might be spared the contagion of the other. And for some — like the horror writer Victor LaValle, who discovered his childhood hero H. P. Lovecraft to be a racist — it’s a long process of soul-searching that ends in compromise.
In his introduction to the second volume of THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT (Liveright, 512 pp., $39.95), which was edited by Leslie S. Klinger, LaValle — an award-winning African-American novelist and critic — writes that he discovered Lovecraft at the age of 10 and was “here for all of it: the high anxiety, waves of madness and the terror of human insignificance.” Then, at 15, he began to understand the underlying racial prejudices in the stories, and rejected Lovecraft entirely. Eventually he came to see that there is no way to cut a figure like Lovecraft — one of the founders of American horror, whose work has inspired generations of writers — out of his life. “You can love something, love someone,” LaValle writes, “and criticize them. That’s called maturity.”
I came to Lovecraft in my late teens when a friend gave me a copy of “At the Mountains of Madness,” the story of a geologist whose explorations of Antarctica uncover the remnants of ancient alien life-forms. I didn’t feel an emotional connection to Lovecraft the way LaValle did as a kid, but the apprentice writer in me was thrilled by his inventiveness and a certain voracity of the imagination that shaped everything — history, myth, superstition, reality, fiction, science, everything — to suit his vision. I loved his use of the uncanny. I loved his ability to create a sense of cosmic dread. Then, like now, I found parts of Lovecraft’s work bewildering, so layered in florid prose that I would return to Poe as if to a lifeboat, thankful for his solidity.
If I’d had Leslie S. Klinger as my guide, I would have been better equipped to navigate the peculiarities of the Lovecraftian universe. Klinger’s depth of knowledge about the world Lovecraft inhabited, and his ability to tease out shades of Lovecraft’s personal experiences in the stories, make this volume the most exciting and definitive collection of Lovecraft’s work out there. With hundreds of annotations and photographs, the more obscure elements of Lovecraft’s stories are explained, as are the experiences that may have contributed to Lovecraft’s racism, misogyny and generally misanthropic worldview. LaValle’s introduction, and Klinger’s annotations, give such a full picture of Lovecraft that readers can make their own decisions about whether to stick around and read his work, or turn elsewhere. For me, it is worth taking LaValle’s approach. Lovecraft is deeply flawed, and his stories cannot be read without coming to terms with that. Yet there is ample reward in doing so.
Lovecraft lived most of his life in Providence, R.I., but for a short time he resided in Brooklyn. He didn’t like the city much, and soon moved back to Providence, but the experience inspired him to write the story “He,” a surreal tale about a man marooned in a strange city grappling with his sense of dislocation. One night the man meets a necromancer who leads him to a hidden house in Greenwich Village, where he reveals a terrible vision: “I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage — foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected by a normal mind. … The Hudson glinted wickedly and in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies.” The necromancer has the ability to break “the sanctity of things as great as space and time,” revealing earth before human contamination. Awed and terrified, the narrator asks him how far in time he can see, and the old man shows him a sky “verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” Seeing into the past and future only underscores human irrelevance in the larger scope of nature. Our impact on the landscape is momentary. Earth existed without us and will exist after our extinction. It is Lovecraft’s great insight: The ultimate horror is not death, but irrelevance.
One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Under the Pyramids,” published in Weird Tales magazine in 1924. Hoping to boost readership, the editor of Weird Tales commissioned Lovecraft to write an account of the famous escape artist Harry Houdini’s true adventure in Egypt. Houdini dictated the story to Lovecraft, who realized it was fantasy and asked permission to take creative license. The result is pure Lovecraft, a terrifying descent into a mythological dreamworld that has the hallucinatory power of an ancient tribal ritual.
Narrating in first person as Houdini, Lovecraft tells the tale of a journey to Egypt, where he is abducted by a group of Bedouins at the Sphinx of Giza, tied up and thrown into “a narrow hewn well,” falling through “solid rock” in an “endless descent and swinging flight through goblin space.” When the length of the rope is exhausted, Houdini finds himself trapped in a secret cavern below the Sphinx, where strange creatures perform a ceremony to ancient gods, evoking “a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors.” This variety of universal terror — not for the self, per se, but for the whole of our kind in the face of uncertainty — is what makes Lovecraft unique. No other writer can make you afraid for your species quite like Lovecraft.
If these 25 stories leave you wanting more Lovecraft, I recommend you go back to the wonderful (and, at 928 pages, exhaustive) first volume of “The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft,” published in 2014, which was also edited by Klinger. It contains some of Lovecraft’s most beloved fictions: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Klinger’s foreword elaborates upon Lovecraft’s life — he mastered the alphabet at age 2 and was writing poetry by age 7 — but also sketches the literary context from which Lovecraft emerged, his influences, and the broad history of horror and weird fiction that shaped him.
I went back and reread that first Lovecraft novella from my teens, “At the Mountains of Madness,” and found it even more disturbing than the first time around, mostly because I realized that Lovecraft is, in many ways, like one of the alien remnants calcified in the frozen mountains. We can dig him up and appreciate his gifts, but there is no changing the fact that he is a relic from another era, one that our civilization regards with wonder but suspicion.
I was elated when MONSTER, SHE WROTE: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction (Quirk Books, 352 pp., $19.99) arrived in my mailbox. It is a book I have been waiting to read for a long time: a reference that collects women writers of horror, speculative, Gothic and dark fiction together in one place. The editors, Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson, deserve a standing ovation. Writers such as Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson have long been recognized as shaping the horror genre, but there are many dozens of lesser-known women whose stories have been overlooked and forgotten. You will find them here.
Take Charlotte Riddell, for example, the author of over 50 novels and short stories that most of us have never read. According to Kröger and Anderson, her ghost stories form a “phantasmal paradigm shift” in the evolution of the genre. Before Riddell, ghosts were often seen as a “metaphorical mirror for the protagonist, reflecting what was already haunting the character,” like “the spirits that visit Ebenezer Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol’ to teach him an important lesson.” Riddell’s ghosts, however, have a life of their own — or, rather, a purpose of their own — outside of the main character, returning to earth to solve a crime, as in her story “Nut Bush Farm.” I can think of a number of contemporary novels that use this trope, yet Riddell has been forgotten. I’m excited to read her novellas “Fairy Water” and “An Uninhabited House,” released earlier this year by British Library Publishing.
Despite the difficulties of the past, Kröger and Anderson believe contemporary women are changing the game. Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, Margaret Atwood and Carmen Maria Machado, among others, are experimenting with the genre, carrying on its traditions while shaping it in their own image.
There is a moment in Marente de Moor’s addictive Gothic novel THE DUTCH MAIDEN (World Editions, 312 pp., paper, $17.99), translated by David Doherty, when Janna — who has just arrived in Germany from the Netherlands to train with an intriguing fencing master — loses her confidence. She stands before a mirror fencing “against my reflection” and notes that her “formidable opponent” makes her feel “uncertain, and uncertainty is a fatal flaw for a fencer.”
Despite this moment of self-doubt, Janna usually knows what she wants. She dreams of being a fencer as skilled as Helene Mayer, the controversial German who won a gold medal in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, who was forced to leave Europe in 1935 because she was Jewish, only to return at Hitler’s request to compete in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (where she won a silver medal and gave a Nazi salute). Janna’s teacher, with whom she is obsessed, is the cold, aristocratic Egon von Bötticher, a much older man who has a mysterious connection to her father. And while questions about the exact nature of her father’s relationship with von Bötticher propel one through the novel, it is Janna’s intense emotional world, the foreboding atmosphere of pre-World War II Germany and the richness of de Moor’s imagination that make “The Dutch Maiden” one of the most delicious novels I’ve read in ages.
Janna’s plight is that of Jane Eyre and the narrator of du Maurier’s “Rebecca.” She is a young woman who falls in love with an older man so damaged he cannot possibly be good for her. Not that first love is ever about what’s good for us. Often, it’s the dark, unknown dangers of adulthood that act as an aphrodisiac. In Janna, one feels how terrifying desire can be, especially when it expresses itself through violence.
Fencing and love. Battle and desire. The combination transforms Janna’s attempts at love into a match of skill, a game that leaves one bloody and scarred, giving the novel a cruel beauty. While the narrative drags a bit in stretches, I couldn’t put it down. Perhaps a good story can, like a love affair, be likened to swordplay: “A good fencing match has moments of stillness. … Without stillness, a duel descends into a blind scuffle that ends in slaughter.” A sentiment that seems apt for both love and battle.
The characters in Benjamin Percy’s new collection, SUICIDE WOODS (Graywolf, 216 pp., paper, $16), are built around landscape the way roses build themselves around a trellis. They are twisted and thorny and beautiful, and wholly dependent upon that which holds them. A therapy group finds solace and horror in a forest of moss-furred branches; a child’s essence changes in an icy pond — nature shapes and destroys Percy’s characters. One feels, in reading “Suicide Woods,” that people are only as knowable as their habitat.
The collection opens with “The Cold Boy,” in which a child falls into a winter pond, “his tiny body floating there, turning around and around” under a sheet of ice. His uncle, a taxidermist, finds him and is sure he’s dead. But when he pulls the body out of the pond, his nephew is alive, only utterly changed. The transformation is disturbing and unforgettable, as are the descriptions of the Minnesota freeze that works its way into the boy.
A small masterpiece, the eponymous story “Suicide Woods” revolves around a suicide therapy group whose leader, an aging hipster called Mr. Engel, uses the “400 acres of firs and hemlocks and cedars” known as “the suicide woods” to soothe the emotional wounds of his fragile charges. Everyone in the group has attempted suicide at least once, and its numbers fluctuate because members are in rehab or the hospital or have died. The story is emotionally riveting, both in its subject matter and its delivery, and while it is an eminently modern tale, with its references to SSRIs and YouTube, the ending, with its nod to Poe, will leave you with a deep sensation of panic and dread.
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