A re-imagining of the life and death of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft
Penelope Love, epigraph of “Turn Out The Light” in She Walks In Shadows 15
H. P. Lovecraft’s mother is part of the myth. Like Igraine, who bore the boy that would grow up to be King Arthur, she plays her essential role—but there are relatively few stories of her. Unlike Lovecraft’s thousands of letters, little of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft survives, and she was not treated kindly by biographers. Art and fiction have seldom been more beneficent.
The Mythos has permeated H. P. Lovecraft’s biography to such an extent that in fiction it bleeds out into everything else. His conception, birth, upbringing, adolescence, and early adulthood—all aspects of his life that Susie played an active part in—have been re-cast by authors as supernatural terrors that cast a long shadow on the impressionable young lad, and inspired what he wrote. As if a writer of horror could not simply put their imagination to work. That there had to be some reality behind it.
Susie’s part in these little reality plays is often unpleasant. When they re-tell the story of the hallucinations her husband Winfield S. Lovecraft supposedly suffered before he was put away in a sanitarium, such as “Recognition” by Alan Moore, her fictional alter-ego is raped. She may go mad and die insane in the same sanitarium after reading the Necronomicon, as in Lovecraft by Hans Rodionoff, Keith Griffen, and Enrique Breccia. What little facts we have tend to mingle with the distorted ideas of biographies, and then fantasy makes of Susie Lovecraft a caricature, more false face than real.
There is, often enough, very little sympathy for a single mother left alone to raise her son. Even before the shoggoths are brought into the business.
So when a reader turns the page and begins to read Penelope Love’s “Turn Out The Light,” the thing that jumps off the page immediately is empathy. It is not the most accurate, or even the most sympathetic, portrayal of Susie Lovecraft to be published. There is nothing in the limited biographical information we have to suggest that Susie did or thought some of the things that Love suggests she may have, in this story. For example:
In her traveling salesman husband’s absence—philanderer, snob, spineless, whore—her father had spoiled his grandson, told him stories, given the boy the black cat, then given it such a vulgar name.
She had never liked that cat. The one blessing out of all that loss was that the rooming house would not let them keep it. She arranged for it to be drowned, although she told her son it ran off.
Penelope Love, “Turn Out The Light” in She Walks In Shadows 17
This is pure invention. We don’t know what Susie actually thought of Lovecraft’s pet cat with the unfortunate name, there’s no indication she was behind it’s disappearance. Yet that is rather the point: in the absence of hard data, Penelope Love has tried to get inside Susie’s head, to provide a point of view for her. It may not be entirely accurate (her brother Edwin Phillips and sister Annie Gamwell are not mentioned at all), but it isn’t just regurgitating the same old stories either.
Even so, there are parallels between “Turn Out The Light” and works like “Night-Gaunts” (2017) by Joyce Carol Oates. Natural parallels because they are, in a real sense, both working from the same material in similar lines of thought. Retreading the grounds of Lovecraft’s childhood, his fiction; drawing lines and linkages between later works and earlier events and persons. Creating variations on the same myth, like villages in Greece that each have slightly different stories of Herakles. Love’s version of events is a little more subtle, a little less overtly fantastic, and her depiction of Susie Lovecraft a bit more real, though nowhere as sympathetic as “Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” (2017) by Lucy Sussex.
Yet Susie Lovecraft could use a little empathy. She may have born H. P. Lovecraft into the world, but she died just as he began to flower with his stories of the Dreamlands and Randolph Carter, but before Weird Tales came into being. “Turn Out The Light” captures some of the tragedy that is often unspoken about Susie’s relationship with her son. The reason why he did not visit her at the hospital during her last illness is one of those mysteries that will never be revealed, as Lovecraft did not write of such a personal matter, yet it evokes pathos when she begs him not to let them turn out the light…and there is one more thing.
“If I should die, please mark the symbols on the front steps here as you did for your grandfather—and the cat. I know it is nonsense. Just do this for me, please. I would like to think that I could follow the straight line between the stars and come back.”
Penelope Love, “Turn Out The Light” in She Walks In Shadows 26
Some people find immortality of a sorts through their children. Others, through their works. Their name and memory is kept alive. Susie Lovecraft is remembered today through her son, and a tenuous, ghostly, and distorted as that memory may be through the lens of biographers and the liberties of writers and artists—H. P. Lovecraft has secured at least that much for her. With her paintings lost, and no heirs to her body, works like this are the only offerings likely to be made to her memory, to keep it evergreen and safe from final oblivion.
“Turn Out The Light” by Penelope Love was first published in She Walks In Shadows (2015). It has not been republished, except in the paperback editions of that book.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 