Guest Post – Page 3 – Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein

A Transmasculine Horror Writer Looks At Lovecraft
by Joe Koch

If we speculate that all horror is body horror—and we may because the emotional energy experienced interacting with horror arises physiologically in the body—cosmic horror seems to be the exception. Body horror and cosmic horror stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum, the former associated with violence and grossing out the reader in the most carnal way, and the latter concerned with the mental horror of existential dread and terrible awe. When my Yellow Mythos novella “The Wingspan of Severed Hands” was called “cosmic body horror” by beta readers, the label sounded like a conundrum. I’ve thought about the contrast since then, and I’d like to share my impression of what unites the personal and cosmic by digging into Lovecraft’s body horror from a transmasculine perspective.

The horror of cosmic horror arises from the realization that humanity is insignificant in the universe. In Lovecraft, we are like ants under the crushing feet of indifferent elder things that intersect with our world from other dimensions. The threat of cosmic horror comes from outside the body, outside the mind, and outside of the entire framework of quotidian reality. There’s comfort in cosmic horror: the fact that an outside realm exists might mean escape is possible from the confines of the physical world. For anyone ill at ease in their body, the horror of cosmic horror holds a convoluted sort of hope.

Lovecraft’s stories create a world of escape from everyday concerns. Politics, economic struggles, romance, or any significant emotion besides terror takes a back seat to the moment of horror which comes at the end of a systematic mental journey of denial, analysis, and skepticism. The body with its immediate needs and routine desires is almost completely erased in Lovecraft’s fiction, except when the body itself becomes the location of horror.

I’m intrigued by how often it does.

Despite pervasive problematic views that make his work very hard to stomach as a queer, feminist, transmasculine person, what interests me in revisiting Lovecraft today is the very present question of the body. He seems to struggle with it. A nagging tension exists between the dysphoric body horror of his “reversion to type” tales and the fantasies of protagonists who escape their bodies by dreams, drugs, and alien intervention; a divergence between Lovecraft’s claims of scientific rationality and the utterly irrational astral travels he portrays with the veracity of desire.

Body swapping between humans and even alien entities in Lovecraft tales typically comes from the character’s desire to go beyond a given body’s limitations: to perhaps travel in space, interact with alien or forbidden technologies, or achieve a kind of immortality. Gender swapping occurs in “The Thing on the Doorstep” when the occult practitioner Ephraim steals his daughter Asenath’s body before his death, leaving her to perish in his corpse. Because he believes he needs a male body to achieve mastery, he romances and marries an older man while in his daughter’s body to gain access to the intimacy required for another body swap. Asenath’s female body is murdered after the swap, and the husband stuck in her rotting female corpse slogs around with his mind still alive trying to warn the narrator. The female body expires in a soupy mess on the narrator’s doorstep, fulfilling the horror of the title.

Just to be clear, this is no transgender person’s fantasy.

The most queer thing about “The Thing on the Doorstep” is the way Lovecraft reveals the multiple levels of body swapping. The layers covering up Ephraim’s true identity, layers of a possession within a possession, a mask within a mask, are peeled away one by one as the narrator realizes afterwards who he has been interacting with. The process of removing mask after mask rings true to me as a person who has gone through the rather shocking growth process of coming out to myself and then to others.

Gender nonconformity is presented in the story as an aberration, a belief shared by many conservatives today. The narrator shows disapproval and disgust when the female body of Asenath exhibits behaviors Lovecraft associates with masculinity. This external point of view is fixated on the binary and dwells on an impression of wrongness, evoking the fear that if we feel out of sync internally, others will see the mismatch and despise us for it, a fear gender nonconforming people often face. Some trans people overcompensate by performing their assigned gender so expertly as a cover up that they go through phases of self doubt, feeling like an imposter. Lovecraft gives Ephraim a hateful degree of misogyny as motivation for body swapping, with no room in his rigid view for gender fluidity.

Misogyny is a typical misconception about transmasculine people and transgender men. Reactionaries even frame it as an accusation against us, as if hatred of women drives our desire for self-expression. Nothing could be further from the truth. Misogyny is not the same as gender dysphoria in my experience. I’m a feminist. I express this strongly in my fiction. Yet if I could snap my fingers and wake up in a more masculinebody, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Not out of hatred or disdain; it’s a much more personal and intimate desire for outward presentation to align with my internal reality and to fulfill childhood visions of self.

The common term for what drives us to change is gender euphoria. When we are addressed using correct names and pronouns, and when we see ourselves represented in the body and external world as we know ourselves in our minds, we experience gender euphoria. Our motivation is not hatred but joy. We simply want to feel at home in our bodies, which I think is a very reasonable human wish.

From reading Lovecraft, I have the impression he didn’t feel very much at home in his body. He missed school often and failed to graduate due to a nervous breakdown (I Am Providence 1.97-102, 126-128). He confessed to suicidal thoughts in his letters several times, most explicitly:

The method was the only trouble. I didn’t like messy exits, & dignified ones were hard to find. Really good poisons were hard to get—those in my chemical laboratory (I reëstablished this institution in the basement of the new place) were crude & painful. Bullets were spattery & unreliable. Hanging was ignominious. Daggers were messy unless one could arrange to open a wrist-vein in a bowl of warm water—& even that had its drawbacks despite good Roman precedent. Falls from a cliff were positively vulgar in view of the probable state of the remains. Well—what tempted me most was the warm, shallow, reed-grown Barrington River down the east shore of the bay. I used to go there on my bicycle & look speculatively at it. […] How easy it would be to wade out among the rushes & lie face down in the warm water till oblivion came. there would be a certain gurgling or choking unpleasantness at first—but it would soon be over. Then the long, peaceful night of non-existence….
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 4 Feb 1934, Letters to J. Vernon Shea et al. 222

He said that learning about human reproduction from a science book ended his interest in the subject of sex at an early age (“ I knew everything there is to be known about the anatomy and physiology of reproduction in both sexes before I was eight years old” Selected Letters 1.304). He died young partly due to his avoidance of doctors, seeking medical treatment for cancer when it was too advanced for anything other than palliative treatment. Clara Hess, a neighbor, recalled:

Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze at him. (Ave Atque Vale 166)

Lovecraft wrote stories such as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “Arthur Jermyn” rife with fear of being or becoming a monster hybrid. The discovery that they are genetically inhuman is the heart of the protagonist’s horror. An inherited “degenerative” element in the protagonist’s character triumphs over their intellect no matter how hard they fight, dragging them down the evolutionary ladder to engage in reprehensible, inhuman, and likely cannibalistic behavior. Intellect will be subsumed by madness because in Lovecraft, biological determinism always wins.

The monster is the body. The hero is the mind.

The mind of the protagonist, no matter how noble, is trapped in the body and doomed to express biology. Like modern gender critical theorists, Lovecraft claimed to believe only what science can objectively prove. This eugenicist point of view falls apart when the science of biology is not severed from the science of psychology and the larger body of the society, culture, and the full set of direct human experiences in which an individual’s gender is formed and reinforced.

I suspect if Lovecraft were alive today, he would tend to align with those who oppose transgender rights in a similar way that he aligned with the predominant view of his time classifying homosexuality as a perverse abnormality and crime. If he were interested in the subject of gender, and there’s not much to suggest he was beyond brief mentions in his letters of his repulsion for effeminate men (Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos 28-43), he would perhaps, like modern gender critical theorists, label people like me delusional.

There’s little in his work to welcome me, but ironically Lovecraft populated his work with portraits of body dysphoria that feel familiar. Gender dysphoria is the sense of unease or distress one feels when one’s gender identity and body don’t match. When it’s misinterpreted or denied, it may become extreme and debilitating. Lovecraft’s depictions of self-loathing, of the feeling of horror within the self and the sense of having inherited a biological curse that tortures a mind trapped in the wrong body strike a very similar tone. If torture seems too strong a word, check out the statistics for anxiety, depression, and suicide among transgender people who are denied medical care or who encounter familial and societal opposition to their mere existence (Transgender individuals at greater risk of mental health problems, Mental Health and the LGBTQ+ Community).

Feeling tortured by living in an incorrect body isn’t a universal transgender experience, but it’s a very common one. Shame and self-loathing can destroy quality of life, preventing a person from socializing or pursuing hobbies and career. I’ve had my share of days where like Lovecraft I “hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze on him” due to the burden of gender dysphoria.

Owning it and taking action lifts the burden. I picture poor Asenath’s liquifying body from the ending of “The Thing on the Doorstep” as a symbol of self-loathing: this corpse-like and “foul, stunted parody” of self, a self fetid with dysphoria that I dutifully lugged around for half a century before coming out. The corpse in the story can’t speak, and the man inside it dies silenced, able only to deliver a scribbled note. I’m glad that’s not my fate.

In the real world, we’re stuck with one body, no swapping allowed. As transgender people, we know real life body horror. Knowing the opposite—euphoria, groundedness, and a deep sense of being at home in one’s body—is definitive of the transgender experience. And while our concern in this essay is horror, I think it’s vital to contrast the horror discussion with the empowering reality of the health, self-acceptance, and immense happiness transgender people enjoy when they practice freedom of expression and have access to corrective care. Modern discourse focuses on the negative statistics to emphasize a need for change or vilify us as unwell monsters, but my everyday reality is not a struggle with illness or horror. I’m significantly happier and in much better physical health now.

The parallels with coming out in Lovecraft’s fiction keep the horror intact. A protagonist’s success in going beyond the limitations of a story’s physical world won’t negate Lovecraftian biological determinism, but will usually lead to a different kind of body horror. The consequence of crossing the border between worlds is the creation of a bridge: be warned, once the (closet) door is opened, it can never be closed. Once the protagonist’s mind has transgressed liminal space, the body becomes liminal and thus subject to invasion by entities or energies from non-human dimensions, an often unwilling conduit between worlds.

Considered outside of Loveraft’s fiction, the body as liminal and changeable is a mere fact of existence. Time will change all of us, like it or not, as we age. Food, exercise, medications; all of the subtle and bold chemical alterations we make to the body impact the moods and cognitive functions of the mind. The mind doesn’t reign in isolation as a detached godhead; mind and body dynamically interact. I’d personally go so far as to speculate the mind may be a myth dreamed up by the body. If self is an expression of interconnecting systems and body is the engine of impermanence, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is simply a restatement of physiological fact.

Is it really a horror to know oneself as permeable and changeable? In contrast to the horror tales, Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter stories such as “The Silver Key” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” depict flexibility as an asset. They show monsters and aliens as characters rather than unknowable forces. Carter can astral travel, time travel, and interact with other-dimensional spaces and entities. In navigating the dream world, Carter comes to know himself more fully as his quest sends him back to his childhood home, which may symbolically be the authentic body.

At the end of his story arc, Carter achieves a sort of immortality by inhabiting the liminal state of being neither alive nor dead. The horror of permeability fades with the explorer’s increased pleasure and mastery in negotiating a wider range of experience.

Transgender people tend to live, at least for some time, in a liminal state between the gender binary extremes, as neither male nor female. We may lack access to obtain care for aspects of medical transition, we may need to delay it for a variety of reasons, or we simply may not want it. Many nonbinary and agender people in particular seek no physical alteration to the body and continue to present according to society’s standards for their assigned gender. This is why one must never assume another person’s gender based solely on their appearance.

On the uncertain or transgressive borderline between things which can and can’t be known, things neither alive nor dead, we run up against cosmic horror that is not body horror. Lovecraft unintentionally captured the experience of body dysphoria in his work, and the yearning for transformation beyond physical limitations is a fantasy he engaged with in his fiction repeatedly. Whilewe can posit all horror is body horror because the mind is dependent upon the body’s processes for input and existence, I think this is too limiting. It’s as if we’ve given ourselves a diagnosis of awe as a mere chemical or physiological anomaly. Even the staunch biological determinist Lovecraft pointed to something much bigger in the scope of the cosmos.

Joe Koch (He/They) writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Joe is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and the forthcoming collection Convulsive from Apocalypse Party Press. Their short fiction appears in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Not All Monsters, Liminal Spaces, and many others. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.

A Polio Survivor Looks At Lovecraft
by Connie Todd Lila

A sixty cent paperback with a lurid, horror movie cover brought H.P. Lovecraft into my world and began a love affair that is thriving these 50+ years later. The circumstances of my introduction most certainly played a forceful role in the depth of his impact on me. A childhood case of polio went misdiagnosed as one of those “mysterious childhood fevers,” since I lived in the Age of the Vaccine… “It couldn’t be polio, she’s had the shots.” The disease attacked not my legs, but my spine. Already a loner at school, the twisting of my spine drew comments from classmates, forcing me deeper into my own keeping. At age 14, I underwent spinal fusion surgery to give me as normal a backbone as was possible. I spent that year, my freshman year, in a complete body cast, flat in bed. An easel contraption made to sit on my plaster chest held a book, making it possible for me to work with tutors and keep up with classes. Most importantly, that easel made it possible to read. American aphorist Mason Cooley said, “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” My sanity serves as proof of that statement. If Lovecraft’s madness-filled mountains, crumbling edifices, and gaunt-haunted nights had not entered my isolated young life just then, I can’t say where my mind might have wandered, or promise that I’d have wanted to come back.

The paperback anthology that, literally, made possible my endurance that year was a present from my mother. Very familiar with my childhood taste for classic black and white horror films, monster movies and scary stories, this paperback with a flaming skull on a dark cover caught her eye in a supermarket checkout lane. In this author, I found kindred, a companion to sit with me all the long nights sleep would not come; a magician with a wand of words who placed before my mind’s eye fantastic, terrible, and wonderful images into which I could “journey” and escape my prison of plaster. Odd as it is to say, the madness he offered me to “go into” kept me sane–and me a young girl.

Company did not come to my house. There was abuse, cruelty and sadness there, and I believe, these decades later, that my mother kept company away so no one would see how “wrong” our home was. I learned of H.P.L.’s own preference for solitude and his own company. In L. Sprague de Camp’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), de Camp relates how Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather used to “lead him about the unlighted house at night” to cure the boy of fear of the dark. “For the rest of his life, Lovecraft preferred night as the time to be up and abroad.” (de Camp, Chapter Two “Bent Twigs” 17-18). In the same chapter, de Camp describes the eight-year-old Lovecraft as “a born bookworm, he was affected more by the printed word than by his peers” (18). I sought solitude myself, some for my spinal oddity, some from habit. If Lovecraft found solace in words, not people, so would I.

The opening line of “The Outsider” (per Joshi and Schultz, probably written Spring or Summer, 1921; first published in Weird Tales April 1926) proclaims: “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.” I concede that the drama in this far exceeds the actuality of my experience; in my defense, the reader can understand how and why my young self would cling so fiercely to the author of that line… he “gets it.”

Becoming a Lovecraftian scholar required me to vastly stretch my vocabulary. I first read his works with a dictionary at my side. Of course, I fell in love with every line of purple prose. H.P.L. said of himself, of “The Outsider,” in a 1931 letter to J. Vernon Shea (from An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, 2001), that this story was “. . . almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of its language” (198). This language painted fantastical places for me to “go,” from my limited, plastered world. He continues with not being able to understand how he could have let himself be tangled in such “baroque & windy rhetoric” (from the same letter). It still moves me that Lovecraft couldn’t avoid purple prose even when being self-critical for its use. In my sophomore year, upright and mobile again after re-learning to walk, I began a study of the development of Lovecraft’s genius by tracking down and reading, in order, his body of work. Today, as a published writer, I credit my own peacock tail of a vocabulary and love of the written word to my early–and ongoing–obsession with Lovecraft.

In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (per Joshi and Schultz, written November-December 1931; first published as a book 1936, Visionary Publishing Company, Everett, PA), I found the comfort of the familiar yet again, in a grown up, darker interpretation of my girlhood fascination with mermaids. This novella even inspired a D&D campaign I composed around the Cthulhu Mythos (…in which I may or may not have furtively placed an opened sardine can on a warm radiator at the game point where one of the Great Old Ones rose from the waves…dark gaming is all about atmosphere). I continue to be impressed anew by his mind; to wit, a recent PBS cooking program featured an island inspired dish with “Ia” in the title. The translation means “fish,” something I never knew. What Lovecraftian fan cannot chant, “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn,” even if we didn’t know what we were saying?

Into this unabashed celebration of the person who connected the dots for me in a flavor I craved, and helped me keep my own dots together during a terrible time in my girlhood, I do interject a mild complaint. The volume, More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (annotated by S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon, 1999), is a fine reference, scholarly notes alongside ten of Lovecraft’s tales. My complaint is directed to the back cover, to the comment there. It is not credited, simply pronounces Lovecraft’s work “on a par with Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft’s mentor.” To be fair, this comment could simply mean that Lovecraft chose Poe as his scholarly mentor, which he certainly did. During his many tutored removals from school, he augmented his studies by reading voraciously, proclaiming at age eight: “I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!!” Poe remained his lifelong enthusiasm and the strongest single influence on him. (de Camp, Chapter Three “Night Gaunts,” 31). The comment, unsupported, always implies to me that Lovecraft studied with Poe. Poe died 10-7-1849, according to biographies. Lovecraft was born 8-20-1890. Short of a really static-free séance, Poe could not have actually “mentored” Lovecraft. I wonder if I am the only Lovecraft scholar distressed by this casual comment? If so, please forgive a fanatic, driven from a youth isolated and different.

If the truest compliment is mimicry, then I do my own chosen mentor justice with my published work. A forthcoming anthology of Lovecraftian fiction from Infernal Ink Press contains my own dark piece; and there is another one jumping up and down on my desk, eager for me to give it wings to its own submission call.

I’ve been researching and re-reading Lovecraft for more than half a century now. Nowhere have I come upon a claim that his work saved anyone’s sanity–except here.

Connie Todd Lila writes from her home in the Central Wisconsin woods. Her published works include “Selkie Lament” (fiction) in Enchanted Conversation; “Dandelion Spring” (poem) in The Essential Herbal; “Don’t Sew Your Weddin’ Dress” (poem) in Hypnopomp Literary Magazine; “Keeping The Faith” (fiction) in The Monsters We Forgot; “Changeling” (poem) in Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine; “Smoke and Mirrors” (fiction) in Dark Carnival; and “Key” (fiction) to be published in the forthcoming anthology from Infernal Ink Books.

“A Polio Survivor Looks At Lovecraft” is her first guest post for a blog.