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A Jewish Deadhead Looks At Lovecraft by M. I. Black

A Jewish Deadhead Looks at Lovecraft
by M.I. Black

The hi-fi system and the bean bag chair of my adolescent room were purchased with Bar Mitzvah gelt, the financial gain from the coming-of-age ritual marking the moment that thirteen-year-olds become accountable for their own actions in the Jewish community in which they are being raised. Most of my friends, visitors to my comfy chamber, were being raised Catholic or Protestant, and I understood from our dialogs that there was no precise equivalent to the Mitzvah milestone in Christianity. Religions—I was learning—were very different from each other. For example, there was no Jewish equivalent to the Christian concept of hell, other than—as the joke goes—New York City in August. As a counterpoint, ceremonies in which babies receive their names occurred in both Judaism and Christianity. Yet some have taken the ceremony’s gravity to the high heavens: my seventh-grade American history class taught me that the American Puritan Jonathan Edwards famously etched the importance of baptism when he professed, “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of unbaptized babies.”

Sounded like an image from an H.P. Lovecraft story to me.

I would discuss hell with friends, who all thought Jonathan Edwards was an idiot, and we pretty much all agreed that hell seemed like a recruitment tool to get people to become Christian, at worst, or a warning to persuade people not to do evil, at best. None of our theological debates, however, were as long or as exhilarating as our battles in our role-playing games, such as pitting a Paladin against a rattle of ten Bone Devils.

Deities and Demigods, a reference book for Dungeons & Dragons, introduced Lovecraft to me, as well as the works of Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. I still have the first edition of the now prized D&D tome; a later edition excised the Cthulhu and Moorcockian sections due to a complicated legal squabble about copyrights. To this day, the line art for Lovecraft’s section (“Cthulhu Mythos”) still lures me to read its entries. 

In high school, my friends and I began playing Dungeons & Dragons less and less and began reading books and listening to music more and more. I fell headfirst into the world of H.P. Lovecraft and fell head-over-heels for the songs of the Grateful Dead. The predominantly black and gray (with shattering reds and white) wraps of the Del Rey paperbacks called to me from the well-ordered shelves of a now-defunct chain bookstore in our shopping mall. I might have even bought Dead Set—a live, double-CD of The Grateful Dead—the same afternoon as The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, my first Lovecraft book. To this day, I love the artwork of the album and the book, both famous for skulls and skeletons. I remain a fan of the graphical, as well as the auditory. And if what music I was listening to could somehow coalesce with what I was reading, more power to the successfully sound-tracked story.

In my bean bag chair, I soon discovered that I could not read Lovecraft and listen to the Grateful Dead at the same time. Despite the blanched bones, Lovecraft and the Grateful Dead did not sync up for me. Although lyrical in the sense of expressing deep emotions and observations, Lovecraft is not enthusiastic as, say, Ray Bradbury, whose writing could be paired up with several albums of the Grateful Dead. In contrast, Lovecraft begged for classical, to my ear, and I have heard that a few death-metal bands have been heavily influenced by his writing.

Why did I like Lovecraft’s stories? I loved how they created a universe of mythological deities and devices, not something you find in Poe, who I was also reading for pleasure way back when. The creatures of Lovecraft’s genius were indifferent to us earthlings at best, and at worst, they are malevolent with infinite, inescapable reach. His horror rang true for me.  The Romantic and romance can find no purchase in the world of Lovecraft. No one seeks out the healing power of escaping to nature, nor does any major character seem faithful to love, unlike Poe. 

Years later, while managing an independent bookstore in my twenties, I was surprised to read that Lovecraft had actually married. And in my thirties, another Lovecraft fan shared with me—as if unearthing something that should have remained buried—that H.P. was a racist and an antisemite though his former wife was a Jew. I seemed to recall stories that seemed to smack at racism, more so than the run-of-the-mill stories from that time period, but now with my new knowledge, these claims seemed more obvious in retrospect.

Soon I found myself struggling with how to handle this horrid information on Lovecraft, working through something like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. In mild shock, I told myself that if Lovecraft had lived longer, perhaps he would have outgrown the infantile compulsion that places one member of the human race over another. That Lovecraft was a product of a time—a victim of a puritanical upbringing—in which the insulated often deluded themselves into imagining that to belong to a higher rung in an alleged hierarchy is to live a life more supreme. Perhaps his trait, this reoccurring folly birthed of unfettered fear, retarded in Lovecraft any hopeful internal spark that may have illuminated him to achieve a happier life. Yes, I told myself that he was miserable, and this was the cause of his grumbling hate. If he had lived longer, experienced more of the 20th Century, the horrors of the Holocaust would have made Lovecraft dial back any theories he had about the Jews. And that the struggles of American Civil Rights would wrestle any bad beliefs on race.

In denial, I comforted myself by reading about Lovecraft’s mentoring and befriending a young writer, Robert Bloch, born a Jew, most famous for the novel Psycho, made more famous by the Hitchcock film. Surely, Lovecraft did not hate this Jew. Or, in Lovecraft’s eyes, it seemed a Jew could be born a Jew and then rise above whatever it was that Lovecraft did not like about the Jews. He had loved a Jew when he married his wife, right? They were happy, at least for a while. No, Lovecraft was not really an antisemite. Not a bad one. There were too many Jewish people in his life for him to be hardcore. The court of public opinion had an active imagination.

Then I read some more about Lovecraft, from his own letters.

What came next for me was the argument that art should stand alone, so who cares about the author, right?  I remembered my dad’s chestnut: “Don’t learn too much about your heroes; just concentrate on what makes them heroic.” Can we not engage the work of art as it is by itself, separating it from any intentions of the artist? There was no benefit in learning about the author, for it was the reader that created the text. Reader Response literary theory aided in my denial.

Most fans, of course, want to know a little about the creator of their affection.

So, I read more about Lovecraft. I grew angry. A dead ringer for Gomer Pyle, he allowed all the women in his life—it seemed to me—to bully him. Although fairly prolific, he could not make a living stringing gloomy nouns, adjectives, and verbs together to create his signature ether of impending doom. But how signature was his cosmos? You take a gigantic octopus and stick it on the body of dragon, and—presto—you have Cthulhu, like a platypus, but scary. Oh, and don’t forget, there’s no meaning to life, the bad guys always win, and the cosmos is dead cold. A triad of existential angst! Stunningly creative! Pure genius!

My fist-clenching phase proved short-lived. I still liked his work.

What if I just read the stories I’ve read before? Or just the authors who took his mythos and ran with it in their books? Just watched the movies based on Lovecraft’s works?

Bargaining puttered by in a fleeting stage.

Should we not keep Lovecraft buried? Ignore his faults? Or numb ourselves to the sins of nasty opinions that he may never have acted upon other than to drip some poison in his stories with a random remark of rancor, the sloppiness of stereotype, the temper tantrum of a theme against the mixing of races? I can admire him at his best and ignore his worst. Lovecraft is dead. And we are all going to die. What was the point really? Art does not matter. Nothing matters. There is no fun to be had. There’s no one to look up to. I’m depressed.

The stories of the Grateful Dead soundtrack made me less depressed.

It is my experience from the first story I read of Lovecraft’s, “The Hound,” narrated by a graverobber set on his own goal of unearthing another graverobber from his grave, that a Lovecraft story is often the Grateful Dead story in reverse. In Lovecraft, if you unearth something, there will be hell to pay. Grateful Dead folklore tells another story.

While trying to name the band, guitarist Jerry Garcia lowered a blind finger into an open dictionary and came down on an entry. This entry described the folktale form of a hero coming upon an unburied corpse, giving the dead a burial, and later “going down the road” completing a difficult task with the aid of a stranger, who is the spirit of the grateful dead returning a favor.

Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, acting as the Cthulhuian Book of the Dead, shares accounts of the Old Ones—Lovecraft’s cosmological dreaded deities from space. Deadheads over the last forty years that have pointed to a passage from an uncited “Egyptian Book of the Dead” to bolster the meaning of the moniker of the band:

We now return our souls to the creator,

as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness.

Let our chant fill the void

in order that others may know.

In the land of the night

the ship of the sun

is drawn by the grateful dead.

Reading the Grateful Dead: A Critical Survey (2012), 40n6

In Lovecraft, the dead do not return to the creator to serve.  The dead or undead do not chant but moan. They do not draw the source of light but are forever drowning in darkness. Skeletons populate the worlds of both Lovecraft and the Grateful Dead, although, in one of these worlds, a skull screams as opposed to grins. Does Lovecraft now, who is still dead, scream on a level of hell that could be found in Dante’s cartographic efforts? Would he be on the Eighth Level of Hell, the realm of torment designed for Falsifiers? Maybe a part of him resides in hell. And the part of him that created a community of readers and writers, ironically through stories of dread and isolation, resides on some astral plane, high above the Inferno.

So, what is my role to play in the Lovecraft story? I will be the wandering hero, who has just found the dead body of Lovecraft, who will bury the bad thoughts of him and stated by him, and I will sing about what was truly deific in him and his work, to bring light up and to bury darkness down, to chant to all who will listen that we humans are complex creatures, given to contradictions, with a talent for winter growth, and I will eulogize that to err is human and to forgive divine. Atonement and forgiveness are not just for Yom Kippur, and someone does not need to ask for your forgiveness to receive it. And for the flawed mortal known as Lovecraft, if some essence of him is somewhere in a celestial plane and can find rest through my accepting the role as folk hero, maybe Lovecraft can be thought of as one of the grateful dead.

M.I. Black has written for advertising agencies, managed new and used bookstores, taught creative writing and media studies, and has worked as a communications officer in libraries. Copyright 2023 M. I. Black.

“(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters

While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator”

How do you go about queering Herbert West?

In 1922, before Weird Tales had ever hit the stands, H. P. Lovecraft’s first commercial work went into print: six brief tales of gruesome mad science, for which he was to be paid five dollars an episode. Commercial hack work, and Lovecraft knew it; it would not be published again until Lovecraft was safely dead and beyond objecting. From there it entered the domain of reprints, and it became the basis for the 1985 film Reanimator. The film, with the iconic performance by Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and the glowing green reanimation agent, was a smash success. It inspired a franchise of movies, a novelization, comic books, merchandise, and stories chronicling the further adventure of the reanimator, his foes and rivals.

Herbert West has become one of Lovecraft’s breakout characters.

It is harder to pin down when the queer interpretations began. The basic building blocks were always there, from the beginning: West and his unnamed partner’s close homosocial bond, like Holmes and his Watson; Lovecraft’s typical asexuality and lack of romance in the story; the allegorical implications of men trying to create life without women, especially via the Freudian technique of injecting some of their special serum into the body. One might also add the loneliness of the outsiders, forced to hide their actions from the world, forced out onto the fringes just to be themselves without discrimination.

For queer folk, reading into the text or the adaptations something of their own experience, maybe Herbert West was always queer too. He just wasn’t out about it yet.

Brian McNaughton may have been the first to really play with the idea in “Herbert West—Reincarnated: Part II, The Horror from the Holy Land” (2000), published in Crypt of Cthulhu #106 and his collection Nasty Stories. Molly Tanzer certainly brought in the open with “Herbert West in Love” (2012). The erotic appeal was made manifest in “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon. Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows expressly coded West and his companion as queer in Providence (2017), which played off against their own queer protagonist…and there are more. The constellation of Reanimator-derived works continues to grow; some are more explicitly queer than others. Each of these interpretations is different, both in their understanding and in their depiction of what being queer means, and in what they drew from Lovecraft or what they borrowed from other media; the glowing green reagent being a common element in most stories written after 1985.

The fluid was fluorescent and green as I gently tipped the vial. A single bead of he concoction caught on the lip of the tube and then fell, splashing into the beed’s mouth.

Clinton W. Waters, “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft”

“(UN)Bury Your Gays” is a spiritual sequel to “Herbert West—Reanimator”; one that retreads a little familiar ground (it is a reanimator story, it would be more shocking if there wasn’t a reanimation), but is overall smaller, more focused: the protagonists are not simply repeating the Herbert West/unnamed assistant dynamic, but are exploring a much more complicated, nuanced, realistic friendship as the only two queer kids in high school. There is a sensibility in the story reminiscent of “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson; a weird sort of universality to the outsider experience which makes the characters much more sympathetic than West and his nameless assistant ever were.

Waters sets the action in the current day, and a certain pop-culture sensibility flows through the scenario: like the genre-savvy characters in the Scream films, they can picture themselves in a horror story and sometimes try to interpret what’s happening through that lens, riffing on vampirism and flesh-eating zombies in a way that Herbert West & his assistant in 1922 couldn’t. Less directly and less obviously, the two teens also approach their sexuality and relationship through the same lens. This is far and away from a Lovecraftian interpretation of Brokeback Mountain, but there are shades of the same relationship dynamics at play. What the leads have isn’t sexual, but they are tied together by their sexuality. A shared intimacy, but not exclusivity.

In a lot of ways, Waters flips Lovecraft’s script. Instead of a nameless protagonist talking about his relationship with Herbert West, we have the great-grand nephew Humphrey West telling the tale of his best friend. Where Herbert West is focused on reanimation practically to the exclusion of all else and seems to take his relationship with the unnamed narrator for granted, in “(UN)Bury Your Gays” the focus is all about the relationship between Humphrey and his friend, with reanimation a catalyst for a shift in their dynamic, and that is what the story is ultimately about.

Of Daniel “Danny” Moreland, I can only speak fondly. He was my closest companion. My champion. My single greatest achievement.

Clinton W. Waters, “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft”

A key point in Waters’ approach is that it is a queering, not the queering of “Herbert West—Reanimator.” This is one interpretation, one take, one possible iteration of the infinite possibilities of exploring Lovecraft’s original narrative, characters, or concepts through a queer lens. Rather than repeating what Molly Tanzer or Alan Moore wrote, Waters is presenting a different permutation on the same idea—one that is more inspired by Lovecraft’s original than a strict revisitation of the same familiar story and characters.

Because there is more than one way to be queer, and more than one way to reanimate the Lovecraftian corpus.

“(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters is available on Amazon Kindle.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Her Letters To Robert E. Howard: Hester Jane Ervin Howard

Dec 9 – ’26

My dear little boy:

This is such nasty weather I do hope you keep your feet dry and warm. I am afraid you will expose yourself and take the flu. Please wear your overcoat, or at least your suit with coat and vest. I warned you.

Hester Howard to Robert E. Howard, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 6

Hester Jane Ervin was born 11 July 1870 in Hill County, Texas, the eighth child of “Colonel” George W. Ervin and his wife Sara Jane. The family eventually settled in Lewisville, where Hester began attending school, where she learned to read and write, and found a special love for poetry:

She loved poetry. Written poetry by sheets and reams, almost books of it, was stored in her memory so that from Robert’s babyhood he had heard its recital. Day by [day,] heard poetry from his mother. She was a lover of the beautiful.

Dr. I. M. Howard to E. Hoffmann Price, 21 Jun 1944, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 205

The Erwin family moved as circumstances changed. From Lewisville to Lampasas, TX, and from there to Exeter, MO. Hester Howard’s profession was probably that of a family caretaker, helping to care for her older relatives and her younger stepsiblings; she is known to have traveled to visit relatives in Texas. Marriage, however, remained elusive…until 12 Jan 1904, when she was 33 years old, Hester married a traveling physician, Dr. Isaac M. Howard. (Renegades & Rogues 7-10)

The Howards’ marriage was marked by frequent moves, and private difficulties. They appear to have had trouble conceiving, and even made steps toward fostering Wallace Howard, the youngest child of Dr. Howard’s brother David. The adoption was only called off when Hester became pregnant. She gave birth to Robert Ervin Howard on 22 Jan 1906, when she was 36 years old. A second pregnancy c. 1908 ended in a miscarriage, and Robert would be her only child. (Renegades & Rogues 16-17, 19)

In October 1919, the Howards finally settled down in the small town of Cross Plains, TX; which would be Hester Howard’s home for the rest of her life, aside from a brief stay in Brownwood while Robert was finishing his high school education, and trips to various hospitals and the like. Hester Howard’s death certificate lists the cause of death as tuberculosis, and it is known that for several years she had suffered at least intermittent and increasingly bad health. It isn’t clear when the disease began to manifest, but by the time Howard began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in the 1930s the spells of ill-health were no doubt pronounced; Dr. Howard stated in one letter dated 11 Jul 1936 that “Mrs. Howard had been in failing health for five years” (The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 76), and around that time Robert mentions a:

[…] small health resort about thirty miles east of Waco where I spent a week.

Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, c. Jun 1931, A Means to Freedom 1.166

This would have been the Torbett Sanitarium at Marlin, TX, which was run by friends of the Howards and where Hester would receive occasional treatment—almost 160 miles from Cross Plains. The illness would progress, and caring for his mother, paying for her treatment, and getting her back and forth from various hospitals would take a toll on the Howard family.

Only two letters survive from Hester Howard to Robert E. Howard survive, the first dated 9 Dec 1926, the second 4 Jan 1927. At that time, Robert E. Howard was in Brownwood, TX, attending the Howard Payne Academy with the aim for a certificate in bookkeeping, all the while working on his writing. His career in the pulps was just beginning—but it was almost cut short:

There are some cases of measles in Brownwood, and if you begin to feel bad, ache or feverish or anything, go to Dr. Fowler, Bailey or Snyder, or any of these men, & let them go over you to see what your trouble is. Try to be sensible about yourself & keep fit.

Hester Howard to Robert E. Howard, 4 Jan 1927, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 7

The measles outbreak turned into an epidemic, including the boarding house where Robert was staying. According to his friend Lindsey Tyson, the almost-19-year-old Robert did the exact opposite of heeding his mother’s advice:

While we were there an epidemic of measles got started, the Powells we were living with had a baby girl who got the disease. The Howards heard about the epidemic and came to take Bob home as he had never had the measles. Bob said this time I damn [sic] sure will have this stuff, he did not want to go. He went into the bathroom that the little girl had been useing [sic] picked up a glass that the child had probably been useing, [sic] drank out of it, rubbed a towel over his face that he thought she had probably been using.

Quoted in Renegades & Rogues 86

Unsurprisingly, Robert E. Howard got measles.

Hester Howard’s two surviving letters to her son show all the concerns a mother might have for a son who was effectively living away from home for the first time. They ask about his health, give his bank account information, share bits of local news and gossip, sending a bit of money for Christmas 1926 so Robert could buy books—and there would have been more letters from home, probably a steady stream of them week after week during the fall, winter, and spring semesters:

Well, I will write again first of next week if I can’t come.

Hester Howard to Robert E. Howard, 9 Dec 1926, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 6

Well, i believe that is all for this time. Please change your shirts every 2 or 3 days, also your handkerchiefs & sox. Please keep clean, and bring Lindsey [Tyson] & one of the other boys home with you on the 21st next. Don’t know, but we might get to come for you. Can’t tell yet, but will write again. Be sure & write to Mother with love–

Hester Howard to Robert E. Howard, 4 Jan 1927, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 8

How many more letters flowed between mother and son? While Robert E. Howard went on periodic trips throughout his adult life, as far south as the Mexican border and as far west as New Mexico, he rarely stayed in any town or city outside of Cross Plains for long unless he was there to take care of his mother. It is not hard to imagine him sending a postcard or letter from his trips to brighten her day, but he hardly seems to have stayed in one place away from home long enough for any sort of correspondence outside of the extended Brownwood sojourn.

Today, the Howard house in Cross Plains is a museum, and visitors can walk through the rooms and imagine Hester Howard sitting at the table to write out a letter to her son. There would be chores to do around the house; food to cook and animals to look after, washing and knitting or sewing to be done, the newspaper to read, perhaps friends and neighbors to visit with…and Bob’s room, right next to her own, with its piles of books and magazines, waiting for her boy to come home. She would jot down her thoughts, her hopes and concerns, for the young man who was her only son, hoping and praying he would be okay…and waiting, perhaps, on his own letters home to let her know how he progressed in his studies, what movies he had seen, or what King Kull was getting up to in Valusia.

These are not the literary letters that Robert E. Howard might have received from C. L. Moore, or the teasing love-letters from Novalyne Price, but the utterly prosaic letters of a woman who had come very far in life to settle in a small West Texas town, and wanted to make sure her son changed his socks so his feet wouldn’t stink. Far and away from how we might think of Robert E. Howard, who liked to fill his letters to H. P. Lovecraft with blood and thunder…but a part of him that should not be overlooked: the man, not the legend, and the mother who kept him in clean shirts and socks.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Devil’s Due: A Transgender Tale (2021) by Diane Woods

It began with what has been called Cancel Culture, I suppose. Without much warning, I was subjected to a number of public accusations by various women of my alleged misdeeds. These accusations were largely unsubstantiated and were simply the public revenge of various disgruntled and jilted former lovers and employees.

But the resulting furor was considerable. I was dropped by my long-time publisher, in a very public manner. My book sales, which had been very considerable (and some quite lucrative movie development deals) quickly began to evaporate. […]

I spent a small fortune on lawyers. It was not successful. And in the court of public opinion, I was tried and convicted in short order. And so, it was in the depths of despair that I somehow found a most unusual, a most intriguing, website for someone or something called “The Repairer of Reputation”.

Diane Woods, Devil’s Due: A Transgender Tale (2021)

“The Repairer of Reputations” is the first, weirdest, and arguably most important tale in Robert W. Chamber’s 1895 collection The King in Yellow. It is also the hardest to actually follow up: Chambers had set the scene thirty years in his future, in the manner of future war stories like H. G. Wells’ “The Land Ironclads” (1903). The narrator is unreliable, as is Mr. Wilde, the eponymous Repairer of Reputations, which adds to the mystery and disquiet of the story—how much of this is true, and how much is madness?

While a few works like Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows’ Providence have deliberately woven some elements of that story into their own, this is rare. Most who draw on The King in Yellow focus on the Yellow Mythos surrounding the play, such as “Cordelia’s Song from The King in Yellow” (1938) by Vincent Starrett & “Evening Reflections, Carcosa” (2011) by Ann K. Schwader rather than the events of the story. So there is a certain cleverness in how Diane Woods takes the idea of the Repairer of Reputations and gives it the perfect contemporary context: who would be in more need of such a service than someone who has been canceled?

Political partisans can be relieved that this book is not about cancel culture, either for or against. The social ostracism is the catalyst for the events of the story, and Woods never goes into vast detail about how true the allegations are or whether the outrage is justified or not. This is, as the story suggests, a transgender tale: the way that the protagonist’s reputation is repaired involves becoming someone else.

Impossibly, my transformation was complete. This was monstrously alarming, of course, but Tanya assured me that this need not be a permanent change. For my own personal reasons, this felt deeply ironic to me. At the same time, deeply erotic.

Since my adolescence, I had been obsessed with the idea of a male being transformed into a female. And since my teens, I had compulsion to periodically dress in the clothes of a female. This has been my most closely guarded secret, of course. But it may help explain what happened next.

Diane Woods, Devil’s Due: A Transgender Tale (2021)

Fantasy gender-bending stories are nothing new. H. P. Lovecraft had body-swapping in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” Bergier used Mythos magic in “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958), John Blackburn had a surgical solution in Dagger of Blood (1997), and so on. The method varied, but the result was often the same: a gender transition that was often swift and total. The reality of transition is much longer, messier, and more difficult, involving various degrees of psychiatric evaluation and therapy, hormone treatments, and possibly surgery—and accompanied by legal and bureaucratic hurdles, healing times, side effects from medication, and social ostracism.

Transgender fantasies cut past many of the real-life difficulties to focus on the drama—and sometimes wonder—of the transformation itself, and in many ways are probably closer to transformation erotica than to any desire to live vicariously through someone else’s transition. In this respect, many such “gender bender” tales are closer to a fetishization of the idea of gender transition, titillating readers with the taboo of crossing that imaginary definitive line between male and female, rather than any effort to create an authentic transgender character.

Devil’s Due: A Transgender Tale is not King in Yellow erotica in the usual sense, however. There are a few scattered erotic scenes in the book, but those hoping for a version of the King in Yellow to appear with a three-foot penis will be sadly disappointed. Fantasy transition tales like this one have a body of tropes of their own, involving how willing the participant is, how they come to accept or reject their new gender, etc.; if the physical transition is swift, the mental transition and acceptance of new gender—and often new sexuality—takes longer, and Diane Woods plays with some of the familiar tropes, but shies away from going into lengthy and explicit sex scenes as the protagonist, now a woman, has to find out if she is a lesbian or bisexual.

While the premise of the story is focused on the repairing of the protagonist’s reputation, and the gender transition is a part of that, the plot gets a little messier. Rather than keep strictly to the Yellow Mythos, Wood brings in elements of the Cthulhu Mythos including Randi Carter (a transitioned Randolph Carter) and Nyarlathotep; the relatively magical physical gender transition is accompanied by a science fiction hypnosis/brainwashing device that facilitates the mental transition and sets up a somewhat Twilight Zone-esque ending. It is far more Mythos material than is strictly necessary for the plot, and gives the story a bit of a fanfiction feel which it didn’t need to accomplish some of the plot twists—but some of the twists themselves aren’t bad.

It is important to note that Devil’s Due does not tackle a difficult subject via the medium of the Mythos in the manner of “Koenigsberg’s Model” (2011) by Peter Tupper & “The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust” (2016) by Raine Roka; that is, Woods is not using the story to address any social theme or element in Chambers or Lovecraft’s fiction, or any such theme or element in their personal prejudices. Devil’s Due is a transformation story that uses the Mythos for inspiration and aesthetics, but there’s not any deeper message about how Lovecraft felt about gender or how Chambers depicted gender in his stories.

Which is fair: not every latter-day Mythos story has to be a commentary on what has gone before. Devil’s Due is a competently-written fantasy transformation story; the riff off of “The Repairer of Reputations” helps it stand out from the dozens of other titles involving gender transformation on the Amazon ebook stocklist, and that is no doubt the point. If anything, it perhaps reads a bit closer to some of the older, less sexually explicit transvestite and transgender stories edited by Sandy Thomas.

Devil’s Due: A Transgender Tale (2021) by Diane Woods is available on Amazon Kindle, it was briefly available as a paperback.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Howard, Mon Amour (2018) by Martine Chifflot

Sonia (Assise en train d’écrire, elle s’interrompt, levant la tête et s’exprimant a voix haute):
Howard est mort.
Quelle tristesse!

Et moi, qui ne suis plus tout à fait sa veuve…
Divorcée, remariée, je ne peux plus être sa veuve officielle.		Sonia (Sitting down to write, she interrupts herself, raises her head and speaks out loud):
Howard is dead.
What sadness!

And I, who am not quite his widow anymore…
Divorced, remarried, I can no longer be his widow, officially.
Howard, Mon Amour 19English translation
Scene 1

Ever since the publication of The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis in various recensions, there has been great interest in the marriage of H. P. Lovecraft, and in his wife Sonia Haft Greene, who remarried in 1936 and became Sonia H. Davis. As the story of their marriage has unfolded in letters and memoirs, the narrative possibilities have struck several writers. Richard Lupoff included Sonia as a character in Lovecraft’s Book (1985), later expanded or restored as Marblehead (2015), to give one prominent example. Readers and scholars who have traced the story of their meeting, their work on the Rainbow, their collaborations “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923), “Four O’Clock” (1949), Alcestis: A Play (1985), and “European Glimpses” (1988), and their final separation all speak to a dramatic narrative—some might say a tragedy, for all human lives tend toward tragedy at the end.

Howard, Mon Amour is a short drama in 23 scenes by Martine Chifflot. The scene is 1946; their mutual friend Wheeler Dryden has informed Sonia of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, nearly a decade prior. The two had fallen out of touch, and apparently contact had been broken prior to her third and final marriage to Nathaniel A. Davis. Alone while writing, the phantom of Lovecraft appears…whether his ghost, or a hallucination born of her grief, never quite clear. It doesn’t really matter.

Howard: Je suis ici, Sonia; je resterai aussi longtemps que tu vivras. Les choses là-bas ne sont pas tout à fait semblables à ce que l’on raconte, à ce que, moi-même, j’en ai dit et je ne suis pas autorisé à en parler mais il a été permis que je revienne… pour toi, comme pour t’accompagner, comme pour te remercier.Howard: I am here, Sonia; I will stay as long as you live. Things down there are not quite the same as we are told, as I myself have said, and I am not allowed to talk about them, but I have been allowed to come back… for you, as if to accompany you, as if to thank you.
Howard, Mon Amour 22English translation
Scene 2

The French found an early appreciation for Lovecraft, and not just his fiction but many of his letters and associated biographical materials have been translated into French, including Sonia’s memoir. “Un mari nommé H.P.L.” (“A Husband Named H.P.L.” in Lovecraft (Robert Laffront, 1991) appears to have been Chifflot’s main source of data on the marriage, and Chifflot’s drama is fairly accurate to the facts. She may put words into her character’s mouths, but the events play out largely in accordance with Sonia’s account of the marriage, warts and all; the drama of the scenes is a little heightened in the telling, the events more emotional and detailed, but also emotionally true to how Sonia told them herself.

Tante Lilian (ou Sonia L’imitant), apres un moment de silence):
Chère Sonia, nous vous remercions mais cela est tout bonnement impossible.

Voyez-vous, Howard et nous-mêmes sommes des Phillips et nous ne pouvons envisager que l’épouse de Howard doive traviller pour vivre à Providence. Cela constitue une sort de déshonneur que nouse ne pouvons tolérer pour Howard et pour nous-mêmes.

Non. L’épouse de Howard Phillips Lovecraft no peut entretenir son ménage, ni ses tantes. C’est le devoir du mari de subvenir aux besoins familiaux et Howard a joué de malchance à cet égard. Nous connaissons, tout comme vous, les grandes qualités de Howard et nouse aimerions vous voir réunis mais cela ne se peut dans de telles conditions. Vous nous entretiendriez et nous seriouns à votre charge. Ce serait une honte pour nous malgré votre générosité. Cela ne se peut, chère Madame… et nous devrons tous souffrir en silence.		Aunt Lilian (or Sonia imitating her), after a moment of silence):
Dear Sonia, we thank you but this is simply impossible.

You see, we and Howard are Phillips and we cannot contemplate Howard’s wife having to work to live in Providence. This is a dishonor that we cannot tolerate for Howard and ourselves.


No. The wife of Howard Phillips Lovecraft cannot support his household, nor his aunts. It is the husband’s duty to provide for his family, and Howard has been unfortunate in this regard. We know, as you do, the great qualities of Howard and we would like to see you reunited, but it is not possible under these conditions. You would be supporting us and we would be in your charge. It would be a shame for us despite your generosity. It cannot be, dear Madame… and we must all suffer in silence.
Howard, Mon Amour 64English translation
Scene 16

Most of the scenes are monologues, recalling some incident from their married lives; the more interesting scenes are dialogues, where Howard and Sonia actually have a bit of back-and-forth; other characters like Howard’s aunts Lillian and Annie have brief roles, and as suggested, could simply be retold by the actress playing Sonia doing their parts. It is a work meant to be not just read, but acted out; Chifflot herself has performed on stage in the role of Sonia:

Howard, Mon Amour. Scène 10. Sebastien Ciesielski et Martine Chifflot

For all the research that went in Howard, Mon Amour, there are a few idiosyncrasies that go beyond the facts. Little attention is given to Sonia’s Jewish identity or how Howard’s prejudices and antisemitism spiked during his stressful stay in New York, for example. There is an odd moment where Sonia believes that Howard’s correspondence with his revision client Zealia Bishop caused a “cooling” (refroidissement) of their relationship; and another where Sonia is said to dislike Crowley (in reality, Sonia and Aleister Crowley never met, it’s all an internet hoax). Which can all be explained as dramatic license rather than error or intentional misdirection. These are things that might stand out to a Lovecraft scholar with a penchant for pedantry more than a Lovecraft fan.

The emotional core of the work is true, however. In many ways, Sonia did find herself haunted by Lovecraft’s ghost for the rest of her life; his legacy clung to her as people asked her about the marriage, and many of her surviving letters survive because they are about Howard or addressed to his friends like August Derleth and Samuel Loveman. In Howard, Mon Amour, Sonia seems to accept that…and that she still loves him. Which, perhaps, is true. It was never love that got in the way of their relationship, but everything else around them: her health, his aunts, their finances, a difference in wants and needs, what they were and were not willing to do.

Howard, Mon Amour by Martine Chifflot was published in 2018 by L’Aigle Botté, and has been performed on stage as “Lovecraft, Mon Amour.” An English translation by Claude Antony has been announced:

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Lavinia Rising (2022) by Farah Rose Smith

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old Whateley’s reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”

There is a small cycle of stories involving Lavinia Whateley, spinning out from “The Dunwich Horror.” W. H. Pugmire & Robert M. Price suggested her survival in “The Tree House” in The Dunwich Cycle; Alex Picchetti went into explicit detail about her conception of the twins in “When The Stars Come” in Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica; Edward Lee was no less explicit in describing Lavinia’s relationship with her sons in The Dunwich Romance.

Yet these stories are all more or less unsympathetic—perhaps not surprising as they were all written by men, and accept that Lavinia was a more or less willing participant in the events leading up to the Dunwich Horror; a cultist who finally grew afraid of her children and quietly disappeared off the page when her part in the story was over. Few of them focus on what it was like to be Lavinia Whateley. Albinos don’t have it easy in life, even when they’re not uneducated and living in rural poverty under the will of a demented wizard intent on using her as a broodmare for a pair of cosmic horror antichrists. There is little of the realism of that hard life in their characterizations. As Smith puts it:

Also, as a fellow disabled New England woman living in poverty, I felt there was something beyond affinity forming between my eyes and the words on the page. I wanted to hear her, imagine her as more fully-formed than Lovecraft had made her.

Farah Rose Smith, A Disability Scholar Looks At Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s model of Lavinia Whateley was Mary from Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan”—a young woman raised to be the subject of an experiment by an older, learned man, who gives birth to an enfant terrible, inhuman in aspect. Mary is barely there in Machen’s story, and Lovecraft gave her both more background and characterization—but not very positive characterization, and even the description of Lavinia is unflattering. Lavinia was “a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five,” a “slatternly, crinkly-haired albino,” with “misproportioned arms” and the Whateley chinlessness.

Some of Lovecraft’s descriptions are particular: why the misproportioned arms? Why an albino? Why crinkly hair? Readers and writers might gloss some of these: making Lavinia an albino helped to heighten the contrast with her “black brat,” Wilbur Whateley; crinkly hair can be a sign of dryness, suggesting she doesn’t wash it, which would go along with the idea that Lavinia was “slatternly” or unkempt, dirty, a common characteristic of poor whites in Lovecraft’s fiction. Yet Farah Rose Smith looked at these pieces of the puzzle and went a different way…

Ma was born in the back of a show wagon to a dyin’ hottentot (that’s what Barnum called ’em, she said, but said she’d slap me cross the cheeks top and bottom if I ever said it myself) and “New England’s tallest Negro.” When she was a little gilr, they told her to get out when she could, or else Barnum’d put her on display like them and even take out her body parts fer exhibition after she was dead.

Farah Rose Smith, Lavinia Rising 21

This puts, to pun a phrase, an entirely different complexion on the matter. Lovecraft gives no attention to Lavinia Whateley’s maternal line except to say that Mrs. Whateley died violently when the girl was twelve years old. He has nothing to say about Wilbur Whateley’s maternal grandparents. Human zoos and human oddities were real—and often very exploitative—enterprises in the late 19th and early 20th century, as famously depicted in the 1932 pre-Code horror film Freaks. Making Lavinia mixed-race highlights a heritage of discrimination…and a life she didn’t want for her sons.

Like “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) by Victor LaValle, Lavinia Rising is an alternate point of view for “The Dunwich Horror,” but largely follows the plot of Lovecraft’s story. This changes the story from a horror to a tragedy; readers know what is going to happen, more or less, and the difference is that we get Lavinia’s point of view as she grows up, dealing with her illnesses and disabilities, the discrimination and misogyny of a rural New England town and a patriarchal household ruled by a twisted madman that sees her as no more than a means to an end. There is little happiness in that life, and we know how it is going to end.

Yet what Farah Rose Smith offers readers is one thing more: what happens after the end. A brief epilogue to “The Dunwich Horror” which focuses on her actions to understand what happened to her children, as opposed to what happened to Mamie Bishop or Wilbur Whateley. The domestic drama and very human grief may be completely counter to Lovecraft’s idea of cosmic horror…but that is rather the point. Lovecraft did enough damage to Lavinia’s reputation; it’s time to hear her own story in her own words, and her point of view makes her an outsider in her own family of outsiders.

The only book really comparable to Lavinia Rising in the corpus of weird fiction is Helen’s Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz—and while the stories are very different in how they turn out, there is a similarity in that both of these works revisit women in weird fiction who have been ill-served by the rather patriarchial attitudes of the late 19th and early 20th century. Both Machen and Lovecraft were fully capable of writing fiction from the point of view of women, and capable too of imagining them as sympathetic and intelligent beings—Machen’s “The White People” and “The Man of Stone” (1932) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft showcase that, at least a little—but they rarely did so. In focusing on their supernatural horrors, Lovecraft and Machen largely overlook or choose not to detail the domestic horrors and psychological horrors of those women’s lives, except by inference…or, in the case of Lavinia, a single desperate conversation:

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May-Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

“They’s more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,” she said, “an’ naowadays they’s more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun’t know what he wants nor what he’s a-tryin’ to dew.”

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”

Smith retains Lovecraft’s dialogue verbatim, but expands on the scene and the thoughts and events behind them. Like Rabinowitz, the main point of departure is the part of the story where the woman died or disappeared—and their survival marks the transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This is all about the parts of the story the reader never got to read about…and, it has to be said, Smith does it well. It is a compelling story, and if there are a few inconsistencies here and there, those might as easily be chalked up to an unreliable narrator and unreliable transcription as error.

Plus, we get to learn the name of Wilbur’s brother.

Farah Rose Smith’s Lavinia Rising was published in 2022; some of her other Lovecraftian fiction is included in the collections The Witch is the Body (2021) and Of One Pure Will (2021).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Deeper Cut: Lovecraft in Chinatown

Chinatown [in San Francisco] must still be a fascinating & mysterious place, even though old-timers say it is merely a pallid echo of the original pre-1906 quarter. The only Chinatowns I’ve seen are those in Prov., Boston, & N.Y.—the latter the most picturesque of the three.

H. P. Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, 14 Mar 1935, Letters to E. Hoffmann Price 170

For his first thirty years, H. P. Lovecraft seldom left his native Providence, Rhode Island. All of his travels, his visits with friends, and to ethnic enclaves in different cities—as well as his marriage and all of his professionally-published fiction—happened in the last seventeen years of his life. The vast majority of character growth, exposure to different cultures, and challenges to Lovecraft’s prejudices happened in the final third of his existence. Which is why it is interesting to see what Lovecraft writes about various ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves he visited, including the few Chinatowns he visited on his travels.

Despite the name, “Chinatown” is a bit of a misnomer. In the 19th century, especially after the end of slavery, employers in the United States began to import cheap labor from Asia—including the Empire of China, Japan, the British Raj and other central and south Asian countries, Southeast Asian nations like Formosa (Taiwan) and Siam (Thailand), and the Indonesian archipelago. All of these “Asians” came to the United States at different times and places—and because of their different appearance, cultures, religions, language, and perceived economic competition, faced tremendous discrimination and even violence from the American citizens. Like many other immigrants, they tended to be poor and poorly paid, and settled in the cheapest or least desired neighborhoods and ghettoes—which in time came to include Asian-owned shops, restaurants, and other businesses; as well as schools, cemeteries, temples, and cultural centers or benevolent societies—and became, in effect, small organic communities operating alongside and within larger and predominantly white American cities.

While commonly called “Chinatowns” because the bulk of the immigrant population and their Asian-American descendants were perceived to be Chinese, these communities were not usually homogenous, but included many different nationalities and ethnicities, and the “flavor” of a given Chinatown could vary considerably from city-to-city—even the preferred dialect of the Chinese language and the style of Americanized Chinese food would often reflect the province(s) where the majority of the immigrants had emigrated from.

Like other ethnic and linguistic minorities in the United States, Asian immigrants faced social, economic, and legal discrimination. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1917 (the “Asiatic Barred Zone Act”) effectively halted immigration from Asia to the United States for decades; legal rules like Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927) confirmed Asian-Americans as “colored” for the purposes of race laws, often prevented mixed-race marriages, segregating where Asian-Americans could work, live, and go to school. The Massie Case in 1932 highlights how prejudice against Asians could be deadly violent—and how socially accepted such violence was.

In the face of restricted immigration and ongoing discrimination, many Chinatowns shrank or ceased to exist altogether, the populations moving on—yet others thrived and grew, and still exist today, the largest existing both as vibrant communities still absorbing generations of immigrants and perhaps increasingly as tourist attractions. Yet in their endurance, they made their mark on American culture as well; the Asian architecture and festivals and the rags-to-riches stories of hardworking Asian immigrants struggling for their success became a part of the mythos of their cities. There was a dark side to this mythos too: Yellow Menace fears of enemy aliens, criminal gangs, opium dens, and tong wars filled the newspapers, dime novels, and eventually the pulps. It was not without reason that Robert E. Howard made his weird detective Steve Harrison’s beat Chinatown—the Texan was playing to the expectations of a pulp audience that had been raised to think of these ethnic enclaves in terms of stereotypes and prejudice.

Lovecraft, who visited Chinatowns in the 1920s and 30s, was aware of all of this—and his comments have to be understood as an outsider, a tourist who wants a glimpse of the exotic East he had long held in his imagination but never actually had the chance to visit.

Chinatown was as close to Asia as Lovecraft would ever get.

Providence

There were two small Chinatowns in Providence, Rhode Island: a small one centered around Burrill St. that burned down in 1906, and a newer one centered on Empire Street which was torn down in 1951 as the city extended the street and expanded it, not coincidentally razing the old buildings and displacing the small community there. While Lovecraft could have theoretically visited both during his lifetime, he was no doubt more familiar with the small community centered around Empire St.—as Empire intersects with Westminster St., where the Chin Lee Co. First Class Chop Sooey and American Restaurant stood, an establishment where Lovecraft and his aunt sometimes took their meals:

Christmas, thank Pegāna, was decently mild—& I succeeded in dragging my elder aunt down town for the first time in a year & a half—to partake of an old-time Christmas feast with plum pudding and all, at the hospitable refctory of that staunch upholder of ancient English tradition—Chin Lee, Esq., (a very distant eastern connexion—phonetically at least—of the main Virginia line of Stratford & Arlington!) who so liberally stocked you with chow mein at our little pre-Maxfield supper last June.

H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 27 Dec 1929, Letters to James F. Morton 212

“Chin Lee” (Chin Dong Goon) was the proprietor of the restaurant that was in or near the Providence Chinatown; an early menu survives showing largely American and French dishes, but this was probably for white customers. His daughter Grace Lee Boggs reports she was born in the family apartment above that restaurant.

Regrettably, Lovecraft doesn’t offer any more descriptive details of the Providence Chinatown, although he must have passed through or near it several times during his life. Being so relatively small both geographically and in terms of population, it probably lacked much in the way of distinctive architecture or tourist draw, although one can easily imagine Lovecraft taking out-of-towners for a stroll down Empire St. and making the turn at Westminster St., in case they wanted some chow mein or chop suey.

Boston

We threaded the colonial lanes of Beacon Hill, Chapel, Old Corner, Old South Church, old State House, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s house, (built 1676) birthplace of Mortonius’ grandfather, old North Church, hellish colonial byways of the North End, (the scene of “Pickman’s Model”—I was heartbroken to find the actual alley & house of the tale utterly demolished; a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down) & the relatively commonplace Chinatown along Beach St.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 17 Jul 1927, Letters to Family & Family Friends 2.609

Boston was an international port for centuries, but the sprinkling of Chinese and other Asian nationals only appears to have formed an ethnic enclave in the 1870s, after a number of immigrants were brought over from California to Massachusetts as cheap labor. Despite discrimination, the Boston Chinatown grew and flourished, and was the largest New England Chinatown outside of New York during Lovecraft’s lifetime—and the only one in the region to survive to the present day.

It isn’t clear when Lovecraft first visited Boston’s Chinatown. Amateur journalism brought him more contacts and spurred his first adult travels outside of Providence, to Boston to meet up with fellow amateurs, and to listen to Lord Dunsany at Copley Plaza in 1919. Lovecraft might well have seen the Boston Chinatown on any visit in the 1920s; the 1927 letter to his aunt Lillian D. Clark discusses a tour of Boston where Lovecraft showed Donald Wandrei the sights, so he must have been familiar with it sometime before that.

As with Providence’s Chinatown, Lovecraft doesn’t give any real description. “Prosaic” probably implies that it was not markedly touristy at the time, and that the architecture mostly reflected Western styles. The paifang archway that now stands at the head of Beach St. as a symbolic entrance wasn’t erected until 1982, so in Lovecraft’s time the distinction would have been made in non-English signage, the greater number of Asian faces on the street, the sounds of people speaking Taishanese, and the smell of Chinese food wafting out from kitchens.

New York

Klei, now at the head of a triangular expedition with the same personnel as Saturday’s, proceeded to lead us into the slums; with “Chinatown” as an ulterior objective. […] And then Chinatown appeared. Here cleanliness reigned, for certain enterprising rubberneck-wagon owners use it as a sort of seat of local colour–they have fake opium joints which they point out as the real thing. Doyers St., the main thoroughfare, is narrow and crooked. It is fascinatingly Oriental, and Loveman rhapsodised on the evil faces of the natives. Probably it was only the usual low-caste physiognomy of the coolie type which so thrilled him–but bless me! Let the poets find thrills where they can.

H. P. Lovecraft to the Molo, 18 May 1922, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 97

The Manhattan Chinatown in New York City was, and remains, the largest Asian ethnic enclave on the East Coast of the United States. On his first trip to New York in 1922, Lovecraft’s friend Rheinhart Kleiner took him and fellow visitor Samuel Loveman on a tour of many points of interest in the city. Already, as Lovecraft noted, the area was becoming picaresque and beginning to cater to tourists, though it was still a thriving community and probably more Asian people in one place than Lovecraft had seen before.

It was a place that Lovecraft would revisit at least a few times during his stay in New York (1924-1926), and possibly he would pass by or close to it several times in later years depending on his route through the city. In his letters, he noted his second visit:

Another thing I visited that day was Chinatown—Mott and Dyer Sts., branching off from sordid Chatham Square. This I had seen after dark two years ago with Kleiner and Loveman; but I now beheld it for the first time by day. There are some interesting Oriental balconies, carved and gilded, but so few that one’s expectations are invariably disappointed.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 1 Aug 1924, Letters to Family and Family Friends 1.141

At this point, Lovecraft would have probably already seen the Chinatowns in Providence and Boston, so he might have had his hopes up that New York—bigger and older than both—might have more of an exotic flavor. In this, like other Chinatowns, Lovecraft would be somewhat disappointed: these were working, living communities, not the romantic transplanted neighborhoods from Asian cities or dangerous ghettoes he might have imagined or hoped for:

Kirk, Leeds, & I once explored the N.Y. Chinatown during a tong war, when there were pairs of policemen stationed around at short intervals apart to prevent trouble—but we couldn’t scare up a single flying bullet.

H. P. Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, 14 Mar 1935, Letters to E. Hoffmann Price 170

“Tongs” or benevolent societies were mutual assistance organizations that initially grew up in the West Coast Chinatowns such as San Francisco, and from there spread out or encouraged the formation of new groups. Despite the laudable stated purpose of helping its members—many Chinese immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century would have been relatively poor, spoken little or no English, and lacked many contacts to secure housing or handle immigration legalities—some of these groups became infamous for their association with criminal enterprises such as gambling, protection rackets, human trafficking, and sex work, and for the vicious fighting that could break out between rival organizations.

These “tong wars,” especially those in San Francisco, grabbed national headlines in the late 19th century, but diminished in scale and intensity in the 20th century. “Tong War” headlines appear in 1924 and 1925, and newspapers were prone to sensationalize the prospect of a bloody gang fight, so it isn’t clear when Lovecraft went on this particular expedition.

New York Daily News, 19 Oct 1924

There is some indication that Lovecraft got used to Chinatown, and passed through it or near it semi-regularly as needs dictated:

After leaving [Samuel Loveman] at his airy domicile & starting on a walk over Brooklyn Bridge & up through Chinatown to the north, Kirk & I decided to surprise Loveman with a birthday gift–as which, after much deliberation, we chose a bookcase, plus several cheap decorative accessories to brighten & domesticate his room.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 22 Jan 1925, Letters to Family and Family Friends 1.237-8

During the period of his stay in New York, Lovecraft walked much of the city and became, in his own lights, a tour guide, particularly to its surviving Colonial buildings. When Donald Wandrei was to visit New York in 1927, Lovecraft made sure he didn’t miss out on the New York Chinatown either, giving him instructions much as he would for Harlem:

Chinatown (walk along Park Row from City Hall, turn into Mott St. at Chatham Sq.)

H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 1 Jul 1927, Letters with Donald & Howard Wandrei 128

Lovecraft had left New York in 1926 and moved back to Providence, which is probably the only reason why he didn’t show Wandrei the Manhattan Chinatown himself, as he did with the Boston Chinatown. Lovecraft still passed through New York periodically the rest of his life, and it was on one of these trips when Frank “Sonny” Belknap Long, Jr. wanted to visit some sites in New York, he turned to “Grandpa Theobald” to lead him:

We later followed a route of quaint sights–old chuchyards, waterfront areas, Chinatown, Five Points, &c.–which Sonny had compiled from a series of newspaper articles, & on which he needed his old Grandpas’ expert guidance. I could steer him without difficulty, & we coerced everything on the programme.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 2-3 Jul 1931, Letters to Family and Family Friends 2.930

Other Chinatowns

There were other Chinatowns in cities Lovecraft visited including Cleveland, Miami, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, some of which still exist, others of which are no more. It does not appear that Lovecraft visited these ethnic enclaves, or if he did, chose not to make any reference to them in his surviving letters. Most of these, like Providence’s own quarter, would have been relatively small and easy to overlook, especially as Lovecraft was often traveling quickly and on the cheap.

Chinatown & Lovecraft’s Asiaphobia

Lovecraft was both a white supremacist and came to hate New York City and its large immigrant population. There are many comments in his letters regarding his particular animosity towards New York and its immigrant population, an animosity that informed several stories written or conceived while he wrote in the story such as “He,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” and “The Call of Cthulhu.” Readers of passages like the following might wonder if Lovecraft’s animosity toward the city were inspired in any way by Chinatown or its inhabitants:

You can’t imagine the horror of being engulfed in a maelstrom of repulsive Orientals whose aberrant physiogonomies & rat-like temperaments grate more & more on the sensibilities of an aesthetically impressionable person. New York represents such a stupidenous ruin & decay–such a hideous replacement of virile & sound-heritaged stock by whipped, cringing, furtive dregs & offscourings–that I don’t see how anyone can live long in it without sickening.

H. P. Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, 1 Jul 1927, Letters with Donald & Howard Wandrei 84

The fact is, Lovecraft was not predominantly talking about the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or any other Asian nationality or ethnicty whose immigrants came to New York: he was talking about Jews. While it seems weird to us today to talk about Jews as “Orientals,” the stereotypes of the early 20th century often considered Jewish peoples to have immigrated from, or be descended from people who immigrated from, the Near East, Middle East, or Central Asia (particularly with regards to the Khazar hypothesis, which Lovecraft seems to have picked up in New York). This identification is made much more explicit in other letters, where Lovecraft directly references the supposed Asian origins of Jews—and the best that can be said about those prejudices is that Lovecraft wasn’t being uniquely horrible, but was reflecting a very common way of “othering” Jewish immigrants and Jewish-Americans.

The odd thing about the Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves that Lovecraft encountered on his travels is that he generally did not despise their existence. He accepted the existence of non-Anglo-American cultures, and even stated his admiration for what little he knew of Chinese and Japanese culture in many letters; he also vociferously didn’t want those cultures to spread or intrude on what he saw as white American culture. A self-contained enclave was preferable to the great American Melting Pot. While he never said it in such words, Lovecraft didn’t mind the Chinese in Chinatown anymore than he would have minded the Chinese in China.

That was part of Lovecraft’s rationale for his hatred of New York—the idea that it had once been an American city and that now all the (particularly Jewish) immigrants had come in and taken over; so that it had effectively ceased to be American by his standards (although a glance at the census might have enlightened Lovecraft to the fact that there weren’t quite as many Jews in New York as he thought). In a later letter, Lovecraft wrote:

I freely admitted that the nascent replacement-culture of New York might have as much potential intrinsic merit as any other culture, & that the centuries might conceivably refine & develop it into something of unique excellence–as interesting & non-repugnant to us as Chinese or Saracenic culture.

H. P. Lovecraft to Donald A. Wollheim, 9 Jul 1935, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 308

Lovecraft’s experience of Chinese culture was limited to what he had read in books, the art he had seen in museums, and his brief trips to Chinatowns in Providence, Boston, and New York; he was as much a tourist as any diner in a Chinese restaurant in the United States, and the “exotic” atmosphere of carved and gilded balconies, delicate Japanese prints, and the music of bamboo flutes was his main expectation. In many ways, this expectation of the exotic remains in American culture, from the decor at American Chinese restaurants to the busloads of tourists who visit the various Chinatowns around the country—or, if that is insufficiently real, perhaps to the China Pavilion at Epcot Center in Orlando.

What needs to be understood about Lovecraft’s racism and his experience with Chinatowns is that this was by and large the limit of his experience with Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans. Social and legal discrimination in the United States had helped segregate Asian peoples in these few cities, and in these few parts of cities—his experience, and his prejudices, were not unique. Lovecraft’s asiaphobia and asiaphilia were informed by and reflected the culture he was a part of.

Those same stereotypes still inform aspects of our experiences today, even though the Asiatic Barred Zone Act has long been abolished. Many of us are still tourists with notions of an exotic Orient that reduces the real people and cultures, fascinating in their history and variety, down to a handful of set roles and expectations. Lovecraft’s Chinatown visits neither cured nor exacerbated his prejudices; he neither feared and hated the Asian-Americans he met nor fell in love with them. At best, these visits expanded his world, at least a little…and perhaps in our own lives, if we visit Chinatown, we might appreciate them for what they are and have been, instead of being disappointed that they don’t live up to the fantasies of opium dens and tong wars that were dated even when Lovecraft strolled those streets.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

A Brazilian Looks At Lovecraft

A Brazilian Looks At Lovecraft
by Davi Braid

It was a strange night in Michigan. The gibbous moon lurked behind tenebrous clouds. A barely illuminated terrene town was slowly recovering from the fetid consequences of a cacodaemoniacal college party. Eldritch shadows followed the rhythm of ululating winds, forming a blasphemous image of a chthonian forest at the horizon. Ignored by a lonely exchange student, a cup of the local, noxious coffee was getting cold by the window of a noisome hotel.

For some reason, that cup of coffee caused me to panic. Its horrible taste was a clear indicator of how far this place was from home. I had no friends, no family, no coworkers, and I kept asking myself the reason behind that trip. The original plan was to find personal growth out of my comfort zone. It was not working as intended, though.

The hotel room did not have much to offer, so my free time was spent observing the town from afar and reading. It was fun and exciting at first, but it didn’t last long. The cultural differences, the lack of a deeper connection to people, and the constant feeling of being an outsider are things that hit hard when you are entirely by yourself.

Due to being isolated and depressed, my mind would constantly spiral down into nearly inescapable cycles of fear and nihilism. Socializing is an activity that demands a lot of effort from introverts, and the trouble of trying that in a foreign culture was a great excuse to never do it at all. It seems that being a foreigner was not necessarily a charming characteristic in a small town where half the population was college kids.

Even within the Latino community, it was tough being Brazilian. We speak Portuguese, not Spanish, so there is a language barrier that prevents us from completely fitting in. It is hard to think of a moment that felt worse than being among many other foreigners from South America and feeling like an outcast.

I do not remember exactly how or when Lovecraft’s tales really caught my interest for the first time. After researching gloomy things, taken by desperation and anxiety, the concept Cosmic Horror found its way into the screen of my laptop. I never liked horror as a genre, but the title “The Outsider” caught my eye for obvious reasons. On top of that, something about unknown entities that overshadow mundane problems felt weirdly comforting at that point.

The story failed to impress me with its simplistic structure and a generic monster. However, the ending hit me as no written story has ever done before:

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

Thoughts about the pointlessness of living when death is certain were just some of my recurring demons, which didn’t make me popular at parties. The outsider never belonged, and the monster was not hunting him. The narrator did not see itself as the ghoulish shade of decay that it was. This horror story was my polished glass.

That ending was digested by my brain and became the first step toward a life-long obsession with cosmic horror. Solitude in a small room was not an issue for someone who had just opened the Necronomicon. The observer triggered a long introspection that resulted in a few failed attempts to socialize, turning this newly found genre into the best way to escape reality and self-pity.

One must wonder how many demons Lovecraft had. The themes of his writings were painfully clear. Narrators were always finding out horrific truths, and madness was the natural state of those who see the world for what it is. Convinced of the lack of meaning in life, I became one of his characters. On the other hand, reading his characters was about to turn me back into a functional person.

A sudden sense of urgency—acquired after reading “Dagon”—caused me to slowly break out of an old delusion. Happy, inaccurate memories of a big city chased me to the other hemisphere, much like the old ones chased the narrator:

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

With the help of my thanatophobia, the old one by the window caused the panic attack that shaped my following days. The end was near, time was limited, and nothing was being done. How can someone take control of their future when shackled by insecurity and hopelessness?

After so many of his tales, Lovecraft’s antediluvian view of the world became painfully obvious in “The Horror at Red Hook.” Luckily, I was about to get lectured by them:

The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.

I was not an immigrant, but it would hardly have mattered to him. Being a descendant of Native, Scottish, and Portuguese people myself, tangled enigma was an excellent definition of my heritage. Besides, Brazil is a melting pot. Consequently, it is a tangled enigma, as the writer himself defined. Funny enough, taking offense was not my first reaction. Building anger towards an author from two centuries ago due to his outdated views felt like a pointless mental effort.

The descriptions used by the author for certain ethnicities are revealing. They seem to echo how he talks about monsters and gods—as if everything was otherworldly and incomprehensible. Maybe he was afraid of what was different and unknown. Not understanding other languages being spoken in his own country clearly disturbed him somehow: “From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky.”

Digging into his correspondences and stories, I ended up finding something disturbing in one of his letters:

It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly & schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid & their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semitic before I had been at Hope Street many days.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 72

To my surprise, he married a Jewish woman who shared his passion for literature. At that point, a lambent idea crawled its way into my outré neurons. If Lovecraft shared the same hobbies and passions with an immigrant, would he dislike that person the same way? What if people could see how much they had in common instead of how different they were? And that’s when it hit me: What if I started looking for things I had in common with others instead of reminding them of our differences?

I used to think of myself as a unique, awake person who could see the world for what it is—a cyclopean blasphemy—and therefore, there was no point in trying to enjoy my time on earth. It turns out that person was just a socially impaired snob who constantly reminded others of how different he was. Fortunately, “The Horror At Red Hook” pushed some sense into my head in a peculiar way.

We are all people aimlessly navigating life, trying to make the most of it. If I have my doubts and fears, chances are other humans do too. Instead of trying to stand out as the eccentric foreigner, my approach was changed to “I like that too,” which changed not only my experience in the United States but my whole life as well. 

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of weird cultural barriers to be dealt with. Nonetheless, putting some effort into breaching those barriers proved to be a much better way to make meaningful connections. Colleagues slowly became friends, and friends presented me to a whole new world and lifestyle. 

Michigan was quite life-changing, and I miss my time there so much. I ended up loving snow, hockey, Detroit, and much of the local culture. I went to college parties, had terrific burgers, and even learned how to shoot a gun—although I passed on hunting. I made friends, built a professional network, and even helped many newcomers to feel welcomed.

My introversion never left me, and it will not be going anywhere. The process of changing that old behavior into something more productive took months, yet I managed to get there. It never stopped being a conscious effort, but it was a significant improvement. Ironically, all that happened thanks to a xenophobic, antisemitic man who wrote horror stories.

Besides leaving me with a life lesson, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was also the reason behind my regained interest in Brazilian legends. Many of my country’s backcountry myths inspired me to return to fiction writing, giving it a Lovecraftian spin.

When I’m having a really bad day, I return to “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Someone like me is never truly free from old, obdurate demons. Maybe he wrote them down to take them out of his mind. Reading those stories reminds me that there is much more in the world to be seen and discovered, rekindling my passion for life itself.

It is possible that he would not be pleased with how his unearthly entities helped a Brazilian student to fit in the United States. Especially considering what he used to think of my country—or most countries, according to what he wrote in a letter:

If this nation ever becomes really composite; if the polyglot lower elements ever rise to the surface and direct the destinies of the whole people, then the United States will have undergone intellectual and moral death, and must be content to take its inferior place beside Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and other decidedly immigrant nations. For the glory of the world is the glory of England. […] If other nationalities are now represented here, it is only on sufferance. They are charity boarders, as it were. For this is an Englishman’s country.

H. P. Lovecraft to John Dunn, 14 Oct 1916, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 166

Being a polyglot myself, this was the first time I ever read this word in such a negative connotation. Not having to deal with people like him was possibly pure luck. Sure, I was in several uncomfortable situations here and there. Some people wanted to try their Spanish with me as if it was my first language, and some others thought I lived in a jungle, but it felt more like ignorance than anything else.

In the end, all the situations that I had to endure were nothing like what happened to the Saudi Arabian kids. Most North Americans would actively avoid them because of their country of origin, even though they were perfectly nice and polite young men. Truth be told, It was heartbreaking to watch, which caused me to constantly check on them. In their case, as Lovecraft stated, they were there on sufferance.

I do not admire the man, just what came out of his imagination and personal fears. I read his stories during a vulnerable moment, but what I took from them is my merit. There is no point in spending any energy deliberating on his archaic opinions. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is long gone, and I have my whole life ahead of me. 

Davi Braid is a Brazilian freelance writer and a games journalist who often gets out of his niche to write about different and exciting topics. Although he does not like horror stories, Cosmic Horror fascinates him like no other kind of fiction. You can contact him via email at danobra@gmail.com or find more of his work at https://davibraid.journoportfolio.com/

Copyright 2022 Davi Braid

Her Letters To Clark Ashton Smith: C. L. Moore

There is no volume of The Selected Letters of C. L. Moore, and perhaps there never will be. Like many pulp authors that achieved more lasting and commercial success during her life than peers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Moore’s longevity has been coupled with a relative paucity of critical interest in her life and letters. Lovecraft and Howard both benefited from scholarly attention, if mostly by fans, while they remained within living memory…but Moore died in 1987, and if any concerted effort was made to interview her relatives, friends, and peers or otherwise document her life, it has not yet come to light.

Which makes Moore difficult to research. While her surviving letters with H. P. Lovecraft have been published by Hippocampus Press as Letters to C. L. Moore and Others (2017), this is almost all of her correspondence that has been published. More letters remain in university archives, and possibly in private hands, but the lack of easy access to these letters limits critical and biographical research into Moore’s life and work. Information on her life is thus slow to emerge into the popular consciousness, and to answer even simple questions often requires collating data from different sources.

For example: did C. L. Moore correspond with Clark Ashton Smith?

Without a collection of Moore’s correspondence, a researcher’s first stop might be The Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith (2003, Arkham House)—and they might come away disappointed; not only are there no letters from Smith to Moore in the book, but there are very few references to Moore or her fiction. Continuing on in this line, a researcher might look at the other collections of Smith’s letters to see if there is any further reference to Moore or evidence of a correspondence with her—given that Moore popped onto the Weird Tales scene in 1933 with the publication of “Shambleau,” collections of correspondence before this date like The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith (2005, Hippocampus Press) and Born Under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith (2021, Hippocampus Press) do us no good. Collections of Smith’s correspondence with his Weird Tales peers Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (2020, Hippocampus Press) and Eccentric, Impractical Devils: The Letters of August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith (2020, Hippocampus Press) have some mentions of Moore, but relatively few and nothing about a correspondence.

While there is nothing direct in Smith’s letters about correspondence with Moore, we can infer a few things:

First, Moore and Smith had mutual friends and correspondents in H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert H. Barlow, Henry Kuttner, and probably others. This is evident by their surviving letters to or references to correspondence to these mutuals.

Two, the lack of any mention of a correspondence in Smith’s surviving letters suggests that if there was a correspondence between Smith and Moore, it probably wasn’t extensive or involved. This is not a great surprise: both Smith and Moore were known to sometimes have long gaps between answering letters in the 1930s, and if they didn’t hit it off right away one or the other might easily have dropped a correspondence, even one who was friends with other friends. While a short correspondence could be easily lost (as not all letters from Smith, Lovecraft, etc. survive), a longer correspondence is more likely to have been mentioned in letters to their friends.

Third, when Henry Kuttner died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1958, Smith wrote to Derleth for details—and neither Smith or Derleth ever mention C. L. Moore, who had married Kuttner in 1940 and was still his wife. This suggests that Smith was probably not then corresponding with or closely associated with Moore; if he was, he would either have written to her directly (no need to ask Derleth) or asked after her. Since Smith did not mention Moore at all, it suggests he was unaware of the connection, or at least not in contact with Moore and Kuttner.

As it happens, there is evidence that Moore and Smith corresponded briefly in the 1930s. For this we have to look at the only readily available source of her letters, her correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft:

Also have just written Clark Ashton Smith for a copy of his “Double Shadow, etc.” the advertisement for which you enclosed in your last letter. He is another fantasy writer whose work it is such a pleasure to read, and for almost opposite reasons from those that make R. E. Howard’s writing so good. Exquisite and fantastic enough to lift one clear out of the present. I’m awfully flad of the opportunity to get more of his work to read.

C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 24 Apr 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 31

The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933, Auburn Journal) was a privately-printed chapbook that was one of Smith’s efforts at remunerative self-publication, with copies to Robert E. Howard, R. H. Barlow, and others sold by mail—Lovecraft helped distribute the advertising flyers among his group of correspondents. This would be a natural start to their brief correspondence, and we know Smith wrote her back:

I am expecting the CAS “Double Shadow, etc.” any day now. I had a note from him Saturday saying it was on the way. Yes, Barlow has lent me “Ebony and Crystal” and the “Hashish-Eater” is haunting me still. I am so sorry for people who don’t like that sort of thing—they miss such an awful lot! There must be very few people who can produce prose, poetry and drawings of such superlative quality.

C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 7 May 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 35

Ebony and Crystal (1922, Auburn Journal) was an early collection of Smith’s fantastic poetry, which included the epic poem “The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil,” whose opening line gave Smith one of his epithets: “Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;” according to further letters to Lovecraft, Moore received her copy of The Double Shadow in May, and finished it before the 27th (Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 41-42).

Moore does not mention anything further about correspondence with Smith for some months, and it may be the two fantasists did not continue to write one another after the sale was complete. Smith, for his part, was increasingly occupied with his mother’s failing health during this period and went weeks or months without answering letters. This would seem to be supported by the final reference in her letters to Lovecraft, written when he informed Moore of the death of Fanny Gaylord Smith, Clark’s mother, on 9 September 1935:

I was sorry to hear about Mr. Smith’s mother. I had a debate with myself whether to write, since we have exchanged a note or two, but decided not to both because our correspondence has been so brief and formal, and because in his place I think I’d rather not hear from anyone or be reminded at all of such a bereavement.

C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 16 Oct 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 69

Which is, as far as can be ascertained at this point, the end of it. We might conjecture whys and wherefores Smith and Moore did not renew their correspondence—with Robert E. Howard’s death in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft’s death in 1937 their major correspondent in common would probably have been R. H. Barlow, and after Lovecraft’s death Smith and Barlow would have a falling-out—but we don’t know. Perhaps they did write to one another sometime in the 40s or 50s, and the letters simply haven’t come to light yet; but for the most part, even though Moore’s marriage with Kuttner would bring her to California where Smith was, the orbits of their careers seem to have shifted.

As far as we know, all of their correspondence was limited to a couple of notes in 1935, and we are fortunate to be able to say that much, given the limited materials on C. L. Moore currently available.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

“Up from Slavery” (2019) by Victor LaValle

They had done the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the “shoggoths” in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.

H. P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”

Slavery was a part of Lovecraft’s heritage. While his immediate family never owned any slaves or showed any inclination to, the oldest of his aunts could remember the American Civil War and emancipation; Lovecraft himself was well aware of the part slavery had played in his own native Rhode Island, and liked to remind correspondents that his ancestor Robert Hazard had left 133 slaves in his will.

When Lovecraft wrote his alien entities, the two most detailed civilizations—the Old Ones in Antarctica in At the Mountains of Madness and the people of K’n-yan in The Mound—they were both defined by slave ownership. Why isn’t exactly clear; the exact forms of slavery involved were both like and unlike the chattel slavery of the American system or the slavery practiced by civilizations like the Romans in antiquity. There was no way for slaves in Lovecraft’s stories to earn freedom, and in fact much of the economics and social ramifications of slavery are unexamined…except for one: as in the antebellum South, the Old Ones and K’n-yans lived in the shadow of a slave revolt.

Victor LaValle’s “Up from Slavery” is a riff on an uncommon theme; a companion piece in many ways to “Shoggoths in Bloom” (2008) by Elizabeth Bear. In both stories, the experience of Black people in America, who deal every day with the legacy of slavery, draws parallels with the plight of the shoggoths.

“You were born to serve,” he said. “It’s genetic.”

Victor LaValle, “Up from Slavery” in Lovecraft Mythos New & Classic Edition 217

In many ways, the slavery of the shoggoths is closer to that of replicants in Blade Runner than to what is described in the first chapter of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901)—but the overall morality is identical. Whether a sentient being is kidnapped and forced into service, or grown in a lab and made to serve, the end result is the same. Because of this, slavery narratives work for shoggoth characters. No one has written Uncle Tekeli-Li’s Cabin yet, and maybe never will, but there is real empathy for shoggoth characters who run away from slavery, or fight back to avoid being returned to a state of slavery.

That is important because in a lot of ways the protagonist Simon Dust is unlikable. He carries a big chip on his shoulder, and not without reason. The world through his eyes is stacked against him because of his race. It colors his interaction with others, and his response to little things…people not sitting next to him on the train, muted anger at discovering he has a father after 29 years as an orphan who grew up in foster care, the white neighbor’s disbelief when he shows up. It is familiar territory; LaValle explored the Black experience in his novella “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) as well, and he is excellent at presenting an individual who has labored all their life under a sword of Damocles, and has to deal with a thousand little microaggressions every day or face the consequences.

It is weird to think that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) were contemporaries…but their lives did overlap, even if they did not intersect. LaValle’s use of Washington’s autobiography helps ground Dust’s experience, and that of the shoggoths. Up from slavery shows that being born into slavery may only be the first chapter of someone’s life, even if the experiences and scars of that first chapter stay with them. Likewise, we may say that though Lovecraft may have written slavery into his Mythos, that too is only the first chapter in the saga of the shoggoths, and there is much more that may be written.

“Up from Slavery” by Victor LaValle first appeared in Weird Tales #363 (2019) and was reprinted in Lovecraft Mythos New & Classic Edition (2020), The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (2020), and Nightmare Magazine #100 (Jan 2021). The story won the 2019 Bram Stoker award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).