Lovecraft y Negrito (2023) by Dolores Alcatena

Racist Language
This review concerns H. P. Lovecraft’s cat, whose name was a racial slur against Black people.
As part of this review, the cat’s name and variations are included. Reader discretion advised.

The first known reference to H. P. Lovecraft’s cat was in a letter from his grandfather when Lovecraft was only 5 years old:

You and Dumplin Mama must keep the Barn shut every night and take care of Nig.
—Whipple Van Buren Phillips to H. P. Lovecraft, 17 Oct 1895, Letters to Family & Family Friends 2.1046

“Nig” was short for “Niggerman.” It was a black cat, at a time when the N-word was relatively common for pets with black coats. Whether it was Lovecraft who named the kitten, or a family member or friend, is not recorded in any of Lovecraft’s letters. It was his childhood pet—and, as it happened, the only pet he could afford during his life, although he retained a great fondness for cats throughout his life, often petting or playing with strays. In 1904, Whipple Van Buren Phillips died. Lovecraft’s family home was sold, he and his mother moved away from his childhood home, and the cat disappeared during the tumult, never seen again.

Lovecraft remembered his feline companion in later years, and based two cats in his stories on his lost pet: Niggerman in “The Rats in the Walls,” and Nig in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Neither appearance caused any particular outcry at the time of publication; Weird Tales was no stranger to the N-word and other terms, and it was not until “The Rats in the Walls” (1956) that any serious effort was made to censor or bowdlerize the cat’s name. Works in translation and adaptation were more likely to change the name; different languages, with different histories regarding race relations and Black slavery, have their own nuances of language to give shades of meaning or seek to avoid giving offense.

In 2023, Argentinian illustrator and writer Dolores’ Alcatena published Lovecraft y Negrito, a short graphic novel about Lovecraft’s friendship with his beloved pet. As she puts it in the opening:

Como amante de los gatos, Howard Philips Lovecraft frecuentemente incluía en sus relatos a estos elegantes y misteriosos animalitos. En su estilo deliberadamente desamorado y serio, los describía como símbolos de perfección, estética, libertad e independencia. Pero entre las cartas del escritor aparece Niggerman, un gatito negro que acompañaba a Lovecraft en su niñez. Al hablar de Niggerman (rebautizado ‘Negrito” para esta obra) las palabras del autor asumían un tono cálido, recordando con ternura cómo jugaban juntos en el jardín. Al hablar del gatito, el escritor no pudo, o no quiso, esconder sus sentimientos. El cariño que Lovecraft mantuvo a lo largo de su vida por Niggerman inspiró esta historia, permitiéndonos acceder a un costado más humano del gran autor del horror.

As a cat lover, Howard Philips Lovecraft often included these elegant and mysterious animals in his stories. In his deliberately dispassionate and serious style, he described them as symbols of perfection, aesthetics, freedom, and independence. But among the writer’s letters appears Niggerman, a black kitten who accompanied Lovecraft in his boyhood. When talking about Niggerman (renamed “Negrito” for this work), the author’s words took on a warm tone, fondly recalling how they played together in the garden. When talking about the kitten, the writer could not, or did not want to, hide his feelings. Lovecraft’s lifelong affection for Niggerman inspired this story, allowing us to glimpse a more human side of the great horror author.

Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)

English translation

“Negro” in Spanish is the color black, “-ito” is a diminutive suffix; context is important because in some usages “negrito” can mean bold type, or it can be a reference to certain Southeast Asian peoples, or a not-necessarily-kind reference to small Black children. In the context of this story, it might be best to think of it as a term of affection, like naming a black kitten “Blackie.”

Su gato, Negrito, lo acompaña. Y, como siempre, lo cuida.	His cat, Negrito, accompanies him. And, as always, takes care of him.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation

The story is told in black and white, mostly from Negrito’s perspective. The cat aids and protects Howard through his journeys, including the events that would inspire “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” From a cat’s perspective, the cat-killing couple in Ulthar are particularly horrific.

“Ningún hombre debería matar a un gato” Pensó el niño mientras recordaba a Negrito ronroneando frente al fuego.	“No man should kill a cat,” the boy thought as he remembered Negrito purring in front of the fire.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation

There is a somewhat fairy-tale quality to the retelling, the traipse through Lovecraft’s fiction. Most of Howard’s waking life we don’t see…but then his cat was not there to see that.

Qué suerte que Negrito siempre había estado en esos momentos.	How lucky that Negrito had always been there in those moments.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation

The Lovecraft of these stories is a scared, almost a traumatized kid, with Negrito as his only friend; parental figures are absent. It is a very sympathetic view of Howard as a child, but in comparison to El Joven Lovecraft by José Oliver & Bartolo Torres it does not show Lovecraft’s occasional joyfully morbid side. Readers are meant to empathize with a young Lovecraft.

The ending, a wordless reunion between the dead Lovecraft and his lost cat, is the kind of afterlife that every cat-lover might wish to experience themselves someday.

Es un tributo muy distintivo ser elegido como amigo y confidente de un gato. H. P. Lovecraft.	It is a very distinctive tribute to be chosen as a friend and confidant of a cat. H. P. Lovecraft.	It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such an one more agreeable and interesting.
Dolores Alcatena, Lovecraft y Negrito (2023)	English translation	H. P. Lovecraft, “Cats and Dogs”

Lovecraft y Negrito is a story about a boy and his cat. It is not a historical work that delves into the nuances of the cultural forces that went into such names, or how naming cats did or did not reflect Lovecraft’s racial prejudices in later life. If readers want a scholarly exploration of what we do and don’t know about the real animal, check out Ken Faig’s essay “Lovecraft’s Boyhood Cat” in Lovecraft Annual #19 (2025). If you want a heartwarming fantasy about Lovecraft and his beloved pet, which has gained a kind of literary immortality, then read Lovecraft y Negrito.

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

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London Lovecraft: Volume I (2023) by TL Wiswell

Festival shows are, sadly, an ephemeral lot. While some lead to full length plays, TV shows, or even films, most of them rise and fall with their creators, and said creators’ energy and willingness to sacrifice time and money getting their works on stage. This is especially sad for fans of Lovecraft, who are most receptive to works that expand the canon. It is hoped that this slim book of scripts can in some way help these plays reach a larger audience that they were able to when they were originally performed.
—Introduction, London Lovecraft: Volume I, 4

The London Lovecraft Festival has been running since 2018, though the annual festivities were interrupted by the Covid 19 pandemic. A key part of the festivities are the dramatic or theatrical presentations, which expand on or re-cast Lovecraft’s familiar works in a new light. In 2023, four of these brief plays by LLF founding producer TL Wiswell were collected into an independently-published book by Vulcanello Productions.

Each of the four works is a specific riff off a familiar Lovecraft story, condensed and adapted into short plays with typically 2 or 3 main characters. The connecting theme is that the stories are altered to focus on the female characters, either expanding on the roles and thoughts of existing characters or by gender-flipping characters (so Herbert West may become Albertina, for example).

Other writers have had similar ideas, such as in HPL 1920 (2020) by Nick O’Gorman & Tales from the Cthulhuverse #1 (2020) by Zee Romero & Luca Cicognola, but the play as a format shifts how a story can be told, and tends to zero in on the relationship between the characters portrayed by the actors. It actually works rather well for Lovecraft’s fiction as passages of expository narration in his work can be just that, whereas in comics or film they tend to cutaway into flashbacks.

Much of the stories also have to be removed, the plot boiled down and simplified to what can feasibly be acted or narrated on a small stage at a budget. That kind of condensation is an art unto itself, and as adaptations go, Wiswell treads the fine line between faithfulness, practicality, and originality.

Mountains of Madness

CHARACTERS:
Dr Willa Dyer – Geologist
Dr Pomona Peabodie – Engineering
Frances Danforth – graduate student, engineering

Setting: 1928. A lecture hall at Miskatonic University, set up with a film projector and a gramophone. WILLA DYER is behind the podium addressing the audience as if they are the audience of her lecture. All people referred to are substantially only present in her memories: Peabodie is dead; Danforth has gone mad.
—Introduction, London Lovecraft: Volume I, 10

The Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness was implicitly all white men; the reimagined expedition of Wiswell’s play took place in the decade prior. The all-female expedition raises no more comment than the all-male one did for the bulk of readers. Much of the grand cosmic backstory of the Old Ones is truncated in summation—as it would be, during a lecture—and neatly bypassed Dyer’s exclamation “They were men!” in Lovecraft’s version.

Much of this short play consists of long monologues by Dyer and Peabodie, with brief interjections by Danforth; shifts in light and focus emphasize when one character is speaking from the past (as when a recording of the dead Peabodie “plays” on the gramophone). It is an effective truncation, and shows how gender need not shape every role in one of Lovecraft’s stories.

Asenath’s Tale

CHARACTERS:
Viola Danforth
Asenath Waite Derby

Setting: New England, 1962

Suggested stage setup: two armchairs with a table between them, upon which rests a phone.
—Introduction, London Lovecraft: Volume I, 28

“The Thing on the Doorstep” features one of the more famous of Lovecraft’s women characters, Asenath Waite—but the depiction is somewhat married because of the unique gender dynamics of Waite in that story, as discussed by Joe Koch in Must I Wear This Corpse For You?: H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937), among others. Wiswell doesn’t shy away from this; rather, she puts Asenath’s identity as a woman, and her friendship with Viola Danforth, at the center of the story.

Reading about Asenath Waite as a child in Innsmouth, her relationship with her father and with the other children, an insight into her heritage in Innsmouth, provides a humanizing perspective that is completely absent in Lovecraft’s story—where the reader never “meets” Asenath as she was in youth, but only later, as an adult, with all that implies. Wiswell makes the most of the sexism expressed by Ephraim Waite in Lovecraft’s story to frame a contentious relationship between father and daughter that goes all too badly wrong.

There is something more poignant about “Asenath’s Tale” than “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Edward Derby is almost a born victim in Lovecraft’s story, and his final act of rebellion is late in the game. Wiswell’s story with its light-hearted banter becomes something more like a tragedy; the events unfold, unstoppable, and though the players on the stage can only read their parts, those who know in the audience can see their brief, fleeting happiness and friendship for what it is: the prelude to horror.

Albertina West: Reanimator

CHARACTERS:
Dr Albertina West
Dr Isabel Milburn
The Undead: The animated corpses of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee and others.

All scenes set in a laboratory with a dissecting table and a sitting room in front, in Scotland and France (or maybe Belgium)

Time: 1890-1922
—Introduction, London Lovecraft: Volume I, 50

From a narrative standpoint, “Herbert West—Reanimator” is really six brief episodes strung out like an old film serial; it’s why each individual episode ends with a mini-climax, and might be separated by months or years in time. Adapting that to the stage or screen is tricky; when Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris, and Stuart Gordon put together the screenplay for Re-Animator (1985), they ended up jettisoning entire episodes while burning through the plot to fit a tightly-paced 86-minute runtime.

Wiswell’s approach rearranges the episodes in favor of focusing on a narrower thread of plot: the friendship of West and her assistant Milburn, and reanimation of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee during World War I, and the aftermath. Zeroing-in on this particular plotline has a lot of benefit, because it gives West an effective antagonist to play against, a monster of her own creation, not unlike Frankenstein‘s Adam.

More than that, though, it gives Bertie West’s usually nameless, gormless, and racist assistant (and the narrator of the story in Lovecraft’s version) an identity. The fact that they’re women medical doctors during the late 19th and early 20th century actually gets a bit of attention, which is nice; while these are stories to address the gender gap in Lovecraft rather than historical societal trends to misogyny as a whole, Bertie’s nod to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and the restrictions of women in higher education and medical practice is appropriate for the character and the setting.

Period prejudice with regard to race, on the other hand, is out. Much as with “Kanye West—Reanimator” (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky vs. “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon, we get a version of the seen of a reanimated corpse with a baby’s arm dangling out of its mouth, but the race of the reanimated is not explicitly mentioned. Horror is mixed with bathos at this point, as Milburn and West trade quips and bon mots in a style that owes a bit more to a deranged P. G. Wodehouse than H. P. Lovecraft.

More than pretty much any other of Lovecraft’s stories “Herbert West—Reanimator” seems hard to play straight; the potential for over-the-top gore and dark humor has been made too apparent.

The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath

Unlike the others, this adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was done in collaboration with experimental musician Shivers (Sam Enthoven) and takes the form of a puppet show, narrated and accompanied by music. An audio production of the production is available on Bandcamp.

Randolph Carter has become Miranda Carter, but the gist of the plot and the character are the same as in Lovecraft’s story—albeit with a little more humor.

As she turned to go, Carter wondered why the Zoogs had stopped pursuing her. Then she noticed all the complacent cats of Ulthar licking their chops. She recalled, too, the hungry way a young Zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the street outside. And because she loved nothing on Earth more than small black kittens, she did not mourn the Zoogs.
—London Lovecraft: Volume I, 68

Puppetry, especially shadow puppetry, can be singularly evocative; action that could not be feasibly acted out can be implied, with the audience’s imagination filling in the gaps. As with most of the other stories, Carter’s gender plays little role in how the events play out; it’s a change of face, but the core of Lovecraft’s tale and characterization remains intact.

While all of these plays are competently written and I’d like to see them performed sometime, the best are doubtless “Asenath’s Tale” and “Albertina West: Reanimator” specifically because those are the two stories that diverge most from Lovecraft’s characterization, while keeping true to his plots, and thus add some new dimension to the old stories.

At the moment there does not appear to be any way to purchase copies of London Lovecraft: Volume I (2023) except directly from the author. TL Wiswell was kind enough to sell me a copy during their visit to NecronomiCon Providence 2024, and I appreciate the chance to add to my small store of Lovecraftian plays, alongside works like Lovecraft’s Follies (1971).

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) by Kij Johnson

In a land defined by dreaming men and bickering gods, there were no sure rules, but there was also no certain randomness.
—Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe 133-134

You don’t have to have read Lovecraft or Dunsany to appreciate The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. Without those references, it is still a very competent fantasy novelette. Johnson has a good eye for detail, characterization, description; the plot moves quick, never gets hung up too long in one place, one peril. Vellitt Boe is on a mission, after all.

That being said, without the historical context of Lovecraft and Dunsany, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is in danger of being misunderstood as a generic fantasy novel, of the sort inspired by a thousand sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, or Fighting Fantasy. This comes almost as a consequence of how you get from Lord Dunsany to Kij Johnson, and to really appreciate what she is doing in this novelette and how it got there requires a bit of background.

H. P. Lovecraft discovered Lord Dunsany in 1919. The Anglo-Irish peer had created an artificial mythology in his tales of Pegāna, which would inspire Lovecraft’s own mythos, and the stories of “Beyond the Fields We Know” in Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919) including “Idle Days on the Yann” and “The Shop in Go-By Street” would lay the groundwork for Lovecraft’s Dreamlands.

It is important to remember that Lovecraft built his Mythos over time, defining and re-defining it as time went on and other influences came to bear. “The Cats of Ulthar” (written June 1920) was not originally set in the Dreamlands; it was a generic fantasy. The first actual Dreamlands story was “Celephaïs” (written November 1920). In later fiction, these early fantasies and their names and geographies would be subsumed into the Dreamlands—and the “Dream Cycle” with its vagaries and contradictions (were exactly is Leng?) have given compilers of Mythos-lore much to chew on and argue about.

Randolph Carter came into existence in 1919 as well, in “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” This early story had nothing to do with the Dreamlands either; Lovecraft recorded a dream in his letters involving himself and his friend Samuel Loveman. In turning the dream into a story, Loveman became “Hartley Warren” and Lovecraft himself became “Randolph Carter.” The character became a self-identified counterpart for Lovecraft himself in his stories, though he appeared in only a few of them, notably “The Silver Key” (1926), which is the only one that was a Dreamlands tale until The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (written 1926-1927).

Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest is fundamentally different from anything he wrote before or since. Maybe that is why in part it found no publication during his lifetime. Too long, too weird, too inexplicably full of adventure—it is this novelette which binds together Lovecraft’s “dream” stories, early fantasies, and Randolph Carter stories. Without Dream-Quest, you could argue the Dreamlands are still a part of the Mythos, but places like Ulthar wouldn’t be a part of it. This was the story that really gave the scope and connective tissue that bound much of Lovecraft’s early fiction together. In structure and conception, it is much more similar to David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) or E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922) than anything else.

There aren’t really any women in it.

Which is true for much more of Lovecraft’s fiction than just The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. As discussed in Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft does have female characters in his stories, but the gender balance is distinctly skewed towards male characters. In large part, this seems to be simply because Lovecraft seldom made a character female unless there was a reason for her to be female. Which is why the only absolute reference to women in Dream-Quest is:

It is known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the daughters of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood.

That’s it. There are other references to women in some of the other stories, if you look hard enough—the cat-killing wife in “The Cats of Ulthar” for example—but for the most part, women are implicit. Priests, but no priestesses. “Men” as a generic term for all persons of every gender, in the very 18th century sense. Rapacious gods of the Greco-Roman school, but no lusty goddesses bedding the handsome young men around Kadath.

It was in this context that Kij Johnson wrote her own Dream-Quest, and it is in many ways both a continuation of the tradition of Dunsany and Lovecraft, and a reflection on those works.

And I must of course acknowledge Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whether I could make adult sense of it.
—Kij Johnson, “Acknowledgements” in The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe 167

Johnson did the work, sifted the stories. The story is set between “The Silver Key” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”; it references Lovecraft’s geography and zoology, but also subtly grounds and expands them. The Dreamlands are seen through the eyes of a native, an intelligent and experienced woman who knows more of how things work and finds delight in them. The skill of her construction is such that she never needs to cite a story specifically; it is never written that “In Ulthar no man may kill a cat,” because the idea is implicit in the story: no one even thinks of trying to kill a cat in Ulthar. It simply doesn’t come up. More amusingly and refreshingly, we get little anecdotes like how a young Vellitt Boe tried to climb Hatheg-Kla under the logic that it was only said no man could climb it. A neat bit which feels a bit like Éowyn taking a swing at the Witch-King of Angmar.

The story is at its best when it is showing rather than telling. Why not a woman’s college in Ulthar? Why not a female far-traveler? Nothing in Randolph Carter’s dream-quest required him to have a penis, so what’s to stop a woman from having her own adventure in the Dreamlands? Absolutely nothing.

The story is arguably at its weakest when it stops showing and starts telling.

She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it.

“Women don’t dream large dreams,” he had said, dismissively. “It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams.”

Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yet she was disappointed in Carter. Her dreams were large, of trains a mile long and ships that climbed to the stars, of learning the languages of squids and slime-molds, of crossing a chessboard the size of a city. That night and for years afterward, she had envisioned another dream land, built from the imaginings of powerful women dreamers. (ibid. 71-72)

In narrative terms, the characterization of Randolph Carter as a bit of a straw-man serves its purpose only in highlighting Boe’s struggles as a woman. Even in the Dreamlands, there are gender norms and imbalances; the women’s college of Ulthar is the youngest and most vulnerable of the seven universities, and even a hint of scandal could see it closed, upper education cut off. In that sense, Johnson needed some character to personify the casual misogyny that Boe quested against as much as anything else.

Carter as a mouthpiece is problematic mainly because he never voices such views in Lovecraft’s fiction, and as he is implicitly Lovecraft’s alter-ego (though Johnson does not make this point) it can be read as Johnson putting words in Lovecraft’s mouth. While Lovecraft did evince a few chauvinistic statements during his life, he never wrote anything like what Carter says in Johnson’s Dream-Quest. The statement (“powerful women dreamers” is a great line) needed to be made at some point, if for no other reason than it sets up the finale, but the characterization seems off; rather like Ervin Howard in “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) by Victor LaValle. If a dead horse is going to be beaten, at least beat it for something it actually did.

There is a line in the story that may be uncomfortable, but then it would be a sad world where such a line would be otherwise:

As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans. (ibid. 83)

Nothing of the act, which happened sometime in the far past, is shown. Which is good; the last thing the story needed was an exploitative recap, some trauma porn of the effect and slow recovery. The event happened, it didn’t define her. It is also not the only mention of rape in the story; Vellitt Boe is traveling mostly alone in a quasi-Early Modern fantasy world. Sexual assault need not have a gender bias (the setting rarely hints at lesbianism as a possibility, and male homosexuality is completely absent from the text) but old habits die hard. How many women traveling alone today have the same fear?

Which is perhaps the one real criticism of The Dream-Quest of Villett Boe. It is great for what it is, but if the purpose was to have a message as well tell a story, it feels like it could have been that much better. Why aren’t there any female gods in the Dreamlands? Why aren’t there any female dreamers? Johnson wasn’t obliged to stick to Lovecraft or Dunsany in every regard, and doesn’t. Yet her Dreamland is almost too close to the waking world in some of its gender constructs and mores.

You might be interested to know that at the party one very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and alien creatures. We scholars perhaps tend to forget how much subversive potential both SF and fantasy have, even at their crudest.
—Joanna Russ, To Write Like A Woman 64

Russ, of course, wrote her own Dreamlands tale: “My Boat” (1976). Ironically, Russ’s story features a powerful woman dreamer (who also happens to be black), exactly the kind of character that Villett Boe lamented never meeting in her own Dreamlands. It’s a pity that the two characters didn’t run across each other—but the tales remain complementary. The Dreamlands is big enough for both characters, and more besides.

The book is at its most subversive when just letting Vellitt Boe find her own way, rather than being escorted by guards or ghouls or rescued by gugs. The Dreamlands through her eyes is a delight, and just having a female character be the protagonist of a Dreamlands story in itself is more of a statement that See? Women can explore the Dreamlands too! than any of the casual misogyny attributed to Randolph Carter (or, implicitly, Lovecraft). If Johnson’s goal beyond writing the story was to write a Dreamlands where the women aren’t invisible and mute, she can certainly be said to have succeeded. Above and beyond that, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a very rare thing: a good Dreamlands story, written in a way that is not a pastiche of Dunsany or Lovecraft.

Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe was published in 2016 by Tor.

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

“My Boat” (1976) by Joanna Russ

I’d always thought Alan was pretty much a fruitcake himself—remember, Milty, this is 1952—because he used to read all that crazy stuff, The Cult of Cthulhu, Dagon Calls, The Horror Men of Leng—yeah, I remember that H. P. Lovecraft flick you got ten percent on for Hollywood and TV and reruns—but what did we know?
—Joanna Russ, “My Boat” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1990) 360

The trick of “My Boat” is that Joanna Russ is not telling the same story. The frame is a kind of confession, Hollywood pitch-patter, cynical and jaded and full of bad taste. The confession itself opens as a kind of bildungsroman, focused on the integration of a handful of black teenagers into a rich, all-white highschool, and one drama club kid tagging along. Then there’s the twist, with the title-drop, into straight fantasy; shades of magical realism, skirting the edges of the Dreamlands—but the narrator isn’t ready. Scoot ahead twenty years, 1972, and it’s a story about regret, missed opportunities realized at last—and the frame comes back around around, past catching up to the present.

It’s a story about lost youth. Intimately, if not directly, it’s a story about H. P. Lovecraft.

H. P. Lovecraft’s novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was never published during his lifetime. Lovecraft who was inspired by his dreams to write some of his most famous stories. Who took inspiration from Lord Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann” and built up his own cycle of stories set in a mythical Dreamlands—”The Cats of Ulthar,” “Celephaïs,” “The White Ship,” etc.—which tied back around and into his “Arkham Cycle,” stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” and At the Mountains of Madness. Yet there is a sequel to “Idle Days on the Yann,” which is echoed in Lovecraft as well:

For I thought never again to see the tide of Yann, but when I gave up politics not long ago the wings of my fancy strengthened, though they had erstwhile drooped, and I had hopes of coming behind the East once more where Yann like a proud white war-horse goes through the Lands of Dream. Yet I had forgotten the way to those little cottages on the edge of the fields we know whose upper windows, though dim with antique cobwebs, look out on the fields we know not and are the starting-point of all adventure in all the Lands of Dream.
—Lord Dunsany, “A Shop in Go-By Street”

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key”

“My Boat” is a sequel to the idea of those stories, Lovecraft and Dunsany. Like Russ’ earlier story “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) it is also self-referential. Lovecraft lived, wrote some fiction, and died. The characters are familiar with his works, at least in passing. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is just a weird novel, to a kid in 1952. A fantasy. A dream that teenagers grow out of… and that grown people might try to reclaim, once they’re older and wise enough to realize what they’d missed.

I think Cissie knew what I expected her mamma to be and what a damned fool I was, even considering your run-of-the-mill, seventeen-year-old white liberal racist, and that’s why she didn’t take me along.
—Joanna Russ, “My Boat” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1990) 369

Russ was a woman and a feminist; she was a science fiction fan and writer in a period when the majority of the writers, audience, and editors were white men—and for good measure, most of the protagonists too; their love-interests tended to blonde, whether Terran or Martian. She was a perceptive enough critic to know that, and to be able to use it. The race and gender of her small cast of characters says a lot about them, with no apologies.

Jim, the narrator, is a cutting depiction of a young white man who isn’t aware enough of his own prejudices to know that stereotypes aren’t true; Cecilia “Cessie” Jackson doesn’t have that luxury. We don’t get to see Jim grow up, exactly, but hearing his 37-year-old self talk about his 17-year-old self, we see the older Jim is wise enough to be honest and cynical about how wrong he was then. And we get to see a young black woman, mentally scarred by the traumatic murder of her father, not needing any white man to help or heal her.

This is a story that would have been difficult to write before the death of August Derleth in 1970. It’s not just that it references the integration of schools, segregation being officially outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Malcolm X who was assassinated in 1965. It’s a Mythos story that lives in the shadow of the Civil Rights movement, but which looks back at an earlier decade with jaded eyes, looking for what it missed the first time around.

In a Lovecraftian sense, Cessie Jackson is a very different kind of dreamer. Randolph Carter lost the key to the Dreamlands; Dunsany’s unnamed narrator could no longer sail on the River Yann. They both became too mired in mundane life and reality—but not her. Jim is the Lovecraftian protagonist, and Cessie Jackson initiates him into a world he had not even guessed at…and then she makes the transition that Jim is afraid to make. That’s the key and the catalyst to the plot, what drives the older Jim in the final act. How vapid and empty is the agent’s pitch for the “beautiful blonde girl Martian” compared to the strange reality that was Cessie Jackson, the plain-looking black girl with natural hair?

It took fourteen years for “My Boat” to find its way into a Mythos anthology, the revised edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1990). That is perhaps less surprising when you look at the kinds of Mythos anthologies being published—up until Derleth’s death, Arkham House had an effective monopoly, interspersing Lovecraft stories with contemporary works, pastiches, posthumous collaborations, culminating in the original Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969). “My Boat” is an odd fit if filed next to 1930s pulp reprints or pastiches of the same; forty years on Joanna Russ’ still feels relevant and timely today.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)