Tag Archives: weird fiction

dailies (july)

Read:

Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful
Julian K. Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel
Elizabeth Bear’s Machine
bits of Foreign Affairs Vol. 101 Nº3
started re-reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum

Watched:

Knife+Heart
(almost all of) Sorry to Bother You
a bunch of Stargate: SG-1 (Season 8)
first 2 episodes of Paper Girls
Cowboy Bebop

i really really really enjoyed Elizabeth Bear’s Machine. at work there has been a lot of (very serious) joking around about who among us enjoys “fun” in their reading material and who does not. i have had to conclude that while i don’t think i have much patience of “fun” in my horror reading (the more esoteric, philosophical, and convoluted the better), in the realm of science fiction a little bit of light-heartedness goes a long way. which isn’t to say that Machine didn’t make me cry, because it did. (not an altogether uncommon result of an enjoyable science fiction experience for me, actually.) but i liked the characters and more than that, there was a degree of real and genuine excitement i felt for the world that Bear has created in the White Space stories. (i first encountered the future within which Machine takes place in the short story “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” by Bear and Sarah Monette which was included in the Dreams From the Witch House anthology edited by Lynne Jamneck—read my review here.)

Nghi Vo has been on my radar for a little while, but i hadn’t gotten my act together to read any of her work just yet. thankfully, i’m getting much better at using the interlibrary loan system from the public libraries and have been able to expand my horizons a bit. The Chosen and The Beautiful is not as light-hearted as one might imagine a magically infused re-telling of The Great Gatsby to be. i was also working through it while everyone on twitter was losing their minds over whether it was necessary or not to have read the original (in some form) of a work if one is to write some kind of meta-fiction of it. Vo’s book is a perfect example of exactly why an intimate familiarity with the original work is a fine requirement to impose upon metafictional projects. i haven’t read The Great Gatsby since high school (2010, junior year, TA’s english class, focus on american literature), and Vo’s book made me want to go back and read it over again and turn it upside down and shake out all the little extra details that i know i either missed or have since forgotten.

The Chosen and The Beautiful is able, specifically, to interact exquisitely with the bizarre shallowness which pervades fitzgerald’s novel. the original novel is composed of set pieces and characters being played by people we never really get a good look at, and Vo digs into that exact element, not merely giving depth to the characters by creating histories for them, whole cloth, but by finding ways to bring a peculiar, mystical life to the shallowness itself. the book as a whole is both a love letter and a careful dissection, affection and fond of the original, but also chiding, demanding a little more. what more could you ask for?

Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon… took a little while for me to get into. i persisted through the collection out of curiosity (rather than pure stubbornness) and i do feel like i was rewarded for it. (in particular “I Am a Beautiful Bug!” towards the end of the collection is funny, heartbreaking, delightful.) i found myself thinking of what Gretchen Felker-Martin said when i spoke with her for a piece that went up on the LASC website (see here), to take in “queer art made by real queer people.” if, as a queer person, the aesthetic products of other individuals’ personal experiences of queerness make you uncomfortable, it is imperative to sit with that feeling, to work through it, to try to better understand oneself and one another through and despite and within that feeling of discomfort. i’m not sure what i learned about myself just yet from reading Jarboe’s work, but i do know that i think it’s worth reading and thinking about and talking about, so you should do that.

every time i start re-reading Foucault’s Pendulum i think “surely i must have imagined how good this was” and each time it’s perfect and beautiful and majestic and it makes me feel like every thought and feeling and disdain and passion is possible. that’s it. i love it so much.

i’ll be honest with you guys, it’s 9am. i have been up since 7am. i was woken up at 4am this morning because of intense pain in my knee and, as it turned out, in my shoulder (likely the result of lying too long in one position while asleep, in an effort to avoid moving my knee), which necessitated getting out of bed and taking advil and figuring out how to fall back asleep in a hopefully-better position. i’m too tired to have good complex articulate thoughts about the movies and tv that i’ve been watching. so that’ll just have to wait for another day.

good luck out there. (see you, space cowboy…)

Week in Review: 22-29 December 2021

Read:

“Compulsory Games” by Robert Aickman
“The Mask” by Robert W. Chambers
“In the Court of the Dragon” also by Chambers
Things have gotten worse since we last spoke by Eric LaRocca
Some amount of Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Tara T. Green
Dangerous Dimensions

Watched:

The Witcher Season 2 (partial)
Some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 2)

There was also Christmas and family events and all that, so it’s been a busy week.

Aickman (musings)

Aickman in particular has made a very strong impression on me. I started with his story “Hand in Glove” (all of my reading of Aickman comes from the NYRB collection of his works Compulsory Games edited and introduced by Victoria Nelson). My initial response to that story was, ‘This is too English for me to really understand it.’ Which might seem silly, but there have been times where that particular flavor of English reticence and ingrained class conscious conflict (among other cultural factors) has utterly baffled and alienated me.

My second go-round with Aickman, which I was considering after I wrapped up “Dangerous Dimensions” and had to (sullenly and with much grumbling) reassess my view of Algernon Blackwood (I wasn’t a fan of “The Willows” — the vacillation between unhinged hysteria and obviously doomed attempts to rationalize the supernatural was exhausting and somewhat irritating), I felt it was only just to give Aickman another shot.

I finished the story “Compulsory Games” which I had already begun the previous time I had picked up the book. And after finishing it, no more certain of what I had just experienced that I was at the end of “Hand in Glove”, I turned to Nelson’s introduction to the volume of Aickman’s fiction. While I disagree with some of her points about “the horror genre” as a comprehensive whole (Of black humor she says, “Like sex, this element, and its prerequisite of a sophisticated sensibility, is usually absent in the horror genre.” (p. xii) I also feel that her view that sex is necessarily or usually absent from horror fiction holds true only in certain eras of the genre. But my rapturous and irrepressible rhapsodizing about Livia Llewelyn will have to wait for another day.)

Most importantly, Nelson helpfully contextualizes Aickman’s fiction as being not necessarily “supernatural” so much as “unnatural.” (p. viii) And indeed, thus far it seems best to approach Aickman with the tacit recognition that no explanation is forthcoming, and that any attempts to classify or qualify the experience of his characters according to known modes will result in abject failure. Here, again, Nelson fails to distinguish between the “neatly wrapped up” ending of the traditional ghost story or gothic model of the tale, where the supernatural elements are controlled, contained, and neutralized within the narrative, and the often more ambiguous, unresolved “explanations” of authors generally associated with the Weird.

Indeed, by this measure of irreducible weirdness Aickman can, without a doubt, be counted among the writers of the weird. However, I believe his fiction may leave some readers wanting for something a bit more coherent than what is actually on offer within his stories. He, for the most part, avoids the irritating sensation that he, the author, is as ignorant of understanding as the reader. But nor does he convey the absolute confidence of some other writers (Laird Barron comes to mind, and even Michael Cisco) that he is in full command of his concocted un-reality, and merely choosing to omit an easy answer for the benefit (or frustration) of the reader.

All this to say, more to follow on Aickman soon. I have 13 more stories to go in this volume.

Dangerous Dimensions (1st and 2nd Impressions)

When ordering books for the store, my boss read the title of this book and said, ‘Hey this is the book for you!’

Indeed, I keep threatening that once I get my act together I’ll figure out how to design a t-shirt graphic that conveys “spooky polyhedra” à la “Dreams in the Witch-House.” I love the somewhat ridiculous – though often extremely effective – notion of maddening and mind-bending mathematics. Who needs monsters when you can have equations that rend the very fabric of the known universe?

Unfortunately, Dangerous Dimensions takes us back to the early applications of the discovery of a “Fourth Dimension” (other than time), starting with H.G. Wells’ “Title”. I found this one almost unbearable. Here the fourth dimension becomes a kind of pseudo-scientific purgatory, where the souls of the dead spectate the lives of the still-living. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the story, but it really got into a particular kind of religious- or piously inflected supernatural horror which has never ‘done it’ for me.

The other notable stinker in the collection for me was “Space” by John Buchan. In a sense the introduction to Buchan and his story were of greater issue than the story itself. This volume contains one of the Lovecraft collaborations, and almost the entire introduction to the story/authors for that entry is given over to superficial discussion of Lovecraft’s racism, to the point where I learned nothing about Henry S. Whitehead. Now, “Space” is a story whose entire set-up relies heavily on the notion that Europeans are a more “evolved” form of man and have lost the senses unique to animals and “Savages” which allow them to distinguish the fourth dimension of ‘space’.

I’m not here to rampage against the impolitic and backwards “scientific views” portrayed in the story, but I do take issue with the notion that Lovecraft has become the popular repository for all discussion about racism and eugenic description in genre literature of a particular era. Race featured in a negligible capacity in the Whitehead & Lovecraft story (the 16th century evil Austrian magician or whatever he was had two Black slaves, which is unpleasant and perhaps upsetting but does not really conform with the more egregious elements of Lovecraft’s unpalatable social and scientific views on race). Meanwhile, “Space” displays the very form of ‘eugenic epistemology’ which so tarnishes Lovecraft’s work, and not a single mention of the evolutionary rhetoric is included in the introduction to the story itself.

That is to say: string them all up.

The story itself was fine, but the discussion of the “aboriginal savage” which dominates the beginning of the story definitely left me feeling the strain of having to look past the less than savory socio-political-epistemological aspects.

The stand-out winners in the collection were, for me, Donald Wandrei’s “Infinity Zero” and the Robert Heinlein story “…and he built a crooked house…”. The former has inspired me through its vivid imagery to finally attempt a suitably ‘mathematic’ Weird illustration, as well as being genuinely freaky. The science is also quite good.

Meanwhile, the latter – the Heinlein – was so funny that I’m perplexed no one has adapted it to cinema as of yet. It would make for a very fun, and very funny, little film. Strong visuals, and a lighthearted and enjoyable tone. Some minor “updating” might be required to render the female character a little more palatable for a contemporary audience, but I’m sure there are people who would utterly fail to recognize the light misogyny which persists within the characterizations.

On the whole, it was a solid collection. I felt that the editor tipped his hand a bit including two Blackwood stories (a personal favorite and academic interest of the editor) but I must admit that both Blackwood stories were pretty good. Enough that I’m seriously considering searching up more of the John Silence stories for future reading.

Quick Notes on Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

I have plenty to say about Eric LaRocca’s Things have gotten worse… Though not perhaps as many to say as the run-away hit of the season merits. The big one is that while I expected it to go one way (and then after the first twist another way, and then yet another way after the second twist) it never really went where you expected it to go. This means that though the experience is deeply horrifying and made my skin hurt, it was never banal.

I must admit that I’m not sure the book ever really tips over into the realm of “erotic horror” but the bar/standard I have for that was set by Livia Llewelyn (specifically the collection Furnace), then solidified with Steven Berman’s Fit for Consumption, with an honorable mention for That One Story in Bracken MacLeod’s 13 Views from the Suicide Woods. Which is to say, an epistolary narrative is unlikely to meet the necessary qualifications of embodiment to really make the “erotic horror” grade. This is in no way a criticism of the book itself, but rather the way the presentation implies a particular tone or expectation which is not quite fulfilled.

Mr. LaRocca certainly has my attention. My tastes run toward the more supernatural than the mundane in the annals of horror and weird fiction, but LaRocca’s characters are so vividly painted and pleasingly complete (if utterly unhinged) that I would be willing to venture into the depths of the believably horrible with his prose charting the path.

That’s certainly MORE than enough words on any number of topics. And I’ll be back with some slightly more fleshed out reviews as well as a few musings like “What exactly is appetite in horror?” (Brought to you by Fit for Consumption where food and sex make for natural if discomfiting bedfellows.) Formal reviews for the above mentioned collections should be forthcoming, and something a little meatier for Mr. LaRocca’s work as well, when I finish digesting it. (I only finished the book two nights ago.) As well as hopefully something on Jeffery Ford’s Big Dark Hole collection, which I am part-way through.

Rationality and Superstition, some thoughts on reckoning in Weird Fiction

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One of the things I find most fascinating in Lovecraft’s writing is the way in which the structure of his fiction actively undermines the very things he claims and seems to hold dear.

I’m currently reading Jason Colavito’s The Cult of Alien Gods, (more on his most recent book: The Mound Builder Myth some time soon). In one of the first chapters––I’m sorry, I’m reading it on the Kindle and it’s an impressively badly structured file, none of the footnote links work, etc. Which is frustrating given that I bought the damn thing OFF AMAZON, but I digress––… In one of the first chapters he outlines the trajectory of the Gothic romance into horror and detective fiction and ultimately into the Weird tale to bring us through the evolution of the literary form which culminated in Lovecraft’s work.

“Thus for Lovecraft, the stories of the age taught him that oblivion was the end result of the unwholesome pursuit of knowledge, a theme he would employ again and again.” (Loc 513)

This quote reminded me of something I often find myself discussing with people who come into my place of employment: while Lovecraft tells us explicitly in his language, via description and story structure, that the rational middle-to-upper class white men who make up his protagonists are of superior breeding, intelligence, and composure than any of the religious, superstitious, and non-white individuals they encounter… Protestant scientific rationalism never saves any of his protagonists from ignominious ends.

This tends to feed into my personal belief that one reason that Lovecraft endures as a writer despite his obvious failings as a human being, and especially despite the way those failings contaminate his fiction, is because this, like other parts of his œuvre, demonstrate that he was a better artist than he intended. His fiction is packed with epistemological ambiguities, the form and the fiction at odds with one another (and especially at odds with contemporary characterizations of both the fiction and the man… Perhaps something to follow up on at a later date). He tells us that the only way to achieve true knowledge and understanding is by following the path of rational scientific inquiry and to cast aside all superstition, but at the same time, he shows us that pursuing rational inquiry into these realms of the vast unknown can only result in madness and death.

I always return to The Dreams in the Witch House, the story which first arrested me with this realization. Because my biggest take away from the story was that the story’s protagonist, Walter Gilman, was an idiot. Throughout the entire story, Gilman is warned by “a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz” that he should abandon his somnambulant inquiries into the mysteries of the witch Keziah and his apartment on the top floor where the witch once lived, lest something terrible happen to him.

Spoiler alert:

Obviously, he doesn’t abandon his exploration of the spooky mathematics he’s involved in, and obviously he does not come to a good end, or he wouldn’t be appearing in this essay. It is important to note that, in defence of Lovecraft’s materialist worldview, neither does Mr. Mazurewicz. It would be blatant falsehood to state that religious or superstitious thinking provides any measure of true safety in the Lovecraft Mythos. But the kind of superstitious thinking which makes one wary of those places where the veil between the worlds is thinnest (if you will) is certainly worth heeding, even in a world populated with Old Ones and non-Euclidean geometries.

Side note: While I don’t think anyone is going to show up to start arguing with me, though I welcome people’s input, I am compelled to mention that I believe that in Dreams in the Witch House Gilman is to a certain degree bewitched (hah) and enthralled and therefore his decision to remain in Keziah’s apartment despite the presence of Brown Jenkins (truly the story’s most terrifying element) is not entirely his own. But that really only brings us to the edge of considering the quest for knowledge as a compulsion/enchantment in its own right.

But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife’s edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief). Being able to access a more accurate vision of reality does nothing to improve one’s ability to describe or comprehend it. His rational protagonists might have a “better idea” of what the Old Ones “really are” or better understand themselves or any number of things, but, as evidenced by their gibbering madness, are not at all better equipped to engage with that reality. Indeed, it often seems that the best way to “deal” with a Lovecraftian universe is to approach it with the armature of superstitious belief and a quasi-religious reverence. After all, several thousand years of religious worship clearly demonstrates that the human mind is equipped to handle belief in creatures with powers beyond anything they can imagine.

But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife’s edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief).

This approach to the supernatural, and the distance between rationality and superstition reminds me of the work of Lovecraft protégé and weird fiction writer Frank Belknap Long (now there was a man whose racism felt “of the time” by being just a light, temporal seasoning in the fiction, rather than a deeply rooted epistemological function of the fiction itself). I didn’t, on the whole, love Long’s fiction. As with many others, my primary motivation for reading his stuff were the two Lovecraftian stories, “The Hounds of Tindalos” and “The Space Eaters”. “Hounds” was frustrating because it felt like a brilliant premise executed to only a fraction of its full potential.

“The Space Eaters” by contrast is almost singularly brilliant… Up until the very end, where it lost me completely. I will actually refrain from speaking too much about the story itself, because it would be a genuine tragedy to ruin the experience for anyone who finds themself reading the story for the first time. I wish to discuss one element of the story which does not figure into the plot, but I noticed was characteristic of Long’s work, and I will, for better or worse, be discussing the mechanics of the end of the story which were such a disappointment to me.

One thing that struck me about Long’s work, over all, was that in contrast to Lovecraft’s characters who find themselves compelled to gaze into the abyss, Long’s protagonists compulsively look away. Where Lovecraft gives us a horror made of up of disjointed, impossible descriptions made all the more horrible by their almost coherence and comprehensibility, Long operates with a nearly cinematic “cut away” format for horrific reveals. In Long’s stories, we remain with the protagonist as he hears things, perhaps smells things, but he never ever looks, and, in “The Space Eaters”, one of our only hints as to the horrors that he is facing is given through the description of the face of someone who DID look while the protagonist looked away. It’s a fascinating structure, especially when compared to Lovecraft, because it proves to a certain degree how much the joke about Lovecraft’s hysteric “It’s was indescribable!” is in fact a gross mischaracterization of his descriptions. (Though he does overuse the word “cyclopean” it’s true.)

But in “The Space Eaters” Long’s protagonist eventually defeats the invaders by making the sign of the cross. It’s probably not the worst twist a story has ever had, but given the presence of a Lovecraft stand-in and the debates Long and Lovecraft had with one another about the merits of religion in general and Catholicism in particular, it does feel somewhat pointed. It also allows the protagonists to make it out alive in a way that few Lovecraftian heroes ever have. Indeed, Long’s fiction seems often to function specifically to shore up the argument that a healthy dose of superstitious thinking does a body good in a vast and largely unexplored reality. His protagonists tangle with the terrifyingly bizarre and incomprehensible, but then manage to move along consigning such things to the realms of fable and fiction, or secure in the knowledge that humanity’s spiritual and religious beliefs have developed alongside these intrusions into conventional reality for the specific purpose of managing and containing the experience of them.

Of course, modern fiction writers (at least, many of my favorites) like to explore the step beyond both Lovecraft and Long. They recognize the value of each viewpoint: that rational scientific inquiry, based in evidence, can yield a better understanding of reality; superstitious, or religious thinking has held a privileged place in human history and experience as a direct result of its capacity to explain the otherwise inexplicable and advise accordingly. But they don’t stop there. Most importantly, they recognize that life continues after these interruptions in conventional reality; it is often not a question of possibility, but of necessity to acquiesce to the new reality paradigm and continue living. It is possible to chart a path between Lovecraft’s Victorian “madness in the face of the irreconcilable” and Long’s “delivering unto the Outside what belongs to it”. We can and do reshape our realities and our understanding of the realities of others to interface with what was previously outside our direct comprehension.

Madness is a luxury not everyone can afford.

Week in Review 2019: 004

I’ve been bedridden for the last three days. A fever, a nice wet cough, moments where I could have sworn I was going to die… The works.

Thankfully, the fever broke mid-way through Saturday and now I only sound awful. All this to say: I have watched an astounding number of movies and a fair bit of television over the last 72 hours:

Movies:

• Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
• Mandy (2018)
• Summer of 84 (2018)
• Mayhem (2017)
• Duck Butter (2018)
• Toc Toc (2017)
• A Most Wanted Man (2014) (partial)
• Snowden (2016) (partial)

TV:

Supergirl: Season 3, episodes 22 and 23
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Season 1, episodes 1 through 5.
Red Oaks: Season 2, episodes 2 and 3.
Travelers: Season 3, episode 2.

Before it got to be as Bad As All That, I…

…watched:

Signature Move (2017)
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

…read:

The Mobius Strip Club of Grief by Bianca Stone
finished the parts of The Nightmare Factory that I’d not read before.

I’ve been chatting with folks who come into the store about the decision to cast Nicholas Cage in “The Colour out of Space” movie adaptation. And, having now seen Mandy, I feel confident in my opinion that Nic Cage is a difficult choice. His sudden appearance in Snowden is actually why I stopped it and switched to something else. (Well, that and the aggressive levels of American Patriotism.)

I think the big danger with Nic Cage is encouraging him to act unhinged. That is usually when his performance goes off the rails in terms of believability. He seemed mostly sane and O.K. in the scene that introduced him in Snowden.

He’s also one of those actors you can’t help but see when they’re acting; Nic Cage, Jack Nicholson, Keanu Reeves, Oprah Winfrey… And it doesn’t have to do with recognizability, either. Sam Rockwell, Domhnall Gleeson, Tom Hardy, Zoe Saldaña always surprise me because, despite their familiarity, they don’t get in the way of the presence of the character they’re playing.

To come at it another way: Lovecraft’s stories aren’t really about people. They rely on a sense of atmosphere and the creeping realization of what lurks beyond the human experience. It seems strange to me, then, to cast some one with an undeniable presence, someone who cannot fade into the background, on whom the audience cannot project themselves.

Lovecraft is very much a writer of un-characters. None of the people he writes, protagonists or otherwise, do substantially more than progress the plot. Whatever friends they have are utilitarian pieces of the narrative to open doorways into other, horrific worlds. Even incidental characters (other tenants, housekeepers, etc) serve some function of necessity, if only as racialized foils for the characters with whom the narrator chooses to associate.

And none of this even begins to touch on the issue, “Nic Cage is a meme.” Because once you have been transformed into a hollow vector for self-replicating situational humor, you cease to be able to generate meaning for yourself.

(Which is exactly why Nicholas Cage hates memes about himself, presumably.)

Week in Review 2019: 003

Read:

Books:

When I Grow up I want to be a Futurist. Badminton, N.
The Only Harmless Great Thing. Bolano, B.
“Prodigy of Dreams,” “Ms. Rinaldi’s Angel,” “The Tsalal,” and “Mad Night of Atonement” in The Nightmare Factory. Ligotti, T.
“Protestant and Catholics.” HPL to Frank Belknap Long, collected in Against Religion: the atheist writings of H. P. Lovecraft. 2010.

Articles:

“Lovecraft, Witch Cults, and Philosophers.” W. Scott Poole in The Age of Lovecraft. 2016.
“Weird Investigations and Nativist Semiotics in H.P. Lovecraft and Dashiell Hammett.” Brooks. E. Hefner in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 60, Number 4. 2014.
Jason Colavito’s blog.

This week has been a little scattered. Whatever terrible thing I did to my wrist some time before Christmas continues apace and has vastly limited my manual dexterity and completely undermined my comfort. At least it has had the good grace to put my non-dominant hand out of commission so that I can continue to scribble. (Should I be typing? Probably not.)

Hefner’s article about Hammett and Lovecraft is really quite remarkable. It examines how Hammett’s novel, The Dain Curse, dismantles the racist ideological underpinnings of the classic ’20s detective story and/or Weird fiction tale, and how those ideas are metamorphosed into the narrative mechanics of nativist fiction.

He sees Hammett’s novel as “a broader critique of a cultural phenomenon in which bodies are seen as legible text where corporeal difference and criminal degeneracy go hand in hand.” (654)

Somewhat predictably, Hefner focuses on Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hood” and “The Call of Cthulhu”.

His analysis of “Call” and Arthur Machen’s influence on Lovecraft’s views on cultural and racial “evolution” in Europe would have benefited from a greater familiarity with Lovecraft’s correspondence around Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Hefner mistakenly credits Lovecraft with developing Machen’s theories of a degenerate pre-Aryan European race into the atavistic cult in “Call”. W. Scott Poole’s article in The Age of Lovecraft clearly shows the link between Murray’s description of the persistent prehistoric witch-cult and Lovecraft’s “global atavistic conspiracy” (Poole, xx). I mentioned Bobby Derie’s article Conan and the Little People last week, which provides a detailed primary source examination of Murray’s influence on Lovecraft.

(Aaand I just realized last week’s link to Derie’s article was busted… It should all be fixed now.)

Personally, I am interested in how Lovecraft’s knowledge and study of history impacted his racial views. Without contesting the assertion that his views were aggressively racist and that they profoundly shaped his literary output, I nonetheless contend that he displays a nuanced (and at times inherently contradictory) view of the different “races.”

Moreover, his eugenic epistemology (to borrow Hefner’s term) engages a racist semiotics which goes beyond the simplistic “Brown people are scary” logic which is often used as a short-hand for his views on the Other. In stories such as “The Lurking Fear” and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” he uses a genetic determinist framework to define a degenerate or inferior class of people who, in contemporary terms, would be considered “white.” This classist dimension to his racism is particularly important, in a large part, because it continues to persist in contemporary fiction and ideology.