Earlier this week, a large and enthusiastic crowd packed Greenlight Bookstore in defiance of freezing temperature and threats of snow. Greenlight hosted a launch party for Midnight Taxi Tango, Daniel José Older’s second novel in the Bone Street Rumba series. But rather than the usual reading-and-wine-soaked-light-conversation that is the centerpiece of most literary events, this party soon became a lively and wide-ranging conversation about race, publishing, and the true legacy of H.P. Lovecraft. Older’s reading was fantastic, but it was his discussion with Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver and the forthcoming The Ballad of Black Tom, that turned the event into one of the best literary nights I’ve ever attended.
Older opened the evening on the right note by quoting Hamilton to loud cheers. Were we ready for a cabinet meeting? Well, perhaps not, but we were more than ready for a reading from Midnight Taxi Tango. Older read two chapters that showed off the range of the book. One was a character sketch, in which “inbetweener” Carlos Delacruz (he works as an intermediary between the living and the dead) investigates some otherworldly business with his friend Kia and her friend Corinna. This section showcases Older’s dialogue, which doesn’t so much pop as jump off the page and slap you to pay attention. The next section was from Kia’s POV, as she’s chased by a ghost. In addition to highlighting Older’s easy command of action and a sense of the supernatural that permeates Brooklyn streets, it also served the most obvious purpose: I really want to know what happens next! And given the line of people who bought books for Older to sign, I think we were all on the same page.
The interview with Victor LaValle was the point when the evening really took off. Well, I say “interview,” but it was really a conversation. Older started off by saying that “when you’re a child, you believe that the writer in the world has to be a disaster.” He cited writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald who are as well known for their substance abuse issues as for their prose. Older said that meeting other writers of color like LaValle gave him a sense of community that defied those expectations, and the idea that he could define the way he became a writer in the world. He ended his introduction of LaValle by saying, “His writing is so fucking amazing that it’s amazing that I get to talk to him.”
LaValle, for his part, opened by quoting Older’s character Carlos: “‘I take power from my dapper.’ I read that and thought, as another writer, that it’s a way of talking about style and arming yourself as a writer.” Older replied, “I always say I believe in flow. But what does that mean? It’s a way of moving. Everything comes from voice and character, and a lot of the writing happens as I feel out the voices… [writing characters] becomes like hanging out with a friend. Then I have to make the story go somewhere, so we’re not just hanging out all night.” He also said that sometime he gets dressed up to write.
One of Older’s greatest influences was his decade working as a paramedic. “People misunderstand, they think we’ve let our hearts go cold,” he said. “But this is a large and complicated world, and if you’re out in it you have a different relationship to trauma. Death always wins. When death becomes your daily bread, you have a different relationship to it.” However, he added that his number-one influence is “the way we tell each other stories.”
LaValle asked if Older could have written his books without having worked as a medic. “I don’t think I’d know what it means,” Older responded. “All the mundane things that go on, and at the same time these very real, life-or-death things… like, having to maneuver through an argument between two people while their child is literally dying in front of you.” LaValle built on that, saying, “There’s through line in your work about seeing the worst.” Older agreed, but added that as a paramedic, “There is no through line. People are always trying to see one, but it’s just one disaster after another… fiction is a way to find a beating heart under all that hell.”
LaValle had just come back from the Key West Literary Seminar, and mentioned that another writer talked about the differences between novels and short stories, saying, “Short stories are inherently pessimistic, but novels are inherently optimistic. Stories mirror death, because they have to stop, where, when you read a novel, you leave it with the idea that there’s a world that goes on.” The two discussed whether that might be part of the reason that novels tend to sell better than short stories, but then Older took the idea in a fascinating direction: “I believe in the revolutionary power of happy endings. Especially when you’re dealing with marginalized people… we need to see that there’s hope.”
LaValle continued, “Heartache and genuine loss are the emotional heart of the book. Why was that, for you, the heart?” Older replied, “I didn’t do it intentionally. “When I realized it, I was hoping someone would pick it up. It started with two stories on Tor.com, but it wasn’t in my conscious mind. What I kept thinking was, when we’re telling ghost stories, the question for me becomes why are we haunted. Who is haunting who? And why? What is lost when we lose people? I think there’s a false notion that there’s an end to grief, and I wanted to look at what happens when we don’t allow it to resolve.”
LaValle turned to the audience then, and asked all the writers to raise their hands. I’m not great at math, but I’m going to hazard a guess that 97% of the audience were writers, which encouraged LaValle to ask a question about Older’s writing process: “When you’re working something, are you ever caught off-guard by a theme?”
Older replied that it just felt “like a gift. I’m not an architect, I’m a gardener. Or… I load myself into a cannon? And I shoot myself into the world of the story, and then I can look back and see it, and say, ‘Ah, grief! That was the theme!’” He also advised the writers in the audience to “just tell the fuckin’ story. The layers will emerge.” The writers also offered a fantastic update on the old “kill your darlings” advice that has been the bane of writers for year. Older said that sometimes, when he’s working on essays, he’ll write something and think, “Oh, that line is slammin’… but, oh, it has nothing to do with my point” to which LaValle replied, “So you tweet it!”
Next, the two men jumped into a conversation about The World Fantasy Awards and H.P. Lovecraft. To give everyone context, last year Older created a petition petition to change the World Fantasy Award, which has long been a bust of Lovecraft designed by Gahan Wilson. Over the years many authors, including WFA winner Nnedi Okorafor, have talked about being in the uncomfortable position of being overjoyed to receive an award, only to then confront the fact that you literally have a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, fascinating author/virulent racist, in your home. Older finally created the petition suggesting Octavia Butler as a new bust, and the response was immediate and loud: over 2,500 signed the petition. While we still don’t know what the new award will look like, the WFA took people’s concern to heart and announced that Lovecraft will no longer be the model. Naturally, there was a backlash from die-hard Lovecraftians, and LaValle asked him about that reaction. First, Older made it clear that while he’d received plenty of angry emails, it was Okorafor who got most of the hate mail (a fact that he puts down to his own standing as a cis man) and said, “Racists are very sensitive. Their feelings are so fragile!” He also wanted to make it clear that he’s a fan of the writer, if not his beliefs. “I read Lovecraft, and I enjoy him, but I find him repellent. We’re talking about weaponized literature, where people of color are literally demonized.” He pointed out that “you can topple a giant and still read him” and, rather than focusing on the negative backlash, said that “what was cool was that mad people jumped into the conversation who never thought they could be part of the conversation before. And for me? Fantasy changed within the course of a day.”
LaValle agreed, saying, “I see [the Lovecraft Mythos] as being the greatest embodiment of white terror. The horror is coming from miscegenation. There are beings that do not care about [the white author] or his power. That’s what makes Lovecraft amazing… but it didn’t occur to him that these mutant half-breed monsters, at some point they will learn to write.” Over the roar of laughter from the audience, Older explained that LaValle’s latest book, The Ballad of Black Tom, is a new take on Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook,” which “Victor comes along and says, ‘Well, actually….’ and gives us this human and moving story from the point of view of one of the ‘monsters’ of the story.” He emphasized the idea of this long literary conversation, saying, “This is the era of the clapback. We will use our power not just to be pretty faces but to kick some ass. Midnight Taxi Tango and The Ballad of Black Tom are conversations, told from the perspectives of people who were turned into demons.”
Next LaValle turned to the crowd for audience questions, and hands shot up across the room. The first question was about writing as a person of color in a society that is still friendlier to white voices. LaValle said that whites are now “being made to confront a buried power structure that they didn’t even know existed” and older said added “if we’re going to say “Black Lives Matter” we have to recognize that they’ve always mattered.”
The next question was from another writer who specifically asked how she could tell her stories, and get the mainstream publishing industry to pay attention to them, without having to explain everything that make unique. Hilariously enough, LaValle thought the best answer lay in Lovecraft:
I was thinking about Lovecraft—he was writing stuff no one cared about. Like Melville and Fitzgerald, they were forgotten, failed authors when they died. You have to accept that the world will ignore you, or it will try to destroy you. With Lovecraft—he gets into the Library of America, this great honor, and then like five years later we’re like, “Fuck this guy,” but the good thing about him is that he never compromised. Sometimes you have to go to your grave being misunderstood.
Older agreed, and added, “Publishing is like a small liberal arts college that is like 90% white, and you are going to have to do the racial work, and catch the world up. It’s not fair, but we have to catch the world up.”
Another woman in the audience asked Older about his dedication to writing multifaceted women, and Older’s reply was instantaneous: “’Cause so many men don’t.” He went on, “I try to remember what Junot Díaz said about men writing women: ‘Understand that you suck at it’ and then I try to find a place where the history—the often violent history between men and women—is there, but then still have flow. And then I trust my beta readers to check me. I think that when we write the Other, any Other, the problem is often that we’re not willing to confront the history of our own privilege… it sucks, to deal with that, but then eventually as you work with it the writing becomes fun again.”
Finally a discussion of spirituality delved into another difference between mainstream, zombie-and-vampire-loving culture, and the sorts of stories LaValle and Older write. Older summed it up by saying, “This is why I like ghost stories. It’s no secret that modern white Western culture is obsessed with ghosts being evil, when every other culture loves their dead. I’ll smoke a cigar with my dead. I know that history is an open book, and history is walking with us.”
Leah Schnelbach also believes in the revolutionary power of happy endings. Especially when we live in a world where Death always wins. Tweet at her!
“LaValle agreed, saying, “I see [the Lovecraft Mythos] as being the greatest embodiment of white terror. The horror is coming from miscegenation.”
Let’s take a look at some of HPL’s best work. “The Colour Out of Space” (usually regarded as one of Lovecraft’s greatest stories-some would say the greatest). Dunno, not much miscegenation going on in that one.”The Shadow Out of Time*” (perhaps HPL’s best melding of horror with science fiction). Again, not much miscegenation going on. “Whisperer in Darkness” (HPL does the X-FILES avant la lettre). Again, not much evidence of miscegenation.THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD. Ditto. Frankly, of the stories of HPL’s major phase, only “The Shadow over Innsmouth” centers on miscegenation.
“There are beings that do not care about [the white author] or his power.”
One also gets the impression that beings like Yog-Sothoth don’t really care much about humanity in general. Cosmic horror.
“Older explained that LaValle’s latest book, The Ballad of Black Tom, is a new take on Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook,” which “Victor comes along and says, ‘Well, actually….’ and gives us this human and moving story from the point of view of one of the ‘monsters’ of the story.””
Odd how much attention that story gets these days.It’s a terrible tale, far below masterpieces like “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Shadow Out of Time.”
*Robert Silverberg on “The Shadow Out of Time”:
“The key passage, for me, lay in the fourth chapter, in which Lovecraft conjured up an unforgettable vision of giant alien beings moving about in a weird library full of “horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being.”
I wanted passionately to explore that library myself. I knew I could not: I would know no more of the furry prehuman Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua and the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos than Lovecraft chose to tell me, nor would I talk with the mind of Yiang-Li, the philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in AD 5000, nor with the mind of the king of Lomar who ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it. But I read that page of Lovecraft ten thousand times—it is page 429 of the Wollheim anthology, page 56 of the new edition—and even now, scanning it this morning, it stirs in me the quixotic hunger to find and absorb all the science fiction in the world, every word of it, so that I might begin to know these mysteries of the lost imaginary kingdoms of time past and time future.”
@1: Maybe that’s because “The Horror at Red Hook” is so aggressively bad that anything you do it is an improvement? Anyway, the Lovecraft Mythos isn’t all about race. Some of it is Lovecraft telling you the contents of his dreams. Some of it is about how horrifying old houses are. Some of it is about contemporary geological research…
Was Lovecraft racist? I give you this poem (TW for racial slurs). So yeah, your fave is problematic. Doesn’t so much matter to me as a Black woman whether Cthulhu is involved or not. It’s within Lovecraft’s oeuvre.
“Was Lovecraft racist?”
Yeah.
“I give you this poem (TW for racial slurs). So yeah, your fave is problematic. Doesn’t so much matter to me as a Black woman whether Cthulhu is involved or not. It’s within Lovecraft’s oeuvre.”
And it’s a terrible poem. If you want to read good poetry by Lovecraft, try FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH or “The Ancient Track.”
@2:”Maybe that’s because “The Horror at Red Hook” is so aggressively bad that anything you do it is an improvement?”
Good point. God knows that I would feel really intimidated if I tried to take-on “The Shadow Out of Time.”
“Anyway, the Lovecraft Mythos isn’t all about race. Some of it is Lovecraft telling you the contents of his dreams. Some of it is about how horrifying old houses are. Some of it is about contemporary geological research…”
Precisely. One shouldn’t ignore the racial elements in HPL’s Weltanschauung, but one also shouldn’t over-emphasize them, either.
@1: I wouldn’t say there is only one story about miscegenation. There is plenty of miscegenation in Lovecraft, usually in form of half-human hybrids. I agree that racism wasn’t Lovecraft central theme, but it was quite important one.
People exploring racial themes in Lovecraft really should go beyond Red Hook though. Stories like Arthur Jermyn or Medusa’s Coil are both more racist and more interesting and offer rich possibilities for sympathetic interpretations.
Very sad to hear about the threats, and especially about Okorafor being attacked more. Really not cool, people.
Very much so. Still doesn’t stop him from being my fave.
We educated white people love to believe our shit is all compartmentalized and that the big smart part of us that knows racism is bad and wrong is in complete control, and that all the dehumanizing caricatures, jokes, and stereotypes that we grew up with have been debrided from our psyches. That same sort of thinking allows us to believe that Lovecraft’s repugnant racism has no general bearing on his horror stories (except where they specifically do) and that we would be immune to his message even if it were relevant (which it totally is NOT). After all, the most merciful thing in the world, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents, right?
@6:” I wouldn’t say there is only one story about miscegenation.”
Sure. But, as I noted above, I was confining myself to Lovecraft’s major fiction. In terms of HPL’s best work (“Colour,” “Whisperer,” etc), only “Shadow over Innsmouth” counts as a tale where miscegenation plays a significant role.
” There is plenty of miscegenation in Lovecraft, usually in form of half-human hybrids. I agree that racism wasn’t Lovecraft central theme, but it was quite important one.”
Sure.
“People exploring racial themes in Lovecraft really should go beyond Red Hook though. Stories like Arthur Jermyn or Medusa’s Coil are both more racist and more interesting and offer rich possibilities for sympathetic interpretations.”
I’ll have to disagree regarding “Medusa’s Coil” on aesthetic grounds. It’s really, really badly written. Just compare the ending of “Medusa’s Coil” to “Shadow over Innsmouth”:
“Medusa’s Coil”
“In the end I drove on without telling anything. But I did hint that gossip was wronging the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear—as if from distant but authentic reports wafted among friends—that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married her.
More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honour and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a daemon of the pit—what a gorgon of the elder blasphemies—had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.
Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me—that horror which he must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.
It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist’s skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe’s most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.”
“Shadow over Innsmouth”
“I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men’s death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!
I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”
@7:”We educated white people love to believe our shit is all compartmentalized and that the big smart part of us that knows racism is bad and wrong is in complete control, and that all the dehumanizing caricatures, jokes, and stereotypes that we grew up with have been debrided from our psyches. That same sort of thinking allows us”
Dunno; is ST Joshi White?
” to believe that Lovecraft’s repugnant racism has no general bearing on his horror stories”
Dunno; I would be intrigued to read a racial take on “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Music of Erich Zann”…
@8: The style of the fragment you quoted does seem pretty poor. I’ve read the story only in Russian translation that was more polished. However, I think in terms of plot and characters Medusa’s Coil fares better than the bloody mess that was Red Hook. The latter grew on me a bit with time – it stands out because of raw, violent atmosphere, very unusual for Lovecraft – but it’s still a mess. I really wish that sickening and infuriating Medusa’s Coil got more attention than that one, it certainly needs it.
I should have mentioned this earlier but I am very interested in both LaValle’s novella and the forthcoming Kij Johnson story in the Tor.com line. Many of the best Lovecraftian stories have been written by taking a different perspective on his universe.
@6: Threats are inevitably the actions of the incoherent and the incompetent. I hope that the hate mail has died down for both Older and Okorafor now. (I’m glad the WFA committee are looking for a new design, though I didn’t sign Older’s petition for two reasons: first because Butler considered herself to be primarily a science fiction author and second because I think that the WFA shouldn’t be restricted to the image of any one person.)
@6 & 8: Earlier this month, I was surprised to discover that I’m genuinely looking forward to the reread of “Medusa’s Coil”.
So do I, since the first time I’ve seen the reread.
@11: “Threats are inevitably the actions of the incoherent and the incompetent. I hope that the hate mail has died down for both Older and Okorafor now.”
Complete agreement. There’s never any call for that kind Stalinist behavior.
@11:”(I’m glad the WFA committee are looking for a new design, though I didn’t sign Older’s petition for two reasons: first because Butler considered herself to be primarily a science fiction author and second because I think that the WFA shouldn’t be restricted to the image of any one person.)”
Didn’t someone suggest making the award a stylized globe depicting realms from fantasy literature (Oz, Middle-Earth, etc)?I rather like that idea. Perhaps HPL could even be allowed a bit of space on the globe, either for the Dreamlands or for his fictional New England.
@11:” Earlier this month, I was surprised to discover that I’m genuinely looking forward to the reread of “Medusa’s Coil”.”
I re-read it a couple of months ago. I wanted to see if it was as bad as I remembered. It was.
@13: I’m not sure how far the budget runs but I think it would be interesting to have a different artist create a design based around their interpretation of “fantasy” each year, similar to the way in which the Hugo base varies.
I would like to read a retranslation of the Russian version of “Medusa’s Coil” because Ruina’s description makes it sound more interesting than the English version.
@14: Funny thing, most Russian translations of Lovecraft I’ve read actually are not very good (I hear older 1990s translations are much better, but those I read were mostly the recently made ones for the Russian edition of Arkham House collections). They are very awkward and long-winded, think stereotypical Lovecraft turned up to eleven. Because of them, I was in the “Lovecraft was a bad stylist” group until I read him in English.
Sure, Lovecraft was a racist, but surely way more of his stories are about the horrors of inbreeding than the horrors of miscegenation? The Rats in the Walls, that one with the lightning and the tunnels, the cannibalism one… and my favourite case of irony (since he WAS a huge racist) “Arthur Jermyn” can easily be read as an anti-racist cautionary tale – “this is what happens if you’re a racist: you marry a frickin albino gorilla in the Congo because she’s the only white female around”. It’s like no matter how racist he was, you can’t avoid reality seeping around the edges.
I am so very much looking forward to Lavalle’s take on “Red Hook.”
There’s definitely a trade-off in Lovecraft’s work between quality and overt racism. But the reread has been an education in his themes, and it seems to me that his best stuff sublimates or translates his prejudices, rather than avoiding them. The Outer Ones in “Whisperer in Darkness” are terrifying because they’re “cosmopolitan,” and literally erase differences between human types by transplanting their brains into jars. The Yith are a mocking “Shadow Out of Time” because they record (and avoid) the degeneration that every other race inevitably falls to–and that Lovecraft explicitly thought resulted from inferior races dragging the dominant ones down. The noble and civilized Elder Things fall to a slave revolt, and their slaves bring terror and insanity to anyone who so much as looks at them.
As it happens, I have “Fungi From Yuggoth” open in the next tab, as I work on it for Tuesday’s reread post. It contains the following line:
…which is an Innsmouth reference, and not the poem’s central point–but his good poetry is hardly independent of his xenophobia.
“Medusa’s Coil” is a nasty piece of work–I would lay equal blame at the feet of Zealia Bishop, who seems to have brought a more overt and systematic racism to their collaborations. “The Mound” manages to be particularly upsetting for similar reasons.
I remember only one story centered on inbreeding (Lurking Fear). The Rats in the Walls and The Picture in the House are more about degeneracy. Inbreeding is implied in a number of stories but rarely takes the place of a “central horror”.
More like “if you live in a very racist society discovering that you’re not so “racially pure” may lead you to suicide and everybody will try to forget you existed”. It’s a very tragic story.
Well, at least the whole “she turns out to be biracial” twist was her idea (oh, you really shouldn’t have done that, Zealia), not sure about the rest. You may argue that the racism in Medusa’s Coil is of more everyday variety compared to the more intellectualized racism of Lovecraft, so…
Being a middle aged white male, I realize that my experiences and viewpoint are different than Older and LaValle’s but I can’t help but feel they read too much racism into their critiques. Certainly, there are racist elements in some of Lovecraft’s stories. This is obvious to anyone. I think to dismiss his whole Mythos as “the embodiment of white terror” is both disingenuous and unfair. As a whole the Mythos is not about fear of half-breeds or people of color (although I admit such stereotypes do appear in some of his work), but of powers greater and older than humanity, which we have no hope of opposing when confronted by them. I think to cast the horror of the Great Old Ones as some sort of thinly veiled racism is ridiculous.
I can also understand their distaste with the subject of the World Fantasy award. While I don’t feel Lovecraft’s whole body of work can be dismissed as racist, it is an element of many of his works so in this day and age he might not represent the best archetypal author of fantasy (although I do question their seeming implication that anyone who is sorry to see the old Lovecraft bust go must be a racist). I have to admit that the choice of Ms Butler does make me scratch my head. Not to take anything away from her writing or her status as a famous author, I just never really perceived her as a towering presence in the field of Fantasy literature (indeed, most of her work seems to be in the SF category).
Surprised nobody has mentioned The Dunwich Horror yet, in re half-human hybrids. As for racism, I can’t remember the name of the story that concludes with a plainly subhuman naked black man gnawing on the arm of a (white) child, but, um, yeccchh.
I recently finally got around to reading “The Horror at Red Hook” just to see what all the fuss was about and saw that the “racism” was primarily against Kurdish Yazidis (which is to say primarily a religious group, rather than a race, a religious group commonly known in the Great Pup Age as “devil worshipers”). He wasn’t too fond of Sourthern European immigrants to his pristine New England in “The Terrible Old Man”. And of course there’s the Innsmouth Look which is a warning against mixing humans and amphibians. Lovecraft may well have been a racist, as were pretty much all the Founding Fathers, and not a few reputable humans beings in HPL’s day, but he was also a tremendous figure in fantasy fiction. As to Octavia Butler, I love her, have a complete collection of her published writings mostly in first editions, and once had an extended conversation with her (in A Change of Hobbit, which had her as autographing guest author, sitting lonely since NO ONE ELSE cared about her, believe it or don’t, the most depressing autograph session I’ve ever seen bar none), but her major contributions are to science fiction, not what we commonly call fantasy.
For everyone who talks about “dismissing” Lovecraft due to his racism, I don’t think that’s the right verb. It’s more acknowledging the racism, and gaining a deeper insight into the writing. That’s the opposite of “dismissing.”
Horror lit is about fears, and for many folk (especially, but not only, the Anglo majority in America) a big fear is the Other. I suspect that there has always been a painful awareness of slavery as the American original sin, and racism its justification. Slavery was not a business because of racism – it was a business because it made the southern slave lords very rich. Racial theories (i.e., Science!) had to be adopted to make it seem less obviously evil.
When I was a child reading Lovecraft, I wasn’t aware of his racism, but what struck me as odd was how strange things always engendered fear. Things were horrible because they were strange… Yes, there was an ick factor, things being gelatinous. But some people love sea cucumber! I always thought there would be a thrilling sense of wonder at encountering something so alien. I was especially baffled at his terror and disgust at the idea of higher dimensional spaces. That always struck me as fascinating, not horrible.
On the other hand, consider At The Mountains of Madness. One of the big classics of lovecraft. The climax of the story is when the protagonist realizes that outward appearances don’t matter, and what’s important is the content of someone’s character. Let me quote it
It’s kind of a sad thing when all someone can do is look at a real masterpiece of literature, and see nothing but the color of the skin, or the shape of the genitalia, of the person who wrote it. I suppose that if those are the standards we all “have” to live by in order to be politically correct, that it’s only a matter of time before Shakespeare will be banned, and Isaac Asimov will be burned in public. People are a product of their times. One wonders if the writers of today will be accorded the same sort of brusque judgements they so blithely pass out today in their turn. If so, well, at least there is justice there.
It feels somewhat disingenuous to me (if not ignorant) to pull these historical figures, be it someone from the Bible, Washington, Jefferson, Wilson or now Lovecraft out of their context, plop them down here in contemporary America, and then declare, “Hey, look! A racist!” They were all products of their time, as are we. Our mores were not theirs.
Jumping in the wayback machine and finding dead white guys to pummel isn’t going to forward any sort of current progressive agenda. It’s an empty pill. It’s wasted energy that might make people feel better in the short run but solves exactly nothing.
Little surprised no one has mentioned “The Street”, which to my mind always went hand in hand with “Red Hook”. Also that one bit from “Reanimator”–you know, the boxer? I mean, that part was…whew! Even other racists were like, “Geez, dude, turn it down a notch or ten!”
But yeah, I totally sympathise with the changing of the award. “Nice job! Here’s a picture of a guy who hates your guts! Display it proudly!” It will be interesting to see what they come up with. Personally, I would think a Cthulhu statuette wouldn’t be far amiss. Better an imaginary monster than a real one, n’est-ce pas?
Anyway. Totally checking out the “Ballad of Black Tom”.