Lovecraft Reanimated: Lovecraft as a Fictional Character
“So, he said finally, softly, you’ve come to see the monster. I strained, peering through the darkness.
I’ve brought candles, I said, stupidly.
A long, terrible pause in which the house groaned around me.
…
And then I saw him, his silhouette against the draperies, rising slowly, a gaunt figure, tall but hunched, crippled almost; just for an instant, darkness against darkness- I might have imagined it- and it was gone.”
The Broken Hours, Jacqueline Baker, 2014
In Alan Moore’s Providence series (described as his “Watchmen for Lovecraft”), discussed in my recent entry on Moore’s graphic novel deconstructions, H.P. Lovecraft appears as himself, visited in his hometown of Providence, RI by the troubled journalist Robert Black as part of his research into the secret histories of America. Having explored New York and New England, encountering and being traumatized by various thinly-veiled characters and scenes from Lovecraft’s stories and recording them in his “commonplace book,” Black’s meeting with Lovecraft was fated by Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. The closeted gay, secretly Jewish Black, it turns out, was an occult “herald,” whose records of his experiences would be appropriated and transformed by the “redeemer” Lovecraft, the true Wilbur Whately, into the pop-cultural seeds leading to the rebirth of Cthulhu and the great old ones. Literally, in this case.
While I had issues in general with how Moore framed his critique of cosmic horror, his use of Lovecraft as a character, both the creator of and a denizen of his horrific shared universe is a very apt choice. Moore is certainly not the first to utilize Lovecraft as a character in Lovecraft’s own fictions, and his use of the “Lovecraft was right” trope sums up much of how HPL is seen by the Cthulhu mythos fandom. While Moore depicts Lovecraft affectionately in Providence, he also does not hesitate to show the deep racism and prejudice that informed his writing. This dichotomy, a sympathy, even a parasocial friendship, for the man while reckoning with his fascistic white supremacism forms much of the current discourse surrounding him.
As Lovecraft himself enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality, many authors have since drawn him into their stories, whether silly or serious. Throughout the growth of Cthulhu mythos and the cosmic horror fandom, it feels like Lovecraft himself has somehow become of a piece with his own alien creations, perhaps more than any other author I am aware of. As is illustrated by various covers of Lovecraft-inspired fiction featuring a portrait of the author enhanced with tentacles or other fantastic features, he has become inextricable from his creations, one with the monsters he created. In this entry, I’ll look at some of the fictional uses of Lovecraft himself as a character in literature, often with the motif that the monsters he wrote about are also real, reflecting on how these authors grapple (or not) with the monstrous beliefs of Lovecraft himself. This essay doesn’t even take into account the dozens of similar video games, board games, and films that feature similar tropes.
In such disparate fiction as Christopher Moore’s Practical Demonkeeping (1992) or Thomas Wheeler’s The Arcanum (2003), Lovecraft cameos serve as shorthand for weird, occult knowledge. In the first two of Moore’s Pine Cove trilogy, one “HP” owns a diner in a little California coast town that finds itself continually beset with weird monsters, to which he proves a helpful if not always eager resource. In The Arcanum, a shlocky piece of script writing turned into a novel, Wheeler envisions a kind of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of historical figures, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini, and of course, Lovecraft, serving as the resident “demonologist” brought in to battle the murderous fallen angels rampaging across 1919 New York City.
Other works, such as Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (2006) and Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia (2015) work Lovecraft into their historical works as simply a well-known name to drop a reference to. In The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, which focuses on the famous pulp writers of 1930's New York becoming involved in a pulp threat of their own, it turns out Lovecraft was actually murdered by Chinese gangsters working to spirit a secret weapon of mass destruction out of the states for a sinister warlord. Lovecraft himself serves as a mere convenience of plot with little characterization (would Lovecraft have actually gotten a job, and, ugh, worked for a paycheck like a common laborer?), though the racist “yellow peril” motifs contained throughout are used basically without comment.
Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia, a “dieselpunk” alt-history set in the Italian Regency of Carnaro, a rogue city-state on the Adriatic in current-day Croatia a few years after WWI, features cameos by Lovecraft and (again) Houdini as US spies working to align the Regency with American interests. The unsettling mix of politics in Carnaro, with its syndicalist, futurist, and fascist elements as exemplified by its poet Prophet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, seems to be setting us up for something with this odd couple (who did actually know each other) but like the rest of the novella, it all just fizzles out in a puff of cool ideas.
None of these have much to say about the historical Lovecraft, either his biography or his ideological beliefs but use him as a nod to something weird and occult or someone their adventure or science fiction fan audience would be amused by. Such cameos illustrate the extent to which Lovecraft has become a mascot-like figure for many fans of genre literature, popping up as a recognized person in otherwise unrelated stories.
“This isn’t convincing me. Why haven’t I heard about any of this before?”
Chambers took a deep breath. “You will have, if you’re a fan of weird fiction.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Have you ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft?” … “He did make these things public, only they had to be dressed up as fiction or they never would have seen the light of day.”
The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror, John Llewellyn Probert, 2017
Other works take the metafictional Lovecraft concept much further, incorporating him fully into their narratives, either as a protagonist or as a figure whose presence colors the shape of the plot. This is especially the case for those that rely on the trope that the horrors he wrote about were secretly nonfiction, as in Moore’s Providence. While Lovecraft himself lived a fairly uneventful, if tragic, life, with a family prone to mental illness, his copious correspondences have built a more complete picture of him than most any other genre writer, and his bizarre and outre tastes and ideas blending the fantastic with an autodidactic knowledge of various real world subjects and a penchant for self-insert characters make him a great fit for “real person fiction.”
Oftentimes, these accounts highlight a paradoxical dichotomy present in many fan interpretations of the author, that of the mystical, reclusive occultist on the edge of madness or the affable, eccentric gentleman who loved ice cream and cats and had a lot of buddies. Each of these approaches idealizes Lovecraft in different ways, of course, and both tend to downplay or ignore the racist, toxic core of his creativity. In novels such as Peter Cannon’s The Lovecraft Chronicles (2004) and Jacqueline Baker’s The Broken Hours (2014), the authors harvest Lovecraft’s biography in order to build atmosphere and celebrate Lovecraft’s genius, providing prime examples of each side of this dichotomy.
The Lovecraft Chronicles is an affectionate alt-history imagining of Lovecraft if he survived until 1960, and avoids the use of the supernatural in its plot. Cannon frames this pseudo biography as the memoirs of three people who knew Lovecraft, focusing on his relationships with women. In this universe, a few chance meetings and a little well-taken feminine advice saved Lovecraft from dying in obscurity in 1937, becoming instead a successful author and even Hollywood actor. This is the Lovecraft of much fan imagination, a genteel eccentric whose more unfortunate attitudes are mere quirks, easily remedied. Those antisemitic and racist sentiments he held in his youth are quickly challenged by this series of vivacious young women, leading to a much-changed man.
The Broken Hours, in contrast, is a claustrophobic, atmospheric ghost story whose stifling atmosphere and ominous style focuses on the haunted figure of Lovecraft in the last year of his life. In a similar premise, narrator Arthur Crandle finds himself employed as Lovecraft’s secretary in the spring of 1936, quickly finding that his employers’ oppressive but mostly unseen presence and his fraught family history echo Crandle’s own regrets. Here too, Lovecraft’s relationships with women form the heart of the work, with his family’s mental illness serving as a recurring theme. Baker’s ambiguity regarding her unreliable narrators make the ghosts that float through the novel depict Lovecraft as a man tormented by his family’s demons, a monster created by a smothering mother and an absent father.
Much more common, though, as I mentioned earlier, are stories that frame Lovecraft’s opus as being in some way based on hidden truth, with the author knowing things he should not know or even being in some way a monstrous being himself. Works such as David Barbour and Richard Raleigh’s horror novel Shadows Bend (2000), Hans Rodinoff’s graphic novel Lovecraft (2004), and Jose Oliver’s webcomic Young Lovecraft mine the real Lovecraft’s history and combine it with his fictional creations to create a metafictional liminal zone.
Hans Rodinoff’s 2004 graphic novel simply entitled Lovecraft is probably the quintessential example of this motif of blending Lovecraft’s life and fiction. With artist Enrique Breccia, Rodinoff illustrates the story of Lovecraft’s biography through the lens that his family was cursed by the great old ones and that all of the dreams and experiences he had inspiring his fiction were actually happening to him, complete with horrific trips to Arkham, encountering interpretations of characters like Brown Jenkin and Wilbur Whateley. Breccia’s artwork ably captures the eerie and inexplicable nature of Lovecraft’s writing, but the plot is a bit forced and it seems pretty obvious this was based on a screenplay, never to be produced.
A more lighthearted, affectionate take is from Jose Oliver’s Spanish web-comic Young Lovecraft, which envisions the horror author as a gothy preteen continually summoning tentacled beasts to sic on bullies, along with his friend Siouxsie and a pet ghoul. With an art style and ambiance that feels like a mix between Bill Watterson and Johnen Vasquez but lacking the specific charms of each, Oliver’s comic take on Lovecraft is basically one joke, the incongruity of gruesome horror with cuteness, and quickly becomes repetitive.
The 2000 horror novel Shadows Bend by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh, is a darker, grittier take that still revels in a lot of fan-fictionesque tropes, featuring a storyline where Lovecraft goes on a road trip across the Depression-era US with his pen pal weird fiction writer Robert E. Howard in order to prevent some sort of eldritch takeover of the world. The authors portray Lovecraft and Howard as caricatures of their writing personas, chewing scenery as they attempt to thwart the alien menace with the help of some magical minorities. Interestingly, Shadows Bend again uses its female characters as a foil to humanize and defuse their racist beliefs, with Lovecraft even sacrificing his life to save the world, tastelessly tying Lovecraft’s fatal stomach cancer to a magical MacGuffin.
Most recently, the Lovecraft Squad series of linked short story collections edited by British writer Stephen Jones ties Lovecraft and his mythos with various events in twentieth-century US history. Particularly in the second volume in the series, Waiting, in which Lovecraft is recruited by the FBI after his published stories were seen to predict various top-secret activities the government had been up to, leading to the foundation of a Human Protection League to defend the world from the evils of Cthulhu and his cult. All in all, though, these narratives feel uneven in tone and voice and, while describing Lovecraft’s racism, offer no critiques and simply seem to frame them as a mere quirk. Compared to the more interesting and progressive takes on the material that have become prominent in recent years, it is disappointing to see such uninteresting, even boring interpretations of the same ideas.
“He needed to believe that he was a superior being, or at least that he belonged to a superior race, because, in his heart, Howard was terrified that he was nothing at all. His prejudice was like a child making a wall out of sand, to keep the ocean out. The child keeps putting more and more sand on the wall, and the ocean keeps pulling it down, and the child knows that, in the end, the ocean will level the wall, but what can he do?”
Robert H. Barlow describing his mentor, The Night Ocean, Paul La Farge, 2017
Even in its most cliched incarnations, it is interesting to think about what is it about H.P. Lovecraft that continues to inspire writers to not only be inspired by his work but to actually incorporate the author himself into their work.
Presaging much of fandom culture, Lovecraft’s engagement with his correspondents across the country led him into contact with much of the origins of modern fantasy and sci-fi, even disregarding the strength of his literary creations. In imagining that Lovecraft’s stories about hidden cults and correlations are the secret truth of the world and that he was somehow channeling or experiencing actual occult reality, people can imagine themselves living in a more mysterious, adventuresome world, even if that world involves malevolent entities whose existence may prove fatal to humanity.
But even more than that, I feel, much of the appeal of incorporating the real life figure of H.P. Lovecraft into a fictional work is because, for many writers of weird genre fiction, he is seen as eminently relatable. Among fans of Lovecraft, he’s kind of thought of as a friend, someone who would fit in inside their (white, male) social circles. On that note, it’s hard not to notice that all the authors of the works I’m looking at here are almost exclusively white American or European men. This brings up the dangers of treating Lovecraft’s stories as real while ignoring the actual roots of his eerie and affecting writing. If fans of Lovecraft are unable to reckon with his odious beliefs, documented well beyond that of the average racist white American during the nadir of US race relations, then what are these narratives really saying? As much as Lovecraft’s fears echo the fears of white America, the world is not as Lovecraft imagined it. Writing Cthulhu Mythos fiction, especially involving Lovecraft himself, without grappling with this fact, in effect, leaves this racist undertone intact.
This is why I found Paul La Farge’s fascinating and intricately woven 2017 novel The Night Ocean such a refreshing reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s legacy, one in conversation with the true horrors of the twentieth century and the sexual, racial, and social realities of the twenty-first century. La Farge crafts a mysterious and compelling narrative that travels back in forth through time (1950s Mexico City, 1930s NY, and 1940s Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp).
Narrated by Dr. Marina Willett, a New York psychologist whose husband has disappeared in typical Lovecraftian fashion, after his investigations into Lovecraft’s relationship with his young fan Robert H. Barlow began to spiral out of control. Soon, Marina too finds herself investigating Charlie’s research, relying on the unreliable and eventful life of an unassuming elderly Canadian, Leo Spinks. Spinks, having published the Erotonomicon, a salacious lost diary of Lovecraft himself in 1952, admitting his sexual relationship with Barlow, seems to know more than he lets on, and in fact, is the axle upon which the story revolves. Or is he? It turns out that, like the Necronomicon of Lovecraft’s writing, what is real and what is imaginary begins to blur, as hoaxes and revelations compete for the reader’s attention. In this Russian nesting doll of a narrative, the way La Farge interviews these narratives into a believable whole provides a perfect homage and criticism of Lovecraft’s place in fandom and popular culture, and why he remains relevant.
There are parallels between the early twentieth century and now, unfortunately. We find ourselves struggling between an uncertain future and a terrible past viewed through a lens of nostalgia. The existential dread of life in a world that is changing, that you are just adrift in. The cosmic horrors of unfettered capitalism, a political class that prefers to suppress representation, an environment in collapse due to human activities itself. These are things that afflict us now in 2022 just as much as they did in 1920, and now, like then, there are those who respond to these fears through hatred. Lovecraft’s work does a good job of conveying the feelings of insignificance of realizing the unthinkable size and age of the cosmos, but he could not conceive of facing these existential challenges with compassion. Perhaps by examining just why we find ourselves so in love with Lovecraft, as in The Night Ocean, we can understand more what dark impulses many in fandom continue to ferment.
