BORN DOWN IN A DEAD MAN'S TOWN.

monstricidal replied to your post: Kitty Valentine thanks you for being a...

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me at HPL constantly: what the fuck is UP, howard. step the FUCK UP,

Simon MacCulloch, “Lovecraft Waits Dreaming.” In Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos, ed. S.T. Joshi, Miskatonic River Press, 2011.

the book of essays i received for christmas was dissecting cthulhu: essays on the cthulhu mythos, ed. s.t. joshi, miskatonic river press, 2011. i’ll say this for it... it sure Does What The Title Says. a good portion of the book is devoted to seminal essays from previous decades of lovecraft scholarship, specifically those debunking the work of august derleth, the man who congealed lovecraft’s disparate scraps of worldbuilding into a single mass, slapped a lame christian analogy onto it, and named it the “cthulhu mythos”--then quite successfully passed his own sloppy pastiche off as the work of Howard Poward himself.

the majority of essays collected in the book are, i’d say, interesting or worthwhile reads. especially fun to read are the Brutal Takedowns of derleth and other pretenders to the HPL throne--never, for example, have i read a more thrilling assessment of massachusetts geography than in robert d. marten’s “arkham country: in rescue of the lost searchers,” an article specifically written to academically suplex a wannabe lovecraft country geographer. there are, as in any collection of works, disappointments--jason c. eckhardt’s “cthulhu’s scald: lovecraft and the nordic tradition” felt a bit, how you say... Weaksauce to me, especially since it’s one of the very few essays in the book that attempts to argue for a coherent lovecraft mythos (in this case, one that parallels nordic mythology). considering how unbelievably slight the actual presence of such beings as cthulhu, etc. is in lovecraft’s authentic works, i’m not sure how you could argue that Octopus Man is a deliberately crafted parallel to odin.

the book also has a generally blind eye to... pretty much every single one of HPL’s faults. if you’re familiar with any other work involving s.t. joshi’s scholarship then U Know How It Is. i have to say it got pretty tiring to read fawning lines about lovecraft’s genius without a single word about how heavily his conception of the world, as put forth in his work, relied on racism and xenophobia. similarly there isn’t an ounce of critique about his highly questionable treatment of gender--not even a single one of those fake asides scholars will use to briefly acknowledge and then brush away problematic elements in their material so they don’t have to deal with it. in none of the essays! there are 22 of them! plus an introduction!

part of it may be the homogeneity of the material. it may just be the (i would imagine) small size of the scholarly lovecraft community, but there are several authors with multiple essays included--i count 5 by robert m. price (almost 1/4th of the total essays in the book!), 3 by will murray, and other repeats. if you choose writers that aren’t interested in criticizing their chosen material on the lines of gender or race, and then collect multiple of their works in one volume, well. not a single anti-racist critique will be had. And No One Was Shocked.

for $20, is it the worst piece of garbage on my shelf? absolutely not. and if you’re into lovecraft criticism, i’d say Go To Town--even after reaching what i thought was my Limit on new insights into the ol Providence Gentlenerd himself, many of these essays made analytical points that surprised and intrigued me. but just be aware that this is definitely a first step into lovecraft criticism, and not the only step you should take.

to do list

godblooded.

          This feels like the worst. Of all the things Karen has seen and heard, she can finally say that she knows--this is the worst of them all.

          “Oh, Kitty,” she says. “Oh, no.” She blinks and the tears hovering on her lashes spill over. “No, that’s not true.” She reaches for her gloved hand and squeezes it between her own, tighter than she would if she could stop herself, searching Kitty’s gaze, looking into those black-seeming eyes, black-seeming but not: they’re forest eyes, eyes like moss, like deep, rich, algal ponds which shimmer dark and green and alive. It doesn’t seem impossible to Karen--more than that, it seems more possible than anything, more true than anything--that like those black pools, which veil their real color, Kitty might be veiled, too--might be hidden enough to fool you--even to fool herself: on the outside, terrible, violent... An animal. But on the inside? Karen knows she’s a person. She knows Kitty deserves so much more.

          (And because it’s Karen, she will never, ever think that the reverse might be true. That the outside, the veil, the disguise, is the person; that inside, where the truth is, is the animal.)