Curriculars: The Relative Weird, Part Two—Writing Back to Lovecraft
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The relativism embedded in the formulation of the Relative Weird as I framed it in my previous post is a complication of the clear, stable distinction between safe and complacent reality on one hand, and uncanny, dangerous supernatural on the other. H.P. Lovecraft arguably pioneered the fantasy of intrusion, a subgenre of fantasy and horror in which one’s ordinary life is disrupted by a sudden awareness of a supernatural reality of which one has been blissfully ignorant. The most basic premise of Lovecraftian cosmic horror is the existential dread of the trauma experienced when coming into contact with this extant but heretofore invisible reality—so vast and so horrifying is the infinitude and pelagic indifference to our insignificant lives that it inflicts madness unto death on puny mortal minds.
The Weird, in terms of cosmic horror, thus operates for Lovecraft as a transcendent, universal principle. As I detailed in “The Trumpian Weird,” in this universalizing reality non-White people exist in the liminal space between normative White civilization and the “terrifying vistas of reality” (“Call of Cthulhu” 139) that are home to the unthinkable eldritch of such Old Gods as Cthulhu. If I may be so gauche as to quote myself:
[Lovecraft’s] stories thus tend to proceed by hints and suggestion; the monstrosity of the hidden eldritch reality is suggested by the monstrosity of the human beings who are either most susceptible to it or who actively submit to its malevolent power … And just which human beings are most susceptible or eager to so subsume themselves? Those who for Lovecraft are less than human.
The fact that this figuration of non-White people as conduits for supernatural horror is a recurring trope is the principal reason I reject out of hand apologias that attempt to set apart Lovecraft’s personal racism from his works of creative imagination. There’s no real distinction here: it’s racism all the way down. It’s for this reason that my main point of departure in my critical considerations of Lovecraft is to pose the question of why. Why has someone whose fiction is both hella racist and written in objectively bad prose1 not only been profoundly influential on gothic horror—as well as science fiction and fantasy—but has, indeed, experienced something of a renaissance over the past twenty years or so? The descriptor “Lovecraftian” has become ubiquitous, applied to a host of fiction, cinema, TV, and video games.2
Were the instances of Lovecraft’s influence simply straight-up, uncritical derivation, that would be one thing, and the more pertinent question would be how creators manage to look past Lovecraft’s more odious tendencies. While there is no shortage of more slavish Lovecraftian recapitulations, it is notable is how much of the current Lovecraftian renaissance has been about critical pushback and revision, or the inversion of Lovecraft’s basic conventions.3 A critical mass of these texts are by queer and racialized authors, and/or concern characters and circumstances specific to marginalized communities; these texts subvert the Lovecraftian mythos in ways that interrogate questions of race and gender and sexuality, often being overtly self-reflexive in referencing either Lovecraft himself or his various stories.
One of the key texts in my American Weird course is The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle. This slim but substantive novella reimagines Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook.” As I noted in “The Trumpian Weird,” “Red Hook” is broadly considered his most explicitly and egregiously racist story, with its descriptions of Red Hook’s polyglot, multiethnic population concentrated around the harbour as an undifferentiated horde, “a hopeless tangle and enigma” with “Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another” which taken together comprises “a babel of sound and filth” (119). Not even Lovecraft’s most ardent apologists attempt to defend this story.4
LaValle’s inversion is to retell the story from the perspective of a Black protagonist. Charles Thomas “Tommy” Tester—later becoming the titular Black Tom after he’s gone through some stuff—is a young man in Harlem in his early 20s, whose hustles to make ends meet range from busking with a guitar to procuring occult arcana for uncanny clients. It is the combination of these occupations that lands him in the employ of Robert Suydam, a would-be sorcerer who plans to wake the “Sleeping King,” a vast eldritch being whose “resting place [is] at the bottom of the sea” (56). Suydam emphasizes to Tommy that the Sleeping King (who we’re given to understand is Cthulhu, even before Tommy names him at the story’s end) is a being of unthinkable power to whom mortals’ petty concerns are beneath notice:
When the sun rose, Robert Suydam concluded with one final piece of wisdom. He retrieved the stone from his pocket again. This time he pressed the rock into Tommy’s palm … “How much did this stone matter to you, to your existence, before you picked it up …? That’s how little humanity’s silly struggles matter to the Sleeping King.” (57)
Tommy’s interactions with Suydam attract the attention of the police—the detective Malone who is Lovecraft’s main character, and a brutally racist cop for hire named Mr. Howard.5 Howard kills Tommy’s father in the course of investigating Tommy: entering their shared Harlem apartment, he “mistakes” the guitar in the father’s hand for a weapon and shoots him. “I felt in danger for my life,” Howard tells Tommy, “I emptied my revolver. Then I reloaded and did it again” (65).
Shellshocked and grief-stricken, Tommy recalls Suydam’s rapturous description of the Sleeping King’s power: “The breathless terror with which the old man spoke of the Sleeping King. A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naïve” (66). Confronted with the callous depravity of a White cop who killed his father with deliberate malevolence, he reflects, “Indifference would be such a relief.”
Suydam, the wealthy scion of an old Dutch family who wields enormous power of both the magical and quotidian varieties, finds sublime terror in Cthulhu’s infinite indifference; to a man accustomed to being paid heed, this is the ultimate expression of power. Tommy by contrast finds in this indifference a welcome alternative to the banality of Mr. Howard’s evil and, by extension, the systemic racism for which he is a metonym. Though he had resolved to leave Suydam’s employ, Tommy instead returns and, full of rage, usurps the old man to become the primary force in waking the Sleeping King. He takes his bloody revenge on Mr. Howard. He spares Malone’s life—though, gruesomely, not unscathed—and whispers in response to the detective’s importunities, “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day” (143).
The Ballad of Black Tom is exemplary of a small but growing subset of the Weird, which specifically writes back to Lovecraft, engaging directly with his racism by critiquing the underlying assumptions of his mythos. Victor LaValle, indeed, goes so far as to dedicate his novella to Lovecraft in a manner that emphasizes the contradictions at work: "For H.P. Lovecraft,” he writes, “with all my conflicted feelings.” LaValle describes how he first obsessively read Lovecraft’s fiction at the age of ten or eleven, not initially seeing the dehumanizing aspects of his stories but drawn in because of Lovecraft’s general expression of helplessness in the face of a larger, implacable world resonated with him profoundly: “even though he was this incredibly smart and well-read human being, he was also … in many ways this flailing 10 or 11-year-old kid.” LaValle says the greatest compliment he can offer Lovecraft’s art “is that he actually got that down on the page in a way that this 10 or 11-year-old Black kid from Queens could also relate to” (NPR).
I think it’s probably safe to say this was nowhere near Lovecraft’s intent, but it’s a salutary example of art and literature offering “portals of discovery” (to use James Joyce’s phrase) to which the artist themself is oblivious. By the time LaValle matured enough to register the more odious aspects of Lovecraft, it was too late to dismiss him out of hand:
[W]hen I was, like, 10 or 11, I just didn't even see it. I think I just couldn't have processed it. And then when I was about 15 or 16, I started being like … what did he just say? And it was the kind of thing that you would say, like—if you were walking down the street and somebody said that, you'd smack them in the mouth. So why did I say that it was OK on the page? And yet by this point, I already loved the stories, so it made for these very conflicted feelings. (NPR)
It's tempting to draw a larger metaphor out of LaValle’s observation, about the insidious and invidious nature of compelling works of creative imagination, and how works of art and literature have been historically employed as vehicles for cultural imperialism … but I’ll save that for a future post and limit myself to observing that this functions as good an answer to my earlier question of why Lovecraft? as we’re likely to find.
One of the interesting elements of these texts writing back to Lovecraft is the way they use genre itself as an overarching metaphor for systems of exclusion. The sympathetic resonance the ten-year-old LaValle found in Lovecraft was that of the outsider, the person who feels out of place in the world. The fact that for Lovecraft that meant being a White person who perceived the presence of nonwhite people as a threat to his autonomy is not a contradiction, but an irony that reflects back on the complexity of these questions—the awareness of which is absent from Lovecraft’s fiction, but immanent in The Ballad of Black Tom and other such narratives. Lovecraft’s own marginalism was a function of his personal idiosyncrasies and a life lived hovering at the poverty line, the latter partly a function of the fact that his writing earned him a pittance. He never gained anything resembling literary respect outside a small circle of genre enthusiasts. Like all pulp authors, and authors of genre fiction more broadly, his work was long disdained by the gatekeepers of Literature. His “renaissance” has been a function of a number of factors, but the biggest one has been the general opening-up of these classifications and the mainstreaming of what used to be niche and nerdy. We see this most obviously with such franchise juggernauts as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Disneyfication of Star Wars; but also a greater freedom among “literary” authors like Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, and Kazuo Ishiguro to write SFF; the elevation of writers emerging from genre origins to literary status, especially in the realm of comics and graphic novels (Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Alan Moore); to say nothing of the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien now gets tacitly understood as Great Literature—and I can regularly teach a class on The Lord of the Rings—when even twenty years ago he was still considered suspect among a critical mass of literature scholars.6
But even as genre has opened up, there are many who jealously police its boundaries—especially as terrain that was long dominated by White male authors and creators increasingly features nonwhite voices, women’s voices, queer voices. Genre, like all categorizing systems, is by nature exclusionary, its “rules” arbitrarily established to delineate what qualifies. The Ballad of Black Tom edges up to using genre as metaphor but never does so explicitly. The next text we did in my Weird course was Lovecraft Country, both the novel by Matt Ruff and some of the episodes from the HBO televisual adaptation. If Black Tom was coy about genre as metaphor, Lovecraft Country makes it its principal conceit. For the third and final instalment of this series, I’ll be digging into that.
REFERENCES
Lovecraft, H.P. “The Horror at Red Hook.” The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S.T. Joshi. Penguin, 2004.
LaValle, Victor. The Ballad of Black Tom. Tom Doherty (Tor.com), 2016.
---. “The Ballad Of Black Tom Offers A Tribute To And Critique Of Lovecraft.” NPR. Fresh Air, 29 February 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/02/29/468558238/the-ballad-of-black-tom-offers-a-tribute-and-critique-of-lovecraft
NOTES
To again quote myself, reiterating what I said on this point in “The Trumpian Weird”: This is a hill I’m perfectly willing to die on. I have read a significant number of apologias for Lovecraft’s prose and for his (to be charitable) unconventional storytelling. I’m willing to grant that “the weird style” is a thing and that Lovecraft’s lugubrious and ornate writing does occasionally work to interesting effect, but taken overall … bad prose is bad prose. He might have had a style, but he was no stylist.
Sometimes this designation can be a bit of a stretch, with “Lovecraftian” applied to anything featuring sea-monsters or anything remotely tentacular, but then the very eagerness to embrace this categorization speaking to the broader cultural cachet Lovecraft’s mythos has in the present moment.
This latter category of works, those inverting Lovecraftian convention, tend more toward the queer uncanny and what I’m calling the Utopian Weird. While Lovecraft, to the best of my knowledge, had absolutely nothing to say about alternative sexualities—or, really, sexuality at all—he did provide a template from which to work in terms of his paranoia about the permeability of the (White) self. The “weird” of the Lovecraftian Weird is figured in part as encounters with the monstrous non-human, and its capacity to taint/infect the self. The most explicit example of this trope is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which is essentially a miscegenation allegory: the people of Innsmouth, as part of a Faustian deal with an aquatic old god, eventually turn into fish-people and return to the reef beneath the waves just offshore from the town. It is the epitome of body-based paranoia, the fear that the self is permeable and subject to monstrous transformation.
When co-opted by the queer uncanny, by contrast—in instances of what I’m calling the Utopian Weird—this paranoia is inverted and the possibility of transformation is treated as liberatory, an expansion of how we understand the human and humanity.
They usually deploy the expedient of dismissing it as a poorly written story, citing Lovecraft’s own estimation of it as such, therefore hardly worth mentioning. Though I must confess I have never quite grasped how “Red Hook” is so much more obviously badly written than … well, anything else in Lovecraft’s corpus.
It was only as I wrote this that it suddenly occurred to me that “Mr. Howard” might be alluding to Howard Philip Lovecraft. Took me awhile to get there, but then even I can see through a brick wall in time (as they say in Bree).
A case in point: in 2003, the BBC conducted “The Big Read,” a huge survey of people’s favourite books in the U.K. Three quarters of a million people responded, and a ranked list of two hundred titles was compiled. Number one with a bullet was The Lord of the Rings—precipitating a number of pearl-clutching think pieces bemoaning the erosion of British literary education and sophistication. I would like to take this moment to add that Terry Pratchett accounted for no fewer than fifteen books on the list.