The Cycle of Undeath

"Parasite. Slowly I approach him. Cancer. He allows his eyes to meet mine. Disease."

V:tM-Redemption - NYC Hub Rap

 

Lovecraft's The Shunned House (which you may want to read if you hate spoilers) feels fairly typical of his brief career's early half in its gothic horror scene-setting. But like Herbert West, it also draws upon Science Fiction sufficiently to hint towards his later shift toward materialistic explanations. Seriously, how many vampire stories culminate in defeating the monster not by religious rite or secrets of the ages passed down by quaintly ethnic informants, but by the thoroughly modern sanitary expedient of jugs of sulfuric acid? After all, vampire myths were at least as likely to resemble ghosts in most mythologies rather than solid corpses. In fairness, memorable but not HPL's finest work. His customary purple prose ran away from himself, as did his effort to provide historical context for his purple people-eater. But that whole gritty, slimy, chthonic nastiness imbuing what is rather explicitly a reimagined vampire myth got me thinking about the waves of vampiric (and to a greater extent, undead) portrayals as either super or natural.

 

Stoker's Dracula provides a bit of both. Educated, refined and imperious its antagonist may be, but one of the book's best executed scenes had him descending a sheer stone wall head-down in a splayed-limb, reptilian crawl, a suddenly alien, animalistic perspective shift. By the time movies rolled around in the early 20th century, monsters were expected to be monstrous and Count Orlok (rather exactly contemporary to The Shunned House) played up the second angle. Bela Lugosi was more ambivalent and Christopher Lee (conscious of the character's power/sex/violence appeal, especially to women) transitioned more fully toward the first. By the time I took an interest, the market was already redefined by Anne Rice's sexualized, romanticized vampires, which her own characters in Interview consciously verbalize as a new evil for a new age: no longer bedraggled graveyard ghouls but sleek, idealized Prince Charmings. Notably, even imitators from other genres, like the electric space vampire haunting a candle (yes, seriously) from ST:TNG's laughably terrible Sub Rosa episode, toed the new line of ethereal, sanitized parasitism, replete with dainty Victorian duds.

 

The inevitable overshoot into Twilight's idiotic emo sparkles made most genre fans finally aware that something, somewhere, had gone un-horribly off the rails. But though attempts have cropped up with some regularity to return vampirism to its monstrous roots, these have hardly contested three decades of Rice-Meyer dominance. Maybe Bloodlines 2 will help with that. Maybe not. One hopes.

 

What truly mentally clicked into conjunction with The Shunned House though was a surprisingly engaging third act of WH40K: Rogue Trader, concerning the setting's Drow knockoffs the Drukhari. Though technically evil space elves, physically thriving on Sadism of the most vicious bent also brings vampirism into the mix.

Apostrophic violation! Summon the Grammarian Imperialis!

A reliance on telepathy which could unduly sanitize the proceedings is offset by the sheer gruesomeness of their methods of extracting said psychic suffering. Something of the Orlokian ghoul seeps back into their bloodthirst and mangling torments. As with Sub Rosa, I find this side attraction merely touching on the genre more informative than official "Vampire" fare as an indicator of undercurrents moving with or against the main tide, not least because like Star Trek, Warhammer is a market force in its own right, and (again like Star Trek in the '90s) one striving for legitimacy.

 

Granted throughout all this pop culture has fixated on a different breed of undead, zombies, which have proliferated since the Living Dead days like... some kind of infectious plague. But though they really are monstrous, deformed, animalistically vicious, their core feature of losing control or intelligent planning makes zombies a very different narrative device, demonstrated by every zombie plot shifting away from them and toward survivor infighting as source of conflict. Nevertheless, the proliferation of movies about earthier, less powerful, more physical ghouls at the same time as vampires lost such traits demonstrates a market reaction against prettified monsters.

 

The new age movement has come and gone, so maybe its new evil can follow. The idea that villainy or monstrosity can be sanitized, or excused as women's sexual ideal, needs a solid stake through its heart.

A Shock on the Doorstep

"it did not occur to them that this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war"

Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

 

Leafing through a few HPL stories I found The Thing on the Doorstep stood out enough to look up individually, and was surprised at finding it panned by at least the reviews cited on Wikipedia. To me, while not one of his best it's still one of Lovecraft's better works, and my reason for seeking commentary in the first place echoes that commentary's negative tone: it's not what you expect from him. But I would add: you say that like it's a bad thing!

 

It is indeed surprising to find this one of his last publications (a few months before he died) because its gothic horror tone better fits his earlier career rather than his later, more scientifictitious bent. It also plays up the interpersonal angle uncharacteristically, and there I think it's not given enough credit for character growth, not of the narrator but of Derby, whose soft, pampered upbringing is hardened through his years of psychic sparring into a superhuman effort of will by the end, living up to the superior intellect bestowed him by birth. The horrors of Derby's last act are by bulk left to the reader's imagination, yes, but you are nonetheless meant to imagine them, scrape by agonizing scrape and shuffle. Imagine, and salute!

 

Oh, Howie, you classically bigoted Boston asshole, did you not know you're supposed to manage your audience's expectations? When your middle name is cosmic horror, don't start writing about screwdrivers or they'll criticize how you handle the riveting!* And that brought to mind an example from more recent decades.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy's world-class work, a rare modern SF classic. Unfortunately after that he dove into the 2000s' environmentalist disaster thriller fad, and I'm solidly in the camp viewing that by-the-numbers sensationalism as more detrimental to environmentalism than any amount of public interest it generated. But a couple of years before Red Mars he wrote a book so sadly underappreciated it rates no more than a three-line blurb: A Short, Sharp Shock. Granted it's a hard book to blurb, of a genre (if it can be called so) more obscure than the text itself. Fantasy, yes, but neither of the dark nor high nor low nor urban varieties. Oneiric fantasy strings together semicoherent imagery and recurring themes in the disjointed yet obsessive manner of dreams. It's easier done in movies than print (Mirrormask jumps to mind) and too often falls into Alice in Wonderland mimicry. A Short, Sharp Shock on the other hand rides its uphill romance and creeping multiple threads of horror beautifully, dipping between chase nightmare, body horror, existential dread and bittersweet lulls of contentment. And yet, for all the Mars books' deserved attention, for all the stupider 40-50-60 books' in-genre appreciation, this little short sharp book's never mentioned. The author's other digression from terraforming/environmental themes, the alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt, fares somewhat better.

I've touched on this before with regard to H.G. Wells, whose well-deserved fame is strictly limited to the first decade of a half-century career, despite later books like Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free or The Research Magnificent being arguably better written, more quotable or more psychosocially incisive. They're just, strictly speaking, less high-concept scie fie than his earlier stuff. Even his fans won't touch them. I myself am guilty of this tendency. I've read a baker's dozen or more of Ursula K. LeGuin's SF stories, but not-a-one of her fantasy books despite being well aware the science in her fiction falls so far into the soft side as to dip routinely into science fantasy.

 

In science one might view more skeptically the expert outside his field, but even there we're forced to acknowledge that intellect is by its nature widely applicable. If it weren't, our fang-less, clawless, flabby species wouldn't be here. Bad enough that nomini sancti of every field of human pursuit from labs to offices to recording studios will strike down upstarts and defend their turfs against perceived encroachment, bad enough that every pulpit's wrapped in barbed wire. Must we mere mortals dig more trenches for them, even between fields of fabulism?

 

 

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* See? My audience expects puns. Mission accomplished.

Void the Void

"We transmit on all frequencies
Talk show panic gossip queens
Racing into ruin
Racing on to our demise"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Into the Void

 

 

Before complaining about Darkest Dungeon 2, let me sidetrack to say the validity of any fad is inverse to the extent to which it is, in fact... a fad. An idiotically and endlessly regurgitated meme. A refuge for the unimaginative and simpleminded. An idiot-friendly set piece. Vapid filler. Dross.

 

Anything can be dragged down to that level if enough of the braindead majority pile onto the bandwagon.

So first off, everyone give Lovecraft a rest. He's getting as played-out as Tolkien elves by last decade. Likewise, as everyone willfully misinterpreted elves as mere spindly prettyboys while ignoring the poignancy of cursed pride, doomed creation or waning nobility, "lovecraftian" has been debased to "tentacled fish monsters" increasingly ignoring the persistent theme of human insufficiency, immeasurably vast antiquity or creeping decadence which elevated his stories past the usual creep show. When The Secret World did it, the reserves had not yet been tapped dry. This ain't then. Come now, horror's not my preferred genre, but there must be other sources of inspiration you can channel. (Just don't fall back on red horny devils or googly-eyed oni.) (Or vampires.) (Or ffs, anything but zombies!)

On a related note, stop spouting "the void" for a bogeyman catch-all. Even as a teenager back in '97 I had no trouble calling bullshit on Event Horizon's standard trappings of a burning hell being called a "dimension of pure chaos" ... which would in fact mean a whole lotta nothing at all. Certainly not a force obsessed with attacking humans. Yes, yes, the certainty of nonexistence is the core under-riding anxiety of any sapient, but you're hardly plumbing those philosophical depths by constantly spouting "the void" as highfalutin' smokescreen for generic goblins. I'm sure you all want a slice of Games Workshop's pie, but a setting designed to peddle fifty-dollar toy soldiers to fanatical collectors is just too obviously a make-work pile of warped pretextium crystals with no depth worth tapping. There's nothing there to copy. The setting really is... a void. You won't steal away Warhammer's fans unless you can slap the Warhammer logo onto your product. Even Blizzard didn't manage it.

Also, as appealing as "the void" sounds to any writer desperate to leave all options open for future sequels / expansions cramming anything and everything trendy into that kitchen sink, you do know you're not the only ones who can spot that cop-out from coherence and a proper worldbuilding framework, right? If it's everything, it's nothing. I'm not sitting here in front of my screen awed at infinite possibilities when I hear your voice actors intone "kay-oss" or "the aether" or "Tha-Voyd" * with all the gravitas of fifth graders reciting a book report on a book they didn't read. I'm thinking "yeah, mmkay, so there's maybe a 5% chance whatever rando' shit these rando' scheisters pull out of their asses next might not bore me to tears." The suspense is not killing me.

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* Or worst of all by this point "multiverse"

The Madness of Darkness

"Out from ruins once possessed
Fallen city, living death"

Metallica - The Thing That Should Not Be

At the Mountains of Madness does not feel like an H. P. Lovecraft story. After a chapter or two I half thought I'd picked up John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? by mistake, and not just because of its Antarctic expedition setting... or the shapeshifting monsters. In fact, Campbell's version (published two years after Lovecraft's and one year after the latter's convenient death, in the same magazine which Campbell had taken over as editor, and which horror tale would go in to inspire several movies and an entire subculture of alien doppelganger fiction) draws a suspicious amount of apparent inspiration from Lovecraft's. But as this blog post concerns itself neither with the letter nor the moral spirit of the rules surrounding plagiarism, let us skip trippingly along.

Lovecraft primarily banked on our fear of the unknown. Most of his tales hold the monster out of focus until the last moment, dangling only a few hints of its physical attributes before the reader. Their tone approached Romantic-era thrillers in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Lovecraft seems to have idolized. His mythical sunken city of R'lyeh resembles Poe's The City in the Sea much more than any of the endless myths and adventure stories about Atlantis. Purple, mythical, mystical, unknowable, indefinable, oneiric, suspenseful Gothic horror for a new century, this was my impression of Lovecraft from the twenty or so short stories I'd read. At the Mountains of Madness in contrast was obviously written with both a geographic atlas and a paleontology tract in hand. Not that this makes its scientific literacy all that impressive from my futuristic vantage point. If nothing else, the altitudes at which the heroes were working should've had them gasping their lungs inside out within five minutes from the strain of sitting, much less racing around an entire city copying murals.
But still.
The story provides more rationalization by far than his previous fare, makes exhaustive references to Antarctic geography, catalogues the Elder Things' alien morphology and physiology, tracks their civilization across major geological periods with references to the continent's climate changes, and most importantly sets up the beginnings of an overarching framework integrating the Elder Things' history with R'lyeh and the Mi-Go. Speaking of which, the story he wrote immediately preceding this one makes me think his switch in tone wasn't a one-off.

The Whisperer in Darkness starts out much like Lovecraft's earlier stories, with hints and portents of raptors in the night. But, halfway through, it ramps up to detailed descriptions of the Mi-Go and exposition as to their origins, material nature and policies vis-a-vis the naked ape. It's especially noteworthy for its ambiguity as to the Mi-Go's motivations, with its unreliably narrated conversations toward the end wide open to interpretation, where in earlier stories the inhuman monsters were almost universally malicious or at least wantonly destructive. In the larger context of his career, you can almost see Lovecraft transitioning thematically from superstition to science fiction as Whisperer progresses. On one hand, this renders his later repeated references to Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym in Mountains of Madness all the more touching, as though Lovecraft couldn't help but reaffirm his admiration of his bygone hero even as he himself outgrew the horror/mystery style of a century prior and took the first steps toward stitching together a coherent cosmology for future works. It also shines a new light on arguably Lovecraft's most accomplished tale, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, one of only two of his major works written after this period, which was carefully composed to allow for materialistic explanations despite the demonic air with which its narrator perceives events.

Then Howard died.

In 1936, five years after it was written, At the Mountains of Madness with its rationalization of worlds beyond into ersatz science was finally published, and a year later, a few months after Lovecraft's death, the magazine was taken over by John W. Campbell, the godfather of hard Science Fiction. In 1938 Campbell published the acclaimed Who Goes There? and Lovecraft remains known to the public as a writer of supernatural horror and not sci-fi.

So here's one of those "what might've been?" questions. If Lovecraft had not died at the age of 46 in relative obscurity, if he had continued his later career's shift toward SF and cobbled together an overarching cosmology for his works, if he had ridden subsequent decades' shift into hard SF alongside Campbell's other golden age writers like Heinlein and Asimov, how would our popular fiction look today? What would Middle-Earth be without The Silmarillion? A couple of romantic, nostalgic adventure stories?

None gains or guesses what it hints at giving

"I cannot tell why some things hold for me
A sense of unplumbed marvels to befall,
Or of a rift in the horizon's wall
Opening to worlds where only gods can be.
[...]
It is in sunsets and strange city spires,
Old villages and woods and misty downs"

H.P. Lovecraft - Fungi From Yuggoth XXVIII - Expectancy


I maintain that the ending of The Lord of the Rings is one of the saddest in all literature. The survival of humanity scores a pyrrhic victory at best, and more rightly an insult to the superhuman wisdom and grace of the noble elves doomed to fade, to relinquish the world to short-lived, small-minded petty vermin.
To us, that is.

While my familiarity with H.P Lovecraft can't qualify as exhaustive, a recent reading of Fungi from Yuggoth has put the various disjointed yarns about fish-monsters and morbidity in perspective. Most of the Fungi are more or less what you'd expect from Lovecraft, florid descriptions of Bosch-like monsters and shuddering invocations of unknowable dangers lurking in the shadows. A little over halfway through the collection, however, several poems slip into a surprisingly touching, soulful melancholy which centers the author's viewpoint.

"I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town"

It's a sentiment familiar to many who scoff at their contemporaries' stumbling re-enactment of the human tragedy echoed in crumbling masonry from Babylon to Boston. One can't call it nostalgia though, as its sufferers have often never known these places, nor is it glorification of imaginary "golden ages" in themselves. Lovecraft was by what I've heard of him, like his hero Poe, too much of a snob and a dandy to really fall for romantic medievalism or the charms of quaint rustics keeping the old ways. The human world, in all its lack, is a cruel trick to play on sentient minds.There must be something more. There should have been something more.

It's more of a lament for the unfulfilled promise of past possibilities, the presque vu of man's fumbling helplessly within grasp of his rightful divinity, age after age, generation after generation, the constant backsliding into bestiality. Degeneration, not merely the loss of the elves but of the elvish blood of Numenor, the loss of promise in the secondborn. For all his grave warnings about the terrors of the cosmos, Lovecraft's most famous denouements as often as not yielded a human devolution (The Lurking Fear, The Rats in the Walls, etc.) In light of all accomplished in the past, the pettiness of the present is worse than stagnation, a betrayal of our own promise, and the insanity induced by eldritch horrors is less a comment on the vastness of the universe as on the diminution of human intellect.