Bad Juju in Cthulu-Land
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A double-review of The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle (2016) & The Dream-Quest of Velitt-Boe by Kij Johnson (2019)
Since H.P. Lovecraft first started forging his haunting singular vision – the Cthulu Mythos – in the first decades of the Twentieth Century other writers have been possessed with the need to delve into its dark recesses, from August Derleth and Robert E. Howard, to Brian Lumley and Neil Gaiman. In recent years Lovecraftian fiction has surged – narratives of vast, elder gods laying dormant in the Earth, unaware of the insignificant lives which transpire above, or watching on from Outside with inhuman indifference, these disturbing tales of an existentially cold universe at the heart of which is a madness-inducing chaos are undoubtedly affected by the times we live in.
Two recent reads repurpose Lovecraft’s problematic oeuvre in interesting ways, fully conscious of the accusations of racism and misogyny. Both by American authors, one is by a writer of colour, the other by a female author, each has taken upon themselves the thorny task.
LaValle’s story wryly reworks ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (penned in 1925, and first published in Weird Tales in 1927). In 1924 Harlem, Tommy Tester is a small-time hustler whose regular guise as a street musician brings him in contact with reclusive millionaire Robert Suydam, who wants him to participate in a nefarious scheme involving the Great Old Ones. LaValle urban noir convincingly charts the everyday racism faced by people of colour in America – a situation which no longer seems ironically distant. In an interesting spin on the ‘selling your soul to the Devil at a crossroads’ motif of Blues legend LaValle boldly has his protagonist side with the priest of the Old Ones– for as ‘Black Tom’ (as he becomes after much suffering and provocation) argues: ‘I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.’ The protagonist, in effect, becomes the antagonist – and the effect is edgy and disturbing. There is no comforting redemption here, only the catharsis of the Grand Guignol.
Taking a very different approach, Johnson’s picaresque quest-narrative could not be more tonally different. Basing her story upon Lovecraft’s novella, ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (also published in 1927), Johnson takes the geography of Lovecraft’s dreamscape, and some of the flora and fauna, but jettisons the Nihilism and suffocating fatalism. The effect is rather like taking a Certificate ‘X’ film and bowdlerising it into a ‘U’. However smoothly written (with occasional recourse to recherché vocabulary) Johnson’s narrative is little more a glorified travelogue, a Grand Tour of Cthulu-Land, neutered into a kind of Lovecraftian theme park. The lovely map in the front matter is a tell-tale sign. As Diana Wynne Jones observes in her Tough Guide to Fantasy Land entry about Maps: ‘no Tour is complete without a Map. Further, you must not expect to be let off from visiting every damn’ place shown on it.’ The inciting incident for this long journey is the disappearance of a star pupil from the Ivy-League-esque Ulthar Women’s College. It turns out this absconded scholar (who happens to be granddaughter of an Elder God) has run off with a shadowy, glamorous man from the Waking World – a kind of reverse Hades figure. Former wanderer Professor Vellitt Boe must track her down and convince her to return. Boe proves to be more than up to the task in her no-nonsense way. A remarkably obliging cat even decides to accompany her, adding to the Disney-ish quality to the proceedings. If one wanted to dig beneath the surface here, one could discern a mythic narrative – that of Demeter’s search for her wayward Persephone (or Kore, pre-pomegranate pips). Maureen J Murdock’s feminist reworking of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey, the Heroine’s Journey, could be easily mapped onto the novel’s structure, and that is no bad thing: for if the novel achieves anything it is in this regard. It is refreshing to have a middle-aged woman as a protagonist. The few male characters are selfish and self-absorbed, lost in status games and the narratives in which they see themselves as hero (including Randolph Carter, from the original story). It is in the ending – with Boe’s awakening in the poignantly defamiliarised waking world, that Johnson’s novel rewards the steadfast reader with some kind epiphany. The message is ultimately far more life-affirming than LaValle’s but strange less satisfying.
Whatever their merits, neither of these novels match the heights of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016), which for my money is the best Cthulu Mythos novel of recent years – soon to be a HBO series directed by Jordan Peele (Get Out; Us) and produced by JJ Abrams. It feels Lovecraft’s legacy feels more resonant than ever – its Nihilistic Cosmicism a perfect reflection of the zeitgeist. When reworked intelligently, as these authors have done, it can provide a dark mirror for our times.
Kevan Manwaring, 18 January 2020
