I couldn't breathe below the sea, but it does breathe underneath me

[sovay]

So I have just been shown a review of Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror, edited by Lynne Jamneck and forthcoming from Dark Regions Press. According to Alison Lang in Rue Morgue Magazine:

The crown jewel in this collection is "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" by Sonya Taaffe, which opens with a female descendant of the legendary Waite family attempting to drown herself in a decrepit bathroom. Told from the perspective of Anson, a proudly queer "child of Innsmouth," the story lovingly describes the fishy attributes of his kin with language more poetic than Lovecraft himself could have imagined. "Over the warm rosewood of her skin, the faint olive tinting of her nascent scales shone like the patina on bronze," begins one passage. Taaffe's story turns the tables on the Lovecraftian skill of describing the ineffable, the awful and the unimaginable and makes it deliriously lovely and wholly human. Through her tale, she affirms that anything can happen when new voices are permitted to run wild in Lovecraft's realm of fearful symmetries. And that's why Dreams from the Witch House deserves to be read—widely.

I will talk more about this story when it is more widely available, but everyone who knows me can be shocked, shocked that I read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and sympathized instantly with the sea-people, the shape-changers, the inheritors of the sea-city that glimmers at the bottom of the narrator's dreams: "Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions." Of course I write of their metamorphosis with envy and admiration: I have singularly failed to grow scales for most of my life, though I taught myself to swim in the Atlantic with my eyes open to the salt. It didn't occur to me until just now, but there are ways in which this story is probably in dialogue with Splash (1984) as well as Lovecraft. I have wanted sea-change as long as I can remember. I have been disappointed, and hence "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts."

(Anson is queer, and Jewish, in part because it would have distressed Lovecraft, but also because I am. My fish people will be intersectional or they will be bullshit.)

The e-book is currently available as part of the Cthulhu Mythos E-Book Bundle; the print version hits shelves and doorsteps later this month. Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Tamsyn Muir, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Gemma Files, Amanda Downum, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Storm Constantine, and R.A. Kaelin among others, with illustrations by Daniele Serra that remind me favorably of Stephen Gemmell's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It is worth your time.

I should go to bed now, but I'm pretty happy.

Comments

[drwex]

in part because it would have distressed Lovecraft

That's interesting. I've had a hard time engaging with Lovecraft in any serious way since I became old enough to learn of his personal anti-semitism. I likewise cannot read or listen to Orson Scott Card any longer.

It's good to see other peoples' responses and perspectives. Mazal tov on the glowing review, too.

[sovay]

I've had a hard time engaging with Lovecraft in any serious way since I became old enough to learn of his personal anti-semitism. I likewise cannot read or listen to Orson Scott Card any longer.

Lovecraft's racism is huge and unavoidable and baked into his worldbuilding in ways that are culturally/biographically interesting and capable of causing a lot of pain. I wrote about it a little after reading Alan Moore's Neonomicon (2010), mostly in comments. Nonetheless, I have less difficulty with it than I do with the views of Orson Scott Card or John C. Wright. I don't think it's the historical distance—"attitudes of the time" only goes so far—although it does make a difference to me that Card and Wright are alive and actively attempting to make the world a harder place for me and other people to live. It may be partly that neither of them offers me anything I find as attractive as Lovecraft's cosmicism (or fish people), so I have no reason to keep thinking about their legacy to the field except in a vaguely depressed way. I don't approach Lovecraft uncritically, but he is important enough to me that I wrote a poem about him. I like Kipling, too, and he once came out with this gem about Einstein.

Mazal tov on the glowing review, too.

Thank you.

[drwex]

Ooh, I'm going to not-read that bit from Kipling because omg yeah seriously f'ed up, I know.

I don't approach Lovecraft uncritically

Yes. I spent some time in 2011-12 reading various peoples' writings on "how to like problematic things" and tried to absorb some of that advice into my own responses. It's a work in progress.

I think some of the difference, for me, is that Lovecraft (and particularly the Cthulhu mythos) have become baked into the culture so deeply that they've become owned. You get things like cuddly green-tentacled plushies, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, both of which I'm sure would have appalled him. I see that as a form of reclaiming, in somewhat the same manner as the community has reclaimed "queer." That is, some people still use that word as a slur/insult but it's also used as a proud identification by members of the community. Likewise, people can still rightly point to HPL's problematic statements and attitudes while still welcoming the FSM's noodly presence. Does that make sense?

[sovay]

Likewise, people can still rightly point to HPL's problematic statements and attitudes while still welcoming the FSM's noodly presence. Does that make sense?

Absolutely; the two are not mutually exclusive. I don't think I agree that Lovecraft's cultural ubiquity is the result of conscious reclamation—if it serves as a form of the latter (Lovecraft's cosmos now a creative playground for anyone who recognizes a shoggoth when they see one, including people whose existence and success would have freaked him out), I see it as a generally accidental process, whereas the use of "queer" as a neutral self-identification rather than a slur has been deliberate and political. I'm also not sure about the ownership argument. You can bake a lot of things so deeply into a culture that they become second-nature touchstones, but that has nothing to do with whether they are problematic or hurtful or not. If you mean that the baked-in quality makes it easier for people to feel comfortable playing with Lovecraft's legacy in ways that highlight or oppose or subvert its more toxic aspects, however, that makes sense to me.

Honestly, I have no idea how Lovecraft would have felt about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I mean, this is the same man who reacted to the discovery of Pluto by writing to a friend: "Whatcha thinka the NEW PLANET? HOT STUFF!!! It is probably Yuggoth." He liked some of the same movies I did. I find much of his biography upsetting and many of his actions bizarrely endearing. He was scared of a lot of things and if he hadn't been, his fiction would have been different, and he might not have been either so racist or so unhappy. I can't tell if he would have found plush Cthulhus offensive and trivializing or if he would instead have found them bewildering but hilarious. He was terrible at promoting his own work and seems to have believed himself a failure to the point where couldn't even be counted on to answer invitations when he had stories handy, but it's not like he didn't know he had fans during his lifetime. I have no idea how he would have reacted to finding himself suddenly part of the canon.

[drwex]

If you mean that the baked-in quality makes it easier for people to feel comfortable playing with Lovecraft's legacy in ways that highlight or oppose or subvert its more toxic aspects, however, that makes sense to me.

Yes, that's a clearer statement of my hypothesis, thank you. I think any given idea or problematic concept can be softened by inclusion in contexts and social elements that are not problematic. It's not exactly "familiarity breeds contempt" so much as "sanding off the pointy edges" because we encounter it in multiple ways. I have no pretensions to understand Lovecraft and counterfactuals mostly cause me to shrug (so with rare exceptions not a fan of alternate histories).

To circle back, I'm curious what you do make of his cultural ubiquity. I grok that there's no telling what makes a thing popular at any given moment but something that endures over time as long as HPL seems qualitatively different.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I hope to see you write about Alan Moore's _Providence_ at some point, perhaps after it's complete (issue 8 of 12 just came out). Incidentally, I'm helping annotate it over at Facts in the Case of Alan Moore's Providence (https://factsprovidence.wordpress.com).

[sovay]

Incidentally, I'm helping annotate it over at Facts in the Case of Alan Moore's Providence.

Does that mean you're enjoying it? I was very wary after Neonomicon.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

On the whole, yes, though I must reserve some judgment due to not having seen the ending yet. It's certainly a great deal more researched and carefully thought out than Neonomicon was, and has less shock-for-shock's sake. Actually, the factor I'm most worried about at this point in the story is how it will end up tying to Neonomicon, as they are clearly related, though not in straightforward ways.

[sovay]

Actually, the factor I'm most worried about at this point in the story is how it will end up tying to Neonomicon, as they are clearly related, though not in straightforward ways.

I hope it does not fail the ending or tie itself to Neonomicon in self-sabotaging ways. Keep me posted?

(What do you like about it so far?)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Will do!

Things I'm enjoying include:
* classic Moore word-play; double-meanings, hidden meanings, and misunderstood meanings saturate the story.
* Complex weaving of multiple layers of reality, history, symbolism, fiction, and meta-fiction.
* Both artist and writer displaying enough attention to detail, that examining things in super-close detail is rewarding to the "squirrel-scholar" in me :-)