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It won't be with me on my deathbed, but I'll still be in your head
I slept six hours last night and eight hours the night before. This is a good thing. I just wish it were happening before dawn and involved fewer nightmares. I am writing neither fiction nor film criticism and trying not to beat myself up for feeling as though my brain has been sponged clean.
I have finished Ruthanna Emrys' Deep Roots (2018). I recommend it for several reasons, including a diverse cast of characters among whom I continue to like the protagonist, a notable leveling-up in plot complexity, more queer romance, New York City in 1949, and Yiddish that is neither translated nor italicized, but at the moment I am thinking about it because it performs an act of reclamation with another of Lovecraft's monstrous races that almost impresses me more than Emrys' richly detailed work with the Deep Ones.
As described in H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop's "The Mound" (1929/30), the K'n-yan are your standard super-decadent civilization fallen into sadism out of having lived too long—immortal and bored with their own advanced technologies and their native gift of dematerialization, they live in a state of highly ritualized sensation-seeking, the cruelty of their diversions growing ever more feverish and grotesque. Their slaves and their livestock are the same class of semi-sentient, semi-human product of magical-scientific experimentation; their favorite entertainments imply a depraved combination of sexual abandon and torture. Even death is no escape from the K'n-yan, since they reanimate the entertainingly mutilated bodies of the dead and use them as yet another class of slaves. The fact that they live beneath an earthen mound in the Midwest and visually resemble the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the area really feels like some kind of slur on Mississippian culture, although I have no idea how much information about Cahokia and its astronomy and copperworking and pits of sacrifice would have been available to either Lovecraft or Bishop; maybe they were just slandering the Aztecs or conquistador-era Maya. Minus the necromancy, they remind me a lot of Evangeline Walton's Etruscans, which I take as a sign of the persistence of this archetype. You can't go anywhere in this field without tripping over another take on Innsmouth, but I have seen many fewer attempts to work with the K'n-yan and I am not surprised. As a fictional species, they are superbly creepy, but not otherwise very complex.
In Emrys' retelling, the K'n-yan are one of the three branches of humanity, equal inheritors of Earth with the peoples of the air and the water: "The people of the rock, the K'n-yan, build first and most beautifully, but grow cruel and frightened and become the Mad Ones Under the Earth." Their madness is not congenital or even inevitably cultural, but the simple result of building an entire society around "domains of magic inimical to rational thought," the "transmutation of material forms into energy." Dust-blooded Audrey Winslow in Winter Tide (2017) has an un-air-like aptitude for magic and a dangerously literal darkness in her blood that rises in supernatural defense, but her sanity is no more in question than any other college student who seriously decides to devote herself to the theory and practice of magic. The full-blooded K'n-yan we meet in Deep Roots is another story: stable so long as her consciousness is disembodied to travel the stars with the Outer Ones, as soon as she's returned to her own small tattoo-twined body and its brain shaped by decades if not centuries of exposure to a magical environment that's like a brickbat to the frontal lobes, Shelean has to work overtime to remember that just because she can alter the shape of the universe with a thought doesn't mean she should. All matter to a K'n-yan is changeable, so easy to change and should be changed if it's more useful or more fun. Trivialities like other people's feelings and/or bodily autonomy evaporate in the fascinating, distracting flux of the universe and the many uses—fueled by the emotional volatility and paranoia that seem to accompany this branch of study—to which its malleability can be turned. In this light, the civilization that Lovecraft and Bishop stuck together out of racism and body horror assumes consistency: it is predicated on whim and transformation and on ideas of helpfulness that can be just as horrifying as malice, which is why Shelean in her body has to be reminded that it is counterproductive to their current mission to give people extra bones and that blood belongs on the inside. (How the Presger and the K'n-yan would get along probably doesn't bear thinking about, unless the crossover already exists, in which case please link me.) Rather than extremely dubious indigenous weirdness, Emrys' K'n-yan recall fairies in their darker interpretations, the beautiful, perilous people under the hill who might abduct or change or abandon you for nothing more than curiosity, much longer-lived than humans, supernally powerful, utterly careless of us. Audrey's ancestors, bred as an experiment in inherited traits between rock and air, released aboveground as a kind of control group, might as well be changelings. This is infinitely more interesting to me than the original conception of the K'n-yan and not just because I enjoy the subliminal folklore. I have no desire to read a straight sequel to "The Mound," but I would happily see more of Shelean in future stories, terrifying and poignant in her thoroughly understandable preference for life inside a metal cylinder rather than mad flesh.
Apparently this is how I spend Tisha B'Av these days.
I have finished Ruthanna Emrys' Deep Roots (2018). I recommend it for several reasons, including a diverse cast of characters among whom I continue to like the protagonist, a notable leveling-up in plot complexity, more queer romance, New York City in 1949, and Yiddish that is neither translated nor italicized, but at the moment I am thinking about it because it performs an act of reclamation with another of Lovecraft's monstrous races that almost impresses me more than Emrys' richly detailed work with the Deep Ones.
As described in H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop's "The Mound" (1929/30), the K'n-yan are your standard super-decadent civilization fallen into sadism out of having lived too long—immortal and bored with their own advanced technologies and their native gift of dematerialization, they live in a state of highly ritualized sensation-seeking, the cruelty of their diversions growing ever more feverish and grotesque. Their slaves and their livestock are the same class of semi-sentient, semi-human product of magical-scientific experimentation; their favorite entertainments imply a depraved combination of sexual abandon and torture. Even death is no escape from the K'n-yan, since they reanimate the entertainingly mutilated bodies of the dead and use them as yet another class of slaves. The fact that they live beneath an earthen mound in the Midwest and visually resemble the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the area really feels like some kind of slur on Mississippian culture, although I have no idea how much information about Cahokia and its astronomy and copperworking and pits of sacrifice would have been available to either Lovecraft or Bishop; maybe they were just slandering the Aztecs or conquistador-era Maya. Minus the necromancy, they remind me a lot of Evangeline Walton's Etruscans, which I take as a sign of the persistence of this archetype. You can't go anywhere in this field without tripping over another take on Innsmouth, but I have seen many fewer attempts to work with the K'n-yan and I am not surprised. As a fictional species, they are superbly creepy, but not otherwise very complex.
In Emrys' retelling, the K'n-yan are one of the three branches of humanity, equal inheritors of Earth with the peoples of the air and the water: "The people of the rock, the K'n-yan, build first and most beautifully, but grow cruel and frightened and become the Mad Ones Under the Earth." Their madness is not congenital or even inevitably cultural, but the simple result of building an entire society around "domains of magic inimical to rational thought," the "transmutation of material forms into energy." Dust-blooded Audrey Winslow in Winter Tide (2017) has an un-air-like aptitude for magic and a dangerously literal darkness in her blood that rises in supernatural defense, but her sanity is no more in question than any other college student who seriously decides to devote herself to the theory and practice of magic. The full-blooded K'n-yan we meet in Deep Roots is another story: stable so long as her consciousness is disembodied to travel the stars with the Outer Ones, as soon as she's returned to her own small tattoo-twined body and its brain shaped by decades if not centuries of exposure to a magical environment that's like a brickbat to the frontal lobes, Shelean has to work overtime to remember that just because she can alter the shape of the universe with a thought doesn't mean she should. All matter to a K'n-yan is changeable, so easy to change and should be changed if it's more useful or more fun. Trivialities like other people's feelings and/or bodily autonomy evaporate in the fascinating, distracting flux of the universe and the many uses—fueled by the emotional volatility and paranoia that seem to accompany this branch of study—to which its malleability can be turned. In this light, the civilization that Lovecraft and Bishop stuck together out of racism and body horror assumes consistency: it is predicated on whim and transformation and on ideas of helpfulness that can be just as horrifying as malice, which is why Shelean in her body has to be reminded that it is counterproductive to their current mission to give people extra bones and that blood belongs on the inside. (How the Presger and the K'n-yan would get along probably doesn't bear thinking about, unless the crossover already exists, in which case please link me.) Rather than extremely dubious indigenous weirdness, Emrys' K'n-yan recall fairies in their darker interpretations, the beautiful, perilous people under the hill who might abduct or change or abandon you for nothing more than curiosity, much longer-lived than humans, supernally powerful, utterly careless of us. Audrey's ancestors, bred as an experiment in inherited traits between rock and air, released aboveground as a kind of control group, might as well be changelings. This is infinitely more interesting to me than the original conception of the K'n-yan and not just because I enjoy the subliminal folklore. I have no desire to read a straight sequel to "The Mound," but I would happily see more of Shelean in future stories, terrifying and poignant in her thoroughly understandable preference for life inside a metal cylinder rather than mad flesh.
Apparently this is how I spend Tisha B'Av these days.
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(Sorry, I know memes aren't your thing, but...)
Also, yay sleep.
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I've just been staring in amazement. Is that a were-tardigrade? Manatee?
Also, yay sleep.
Thank you.
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This is essentially confusing, but I appreciate it.
*hugs*
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It does, thank you. I hadn't seen either of those memes, so the combination was not instinctively familiar to me.
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Thank you! From your mouth to my . . . hypothalamus, I guess.
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:-/ It's hard enough to do these some days even with brain and sleep! <3
I am glad that there was at least good fiction in the meantime.
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Thank you.
I've snapped right back to not sleeping. I'm so tired of it.
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