PopMatters has a long new article today by Dennis P. Quinn, surveying the half-baked fruitcakes who really believe that Lovecraft’s mythos is true.
It’s partly an inevitable side-effect of Lovecraft being a pioneer in the field of participative ‘open’ texts and fan-works. Something that was then turbo-charged thirty years later by the works falling out of copyright, just as a new wave of mass interest crashed down on his life and work. If you open up such a deeply psyche-rooted body of work to those who would create fan-works based on its ideas and themes, then inevitably the results are going to bounce off in a myriad of directions that purists are not going to like; Derleth, Lumley, religious loons and suchlike.
One interesting point made at the end of the article is that…
“Lovecraft’s mythos, in stark contrast to its creator’s own ethnocentric views and overall xenophobia, is a perfect mythology in a multicultural world. Lovecraft’s gods are not bound to any ethnicity, as are the gods of Greece, Rome, Israel, Arabia, Northern Europe, the Americas, Africa, etc. Although they were invented by a New Englander, they are by definition cosmic and out of this world. They are extra-terrestrial, extra-dimensional, and post-race.”
That’s certainly an interesting thought, but I’m coming to the realisation that nearly all his monsters are actually cloaked metaphors for perceived threats of racial invasion, for the societal and personal fear of ‘swamping’ by the alien ‘other’ at the peak of mass immigration into America. Although they are not just this, since they are also tangled up in notions of belief, rationality and the limits of scientific knowledge. Perhaps his monsters still carry a trace of the ‘post-race’ in them, precisely because Lovecraft was not simply projecting them as crude contemporary ‘racial invasion’ metaphors, but was depicting them as reflected in the mirror of his own love/hate relationship with hybridity and the liminal psychological responses surrounding it.
Of course, sometimes his monsters barely had their racist metaphor cloaked. For instance “Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” (apparently inspired by Dunsany’s “Sheol Nugganoth”), for such an accomplished word-smith, cannot have been other than been an invitation to the prejudiced reader to find the phrase “nigger wrath” in the name — accompanied as the name is by the references to “black” and to abundant and promiscuous breeding.
