Assessing those who write in the Lovecraftian Mythos.
Revising Lovecraft: The Mutant Mythos
By
Paul StJohn Mackintosh
OCTOBER 17, 2018
A VAST TIDE of Lovecraftian fiction, revisionist or otherwise, is published every year. I remember reading a claim — which I’ve been unable to track down — that roughly 50 percent of titles published each year in the weird/dark fiction metacategory are more or less Lovecraftian. Why do we see this current fascination with Lovecraft, and why is revisionism necessary in the first place?
Enough unreconstructed pastiches, homages, and Mythosian works have thrived in the ever-expanding universe of the Lovecraftian canon to make a case for continuing to mine the same seam without revision, despite its impurities and toxic contaminants. There are very good reasons, though, why fidelity to Lovecraft can’t be continued unproblematically anymore — reasons that transcend accusations of virtue signaling or kneejerk political correctness. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price, for example, attempted to valorize Lovecraft from an alt-right perspective in
his keynote speech at NecronomiCon 2015; right-wing reappropriation of Lovecraft looks to be on the rise, and some readers and fans (such as
Michel Houellebecq) appear genuinely ready to swallow Lovecraft’s ethnic bigotry and apocalyptic nihilism whole. In these circumstances, revisionist Lovecraftian fiction looks like a proper and sufficient counterbalance.
As a reader, one may be able to enjoy Lovecraft without agreeing with him. As a writer, though, one almost certainly won’t be able to produce meaningful, enduring, or even enjoyable Lovecraft-inspired work (for anyone other than white supremacists) without understanding the author’s underlying credo. In short, you can’t understand the artist without engaging the bigot. The title of Alison Sperling’s 2017
LARB review on Lovecraftian scholarship “
Acknowledgment Is Not Enough” cuts more ways than one: it’s impossible to understand the writer’s intellectual roots and concerns, even his aesthetic, without tackling his mindset. It’s also become almost impossible to write well within Lovecraft’s Mythos without addressing what it was a myth
of. Revisionism is not just The Right Thing, it’s also The Smart Thing.
You can’t understand Lovecraft’s conflation of personal miscegenation and hereditary flaws with outside threats, social decay, and vast panoramas of evolution across Deep Time without first understanding the turn-of-the-century traditions within mainstream experimental literature and polemical pseudo-scientific writing that influenced him. Lovecraft may have been a bizarre, original outlier in the context of 1920s horror or science fiction, but he was completely comprehensible (and even representative) within these older and larger traditions. Many other far-right literary figures on both sides of World War I share much of Lovecraft’s grab-bag of Symbolist, Decadent, Spenglerian, and world-weary
fin-de-siècle values and tropes. Period clichés of Yellow Book dandyism and racial doomsaying abound in this context. D’Annunzio, Hamsun, and Jean Lorrain would all have recognized a kindred spirit in Lovecraft, and period readers of Max Nordau’s
Degeneration and sponsors of the Race Betterment Foundation would recognize familiar ideas, thinly recast, in Lovecraft’s oeuvre.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/revising-lovecraft-the-mutant-mythos/