The Gaming Den

The place was Amazon.com, the price was...I don't remember, many dollars. The book is New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. It is a lovely book. Well put together, stylish cover on a delightful shade of dark puce. I've collected quite a sizable library of Lovecraft/Mythos criticism as research material for my essay/book/monograph, and New Critical Essays looked like it would have a bunch of good material, so I preordered it. However, because I have a rather large pile of stuff to go through I've only recently begun to actually go through the essays, and I figured I'd post my thoughts here for discussion and an excuse to get some stuff out of my system.

I think my problem starts with editor David Simmons. His introduction to the book of essays starts off okay, but the farther on you get the more you realize it's not quite right. By the time Simmons mentions Donald Tyson's The Dream World of H.P. Lovecraft as "an interesting biographical reading of Lovecraft's writing" alarm bells were going off in my head.

This is probably the first and most egregious sin: Simmons is an outsider to Lovecraft scholarship, and hasn't quite managed to sort of the wheat from the chaff when it comes to good Lovecraft criticism and hackneyed, dubious crudola. That's just blood under the bridge, we've all been there, but I think it's a rather large problem to start this collection off with. Lovecraft Studies might not be a focus for English majors at Ivy League univeristies, but to write about a subject when you're ignorant of a large chunk of the criticism does not bode well.

It's not that Simmons isn't willing to put the work in. He cites a fair number of sources, including very reputable pastmasters S.T. Joshi, and David Schultz, but his other cited sources are telling: Michel Houellebecq's H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, and snippets and introductions from Stephen King, China Mieville, and Joyce Carol Oates. With the general exception of Oates, these aren't encouraging names. King has rarely had any real insights into HPL, and because of that most of his commentary has been extremely limited. Mieville has had a fair bit to say about HPL, but not much of it was worth printing much less citing. Houellebecq I can understand because he's the sort of literary scholar that appeals to other literary scholars, but he's also someone whose assertions have to be constantly re-checked against the actual texts because he likes to go into his own interpretation of things.

So, the intro didn't wow me. But that's okay, let's look at the first essay:

"A Certain Resemblance": Abject Hybridity in H. P. Lovecraft's Short Fiction by David Simmons

Oh dear.

There are a great number of problems with this essay, so let's start with what it is: Simmons purpose is "to examine the manner in which H. P. Lovecraft depicts the African continent and its peoples in two of his short stories: 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family' (1921) and 'Under the Pyramids' (1924)." This is problematic not because it discusses HPL's approach to race - that's been done before and probably does need to be examined in more depth - but because it's a very small and weird sample size (the two short stories in question), and said stories have almost nothing to do with each other. Simmons recognizes this and hopes to paint the idea that Lovecraft had conceptualized Africa as "a homogenous, abject Other" but...well, it doesn't really hold water. It isn't incorrect, but you could as well say that Lovecraft saw any foreign locale as distinctly other. Just draw a line around Great Britain and New England and have done with it. So from the first the essay is promising to examine HPL's racism/literary use of race (which is good) but then shoots itself in the foot by taking a really silly thesis that HPL had this universal conception of Africa as a font of black horrors, even as Simmons admits that he treats North Africa/the Middle East a hell of a lot different from the Congo. Even if you accept that Simmons' thesis has merit, why the hell not look at the rest of HPL's references to Africa and do a proper job of it? There aren't that many.

Okay, so second sin: Simmons is a literary wonk, and his approach to the essay is that of the literary wonk. He spends rather more time telling you what he is going to do and citing other people's stuff than he does actually doing his own work. Sometimes this is acceptable, but in this case it's very tiresome because Simmons seems to think he needs to justify (or confirm the justification) that HPL's fiction belongs in the tradition of Gothic literature. Now, there is a good reason for this, because Simmons dearly wants to use the abject theory of the body in Gothic literature as put forth by Julia Kristeva to look at HPL, and that is fair and even good. However, to get there he commits sin number three: citing David Putner.

I have ranted about this befpore. Long story short: Punter is biased against Lovecraft, makes several errors in fact regarding HPL and his works, which leads to several errors in reading HPL, which has been perpetuated in many other books that cite Punter on Lovecraft. Because many literary wonks are basically lazy or entirely too trusting of their sources. Now, the good news is that Simmons does not actually cite any of the bits of Punter that are obviously wrong, but it is still sort of bad form to cite him. Tempting to be sure, but not a good idea.

Sin number four is when Simmons starts to address HPL's views on race. This is a delicate matter to really do correctly, not because you risk offending people (if people weren't offended, it wouldn't be an issue) but because Simmons just doesn't do the work. It really isn't difficult to go the library, pull out any volume of HPL's Selected Letters and thumb through it until you get an appropriate facepalm quote of HPL saying something terrible in or out of context. (Note: Simmons does actually cite four volumes of SL, so why he didn't just go to the source for this one is doubly peculiar. Padding the bibliography?) In fact, if you've done a little googling on HPL and racism you can find a dozen people that have already done that for you, with page references, to save yourself the trouble. So it is disconcerting when Simmons 1) relies on a second-hand quote from HPL's published letters, 2) follows that up by some completely pointless filler from some other person pointing out that there were racial tensions in the United States during the period HPL lived, and 3) - and this is the sin - reprinting HPL's "On the Creation of [EDITED]" in full.

Really, that's just unnecessary. It's probably the most offensive piece that HPL ever wrote, so if you want to paint him as an unapologetic racist you couldn't do much better, but otherwise it does not add to the argument and Simmons doesn't refer to it again. I just find it inexcusable to reprint the entire poem when it serves no purpose to do so. Indeed, if you excised the entire section, the whole bit on trying to examine HPL's racism still flows. It's superfluous, and this is an essay that's already front-loaded with fat.

I guess I'm angry in part because you could do a very good essay look at HPL's racism or its experssion in his weird fiction. I know because I have written something like that in my own essay/monograph/book, and it pains me to see a skin-deep half-assed effort at it. Anyway, moving on. Simmons finally gets around to using Kristeva's take on abjection to look at Lovecraft's fiction, and that isn't bad. If he'd have skipped most of the last five pages and started with that, I would not have been dismayed. Ultimately though, I'm not sure that it really adds anything; Lovecraft has been so identified as the outsider with regards to his own fiction that there isn't a lot of original insight here, however prettily you choose to frame it. There is perhaps some merit in the idea that there is an element of fascination in repulsion - that again would be meat for a good short essay regarding Lovecraft's fiction, or Lovecraftian horror in general. Simmons' actual analyses of Arthur Jermyn and "Under the Pyramids" are intelligent but not erudite, and don't tread any new ground...and in fact seem to fail to make his point, leaving the reader wondering why the hell we sat through over a dozen pages of this.

So that first essay was very frustrating to me, as much for wasted potential as for Simmons' approach. We'll see what the rest of the essays look like in due course.

The cost of that book is sick. I hope it's worth what you paid for it.

I got a small break on the price because I pre-ordered it, but yeah, the amount of money I've spent on research materials is ill.

Is it coming out under your real name? I only ask so I can be talking you up as the opportunities arise.

Yeah, when and if I get the damned thing published. Still busy cutting it down to size.

Which also reminds me, on this book:

"Spawn of the Pit": Lavinia, Maerceline, Medusa, and All Things Foul: H. P. Lovecraft's Liminal Women by Gina Wisker

A much better effort than the first chapter, though with too many small errors of fact and scholarship to readily count. Like Simmons, it's fairly obvious that this is a literary wonk dipping into Lovecraft scholarship more than a dedicated Lovecraft scholar...if that sounds a bit pedantic and elitist, then it probably is a bit. There is a considerable body of literature on Lovecraft's fiction out right now - decades of it - and not all of it is equal, but when you get people coming in to do literary analysis that are obviously ignorant of all that work, it kind of shows. I don't mean that Wisker doesn't cite her sources and hasn't done her research - she has done both very well - but she still makes a lot of biased, ungrounded assumptions, small slips, and gives some sources equal weight which they really shouldn't have. She very obviously depended heavily on Joshi & Schultz' H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, perhaps to the extant that she didn't read all of HPL's stories quite as closely as she might have.

Scholarly semantics aside, I do appreciate how Wisker takes a closer look at stories like "Medusa's Coil" and tries to trace some of the literary origins, inspirations, and archetypes for some of Lovecraft's less-acknowledged female characters. I might quibble with Wisker over the importance she places on certain little factoids in the story, but then again I normally approach HPL's stuff in relation to weird fiction rather than the Gothic, which is what Wisker is trying to tie HPL's portrayals of women into. It's a slightly different approach, and I don't know if I entirely buy all of the bits and pieces of Wisker's case, but I appreciate that she put some good thought and effort into making it. (I also appreciate that some of her conclusions dovetail with my own, so I'll probably end up citing Wisker in my own essay/monograph/book.)

Over all, I consider this a much more ambitious, better researched, and better written chapter than Simmons - and, if Wisker had pursued it at book length, I'd have had some serious competition!

Well, I enjoy these tidbits and as I may have told you before, am really stoked about this coming out. If you need someone to write a foreword- I'm your man. I can even provide references.

Heh. I may take you up on that at some point.

"The Infinitude of the Shrieking Abysses": Rooms, Wombs, Tombs, and the Hysterical Female Gothic in "The Dreams of the Witch House" by Sara Williams

This incredibly dense essay continues the thread of examining Lovecraft from a Gothic perspective, in particular that some of his (male) protagonists actually embody traits or aspects of the Gothic female heroine, complete with feminine hysteria, womb symbols, sexual overtones, etc. Over the course of about 15 pages Williams takes this rather straightforward and intriguing hypothesis and beats it to death with a hammer, then continues on beating it well past the point of recognition. Here again I blame literary wonkishness for ruining what is otherwise a possibly very cogent insight. I mean, read this sentence:

Kahane argues that the Bluebeardean incestuous Oedipal polt of the helpless daughter confronting the erotic power of the father or brother," evoked by the "powerful male figure" on the periphery, is only a "surface convention," and what really lurks "in the forbidden centre of the Gothic which draws me inward" is "the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all encompassing" (335, 336).

What the fhatgn.

I'm not saying you can't pick meaning out of that sentence, but I think at the point where you're conflating Bluebeard (murderer of women) with Oedipus (incest, and specifically kill father/marry mother Oedipal complex of Sigmund Freud) and a female character you're already on really shaky literary ground; to then say that the rapacious father-figure isn't what's behind the poor girl's plight but some desperate quest for a "dead-undead mother"...well, I'm not saying you're wrong, because we've gender- and subject-flipped so many times that we've pretty much lost the thread. So let's back up and restate.

The main thrust of Williams' argument is that Walter Gilman, in his morbid seeking, hysterics, and general helplessness portrays many of the attributes of the Gothic heroine. This is interesting because it is a light to Lovecraft's work that is, as far as I know original, with only a few supporting essays and conceptions I could name. If it was applied to more of HPL's stuff, it would maybe provide a stronger argument for HPL's placement in the continuum of Gothic lit and maybe speak more strongly of the influence of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and whatnot. I don't know if I completely buy her womb-symbolism with "Dreams in the Witch House" and Keziah Mason in particular, but it's an interesting perspective.

After pretty much making this point (in the densest and most wonkish way possible), Williams then asks the key question "why?" and trots out HPL's mother. I think this is probably a mistake, and even drags out the old "HPL was dressed in girl's clothes" chestnut. It doesn't really strengthen her argument, and while most people agree HPL's mother was a major influence on his psyche, it's never been clear-cut what affect she's every really had on his writing. So I give this one four stars for effort and substance, but two stars for style and presentation. I'll probably end up citing it anyway, because the female gothic bit is too good to pass up.

Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft in the Time of Modernism by Gerry Carlin and Nicola Allen.

Carlin and Allen are guilty of an original sin, at least as far as this volume goes. I cannot fault their approach; unlike everyone else in the book so far they appear to have done quite a bit of research into Lovecraft's letters and they draw out examples, quotes, and comparisons from many of his stories instead of focusing on just one - not all of them, because that would be really doing things properly, but more than enough to show they put a lot of thought and effort into this piece. Their style of presentation is very solid, and if they go off on the occasional tangent it's only because they're trying to draw a comparison between HPL and someone else, and that is not only forgivable but accepted practice. Further, in general their summaries are good and their quotes relevant to the subject.

No, the sin that Carlin and Allen are guilty of is just, well, they picked the wrong point to argue - or maybe they just chose the absolute wrong tact in trying to argue it. I think you can very well argue that Lovecraft had some slight relationship with Modernist art and literature, even a kind of push-pull dynamic. The problem is that Carlin and Allen just completely misconstrue it. This essay starts out for example talking about Dada and how he considered time a "soft" concept - yet they then go on for several pages discussing how HPL used "deep time," geological stretches of tremendous vastness and antiquity, the horror of primitiveness, hoary relict species of unfathomable elder ages, the prospect of atavism in his work...in other words, the exact opposite of "soft" time! HPL was a guy all about the cold, impersonal, mind-numbing presence of time that reduced human existence to the merest, most insignificant of concepts - frankly, that's a bit different from the "time as a product of human consciousness" that the Modernists Carlin and Allen cites seem to be going for. It's a point of variance and distinction between HPL and Modernism, not a thread that really binds them.

So points for effort, but I think they just failed to really prove or even make a good case for their point. What really surprised me is that if they wanted to make their point, there was a better (and to me) obvious approach: T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Now, in the essay they talk about how Lovecraft didn't care for Eliot and derided The Waste Land, and with some references to cubism and whatnot in HPL's fiction they took that as an "in" to get at HPL's influence from Modernist art and literature. Yet no mention of Hart Crane? I mean hell, HPL knew Hart Crane. They met. Crane's mother actually like HPL! And Crane's The Bridge is as much a take off in the vein of The Waste Land as anything... If I were to write this essay, with the same basic thesis, I'd probably screw around less with Dada and D. H. Lawrence and focus on Elliot and Crane as the centerpiece, to show how Lovecraft directly interacted with modernism, then go to his fiction for examples of where he cites or compares this that and the other. Hell, they could even have cited Mosig on Lovecraft and Sibelius...

Looming at the Mountains of Madness: Loecraft's Mirages by Robert Waugh

I often have doubts about Robert Waugh. He likes to go into some very weird places in his scholarly Lovecraft stuff. However, this is an extremely solid piece. I would go ahead and say this is the most traditional bit of Lovecraftian scholarship in the entire book to this point, a very to-the-point, thorough, no-bullshit (okay, he cites a dictionary at one point, so almost no BS) article that would have felt right at home in Lovecraft Studies back in the day. It doesn't promise any groundbreaking insights or try to re-evaluate HPL in reference to obscure trendy literary wonk of the day #3, he just puts everything together and lays it out there in nice fashion. It's almost like a good journalism piece, but with a bigger bibliography.

Looming at the Mountains of Madness examines HPL's At the Mountains of Madness with respect to the major Antarctic exploration narratives of the day, with especial emphasis on the recordings of mirages. I admit this is an area of AtMoM that I had never given much thought, so it was an honest pleasure to sit back and read about the different mirages the explorers had encountered in their travels, and then see how Lovecraft had used mirages in AtMoM. The only slightly wonkish bit is when Waugh goes into a little bit about the specific meaning of "looming" in an Antarctic setting (hence the dictionary definition reference - although why he went with Webster's instead of the O.E.D. ...), but it's not an idle point or footnote, and relevant to the whole essay, so I'll forgive that. At 11 pages (and a half counting the bibliography), it's also shorter than the other essays so far - not that it feels truncated or cutoff, just that it had said everything it needed to say and arrived at it's natural stopping point.

A very solid piece of work.

On "The Dunwich Horror" by Donald R. Burleson

Another familiar name, Burleson is familar as having written several articles and even a book or two analyzing Lovecraft from a literary perspective. Originally on reading this article I thought it had been excerpted from an earlier such work, but on closer reading it turned out to be that old literary chestnut: a new essay made from distilling and combining points from earlier essays, refined by a single work and with a few added thoughts. In this specific case, it's a re-presentation of Burleson's thoughts on "The Dunwich Horror," including a notice of the Christ-myth parallels and the way the Whateley twins follow an antiheroic arc that basically mirrors the Heroes Journey of Joseph Campbell. Not exactly new ground for Mythos buffs, but probably quite eye-opening to some of the people that wrote the first few chapters in this book, and a good refresher for the rest of us.

Part II is titled "Lovecraft and His Influence."

The Shadow over Derleth: Disseminating the Mythos in The Trail of Cthulhu by J. S. Mackley

There is a relative dearth of Mythos scholarship on August Derleth, Haefele (and Joshi's response) notwithstanding, but it should be remembered that for a rather long time Derleth was not only gatekeeper of the Mythos, but even after his death his fiction (particularly his "posthumous collaborations" with HPL) proved extremely influential, with all the good and bad that intends.

Mackley, I think, gets it right. He presents Derleth and his influence on the Mythos warts and all (okay, maybe not all the warts, but you really have to dig for C. Hall Thompson and whatnot) in a rather blistering and dry 3-page summary - enough essential background to get the reader through to the true crux of the essay, which is examining Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu. It's probably the most thorough criticism of Derleth vs. Lovecraft I've ever read, going into depth on the differences in their style and use of language. It's not all negative, and quite a bit of it is extremely insightful. Honestly, this is the sort of thing I was hoping to get out of Haefele, but I'm more than happy to see it down from Mackley - and I wouldn't be adverse if Mackley gave all of Derleth's Mythos-works the same treatment.

From the Library of America to the Mountains of Madness: Recent Discourse on H. P. Lovecraft by Steffen Hantke

Hantke takes as his premise that there are three faces to Lovecraft - the creation of the fans of his fiction (what I call the mythological Lovecraft), the creation of Lovecraft scholars and literary academics, and the cinematic Lovecraft that comes from the adaptation of HPL to the new media of film. There is something to this premise, with of course some overlap, pretty much representing the different audiences for HPL's work. From this basis, Hantke goes on to examine to expressions where these faces merge: the addition of Lovecraft to the Library of America, and Guillermo del Toro's long-anticipated but never made adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness.

I think Hanke does the research. I like his style; his prose is such a pleasure to read I almost quoted his opening paragraph in its entirety. But having read the essay twice, I think he's not as concise as he could be, and perhaps is reaching a little to find distinctions that aren't there. I don't know if it can be said that at a very high level the very best Lovecraft scholars and Lovecraft adaptors are also fans of Lovecraft - though I'm pretty damn sure of it - but I do know that Lovecraftiana has been going for a very long time. There's something like fifty years of cinematic history of adapting Lovecraft, and he's been in print countless times in any number of editions. While I would agree that getting a Library of America volume is a good mark that HPL is recognized as an essential American author, I don't think it's necessaryily recognition that HPL has "arrived" or been "elevated from his pulp origins." That's the kind of talk that gets English majors labeled as poncy bastards at parties.

But these are disagreements of substance; it's the kind of conversation and argumentation you want to have in literary discussion about Lovecraft & co. I might not entirely agree with Hanke or his approach, but I like the way he went about it.

Co(s)mic Horror by Chris Murray and Kevin Corstorphine

This essay is an examination of Lovecraft's influence on comic books...sort of. To quote the authors:

...this chapter will examine a selection of Lovecraft-inspired stories in comics, with particular focus on the portrayal of indescribable horrors.

Now, this is rather a slick move. At once, it removes the daunting task of trying to encapsulate all the "Lovecraftian" comics, which is a vast and probably unworkable range at anything less than book length, and that even if you mostly restrict it to those comics that directly reference or namedrop some item of the Mythos (I know, I've had try to do it), and at the same time it allows them to ignore any previous work on the subject, which is admittedly not much (a couple articles here and there, nothing really comprehensive, and some of it quite old - you're better off looking at the internet these days.)

So in this narrow but workable framework, Murray and Corstorphine are free to pick pretty much whatever they want to talk about - and they do.

I rather question their starting point in the 1940s, Gardner Fox notwithstanding. I will grant there was probably a definite nod towards Lovecraft in "Dr Fate and the Fish Men of Nyarl-Amen" in More Fun #65 (1941), but Murray and Corstophine's painful efforts to establish a more solid connection are pitiful:

Indeed, Nyarl-Amen seems reminiscent of Y'Ha-nthlei, the name of the undersea cyclopean city referred to in "The Shadow over Innsmouth," and is certainly related to Nyarlathotep.

Latter certainly, former...really? Nyral-Amen and Y'Ha-nthlei? I don't think I could have picked too more dissimilar collections of letters.

The 1950s brings us E.C. of course, and there's some good solid scholarship there, even if it's a bit short. The 1960s and 70s brings us...Starro the Conquerer. WTF. At least refer to Ditko's run on Dr. Strange or Conan the Barbarian, you hacks. Anyway, they did managed to cover Warren, Heavy Metal, Skull #4, if not some of the more obscure ones.

For the 1980s, the authors go straight to the British invasion with Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman. Not bad choices, honestly, even if it skips over some other stuff that was happening, though I highly question their connection Watchmen with Cthulhu - not all psychic bug-eyed aliens trace straight to Lovecraft, y'know. Similarly, you shouldn't try to make a connection between the Endless of Sandman and the Great Old Ones; you just look silly. Stick with Gaiman's Mythos fiction, he's done a bit of that, some of it even in comics.

John Coulthart is given his own section. I approve.

1990s spends a paragraph on the rise of Millenium and Adventure's (generally terrible) Lovecraft comics, and then focuses on Mike Mignola's Hellboy - a solid choice - and some subsequent series. Again, they hit the top google search hits but miss a lot of the more interesting and obscure comics. Focus returns to Alan Moore for The Courtyard and Neonomicon, and the authors even quote Houllebecq when the subject turns to Lovecraft and sex for a bit. Of course, then they screw the pooch and cite Donald Tyson's biography - seriously guys, get any one of Joshi's biographies. Don't stick with the guy that thinks HPL stayed a virgin so long it activated his chakras.

So, points awarded for effort, points taken away for shoddy work. Overall B-.

I don't know if anyone is still reading this, but I'm going to try and finish this book out by the end of the week.

"Sounds WHich Filled Me with an Indefinable Dread": THe Cthulhu Mythopoeia of H. P. Lovecaft in "Extreme" Metal by Joseph Norman

Heavy metal, black metal, and death metal in all its various shades has never been my forte. I mean yes, I've read Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and to this day think Varg Vikernes is a disgusting human being, and I've got Gary Hill's The Strange Sound of Cthulhu: Music Inspired by the Writing of H. P. Lovecraft in the porcelain library, but it's not my main or even secondary focus of interest. So I went into this essay a bit more wide-eyed than the others.

It seems a very creditable affair, although I don't think much of the first paragraph, because it relies very much on internet research. Honestly, if you feel your subject needs some top hits in google to justify itself, that is not a good sign that you're on a fresh track. I'm talking about esays in general, this one at least restricts itself to music scholarship and specialist websites, though I take a bit of affront at the idea of "the official H. P. Lovecraft website." I'm guessing that's the H. P. Lovecraft Archive (which is very good, don't get me wrong Donovan Loucks!)

Anyway, the essay gives an abbreviated (and excellent) history of Lovecraftian usage and allusion in heavy metal, death metal, black metal, and doom metal, then does three case studies in bands that have used the Cthulhu Mythos: Nile, Cradle of Filth, and Electric Wizard - which, amazingly, I've all heard of. It's really a remarkably solid essay, even if it cites Mieville and Don Smith once or three times, and I kept going back to the Works Cited page to see who such-and-such being referenced was. Detailed, organized, and well-cited. Excellent essay, well worth the effort.

I've been keeping up with it, for what it's worth.

It's been interesting, but, well, I do Lovecraft in spells and binges.

Same here.

Curious to see your best/worst list of these essays, although I'd like to wait on that until you've finished reviewing them.

Keeping up as well, though my interest in Lovecraft as well as experience with the Mythos comes from a group of 5 poorly edited short stories that cropped up on thefreebundle.com and a few playthroughs of the v/n Deus Machina: Demonbane.

[Edit]

Missed a word.

"Comrades in Tentacles": H. P. Lovecraft and China Mieville by Martyn Colebrook

Okay, it takes me a while to get past the title. I've mentioned previously I'm not terribly fond of Mieville's fiction, what little of it I've read, and even less fond at his efforts as a pseudo-literary wonk. So I'm having a bit of gastric distress at the title. Now, I know this is just my own silliness - other people enjoy his works very much indeed, and I've heard good things about Un Lun Dun and whatnot. I honestly don't know why people let him write introductions and ask his opinion about Lovecraft, though. It's really a bit like asking Neil Gaiman or Stephen King their opinion on HPL, because while they are both highly acclaimed writers who have dabbled in the field of Lovecraftian pastiche (Gaiman more successfully than King), neither is particularly an HPL scholar and as far as I can recall none of them has ever given any really impressive insight into Lovecraft or his fiction. They're famous, so people ask their opinion even though they don't particularly know anything. So it appears to be with Mieville. Which is especially annoying, because at least King and Gaiman appear to be in on the fact that they're not S. T. Joshi or Donald Burleson or Robert M. Price or Darrell Schweitzer or David E. Schultz or...you get the drift...so even if there's not a bit of good-natured embarassment when, for example, a Lovecraft documentary keeps on bringing up the Dream King, at least Gaiman makes a solid go at it and doesn't just start spouting bullshit. Anyway, on to the essay.

Okay, all asides aside, this is really a discussion of the New Weird, which is to say the recent resurgence of contemporary weird literature, as aesthetically represented by...well, it's bullshit, really. Like cyberpunk, it's just a convenient label to help sell anthologies, and that is a fine tradition, but I think pretending it is its own thing is a bit much. Unfortunately, this discussion of the New Weird is made via Mieville. It's not a bad piece of work, I just wish it was on a rather different subject. Anyway, we have something like 17 pages tying together Machen, Lovecraft, and Mieville.

It's a bit of a stretch. Not between Machen and Lovecraft, there's plenty of material there, but between Machen and Lovecraft and Mieville. Whenever you don't have direct call-outs to a given author in the text (like, for example, HPL calling out Machen in "The Dunwich Horror") you start stretching a bit, comparing elements in the respective bodies of fiction and drawing thematic parallels. This isn't a science, and if you have sufficient bodies of work between any two different authors you're going to find some point of comparison; in this case an early focus for the essay is London, which was a major location for both Machen and Mieville, and stretches that out a bit into how place is such an important element in all three author's fiction. Somehow Colebrook stops short of the now quite-accepted argument that for HPL at least, the locale is often as much a character as any of the humans wandering around the story.

Some of Colebrook's statements are a bit bizarre. Example:

[Machen's] general disdain for modernity belies a cautious misogyny, evident in the abhorrent snuff-murder of Helen Vaughan in "The Great God Pan."

Wait, what? Now, this is as far as I can tell an original criticism of Machen. I've never seen much analysis of the use of gender in Machen's work, but they were both in keeping with the roles of the time (wives and governesses predominate) and against them (the femme fatale Helen Vaughan and other tricksters), so some typical Edwardian/Victorian misogyny might be pretty much assumed, I've just never really seen a word about it. The "abhorrent snuff-murder" is the most bizarre take for the end of "The Great God Pan" as I've ever come across. It's just..I can sort of see it, if I squint and take my brain away, but it's a very weird perspective to me.

Then of course, Colebrook cites David Punter. I have mentioned this before. Fortunately, it never goes anywhere. I apologize if I've wandered off topic, but I'm trying to keep my mind off the actual droning, stilted, overstressed comparisons between Mieville and Lovecraft, which include quotes from Mieville like this one:

a pulp bricoloage where texts concatenate out of scattered scraps, in what looks like a deliberate undermining of 'plot'

And no, that's no "Mieville on Mieville," although I would thoroughly enjoy Mieville taking the piss out of himself.

Finally, in the last sentence of the last paragraph, Colebrook comes to the point:

In their respective depictions, Lovecraft's highly problematic and racially antagonistic representation of those who he considered Other is contrasted with the politically polemical undercurrent upon which Mieville's cities are founded.

Yes, thank you for finally voicing that cogently. You are wrong.

I know it's bad for to just come out and say that a literary wonk is wrong, but this takes the cake. Mieville and Lovecraft are fundamentally very different authors with completely different styles and, I'd argue, influences. I have no doubt that Mieville has read HPL, and has his perspective of HPL, and even has been influenced by HPL. I might even go so far as to acknowledge that perhaps HPL's specific treatment of his places - degenerate Dunwich, Innsmouth, Arkham - have in some way helped shape Mieville's New Crobuzon. I don't think Colebrook actually gave any good examples of such influence though, or made any particularly good comparisons with respect to the Other in either of their fictions, and the intruiging Machen angle was dropped early in favor of looking at more of Mieville's stuff. Maybe I'm being too much of a narrow-minded engineer when I suggest Colebrook should have gone back, gotten together every word that Mieville had written on Lovecraft, and started again from the beginning.

The final essay of the book:

Tentacles and Teeth: the Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture by Mark Jones

Despite what you might think, the first dozen pages of this essay are actually a highly condensed history of Lovecraftian adaptations and influence in other media - mainly radio, cinema, and comic books. While quite thorough in some respects, it is by its very nature hit and miss, focusing on some titles but completely ignorant of others, leading to a couple of very weird statements here and there. The literary wonkishness part of the essay is pretty much reserved for a couple comments about the uses to which the Mythos is put in these media, focusing mainly on the difficulty of adapting HPL's "cosmicism." Still, found a couple things I had not run across yet, so there is that. The proliferation of the idea of tentacled beings through Mythos influence is handled rather abruptly in a couple paragraphs in the end, and appears to be generally ignorant of tentacled horrors predating Lovecraft, so despite the fancy title this is less an essay about tentacles than...well, a really condensed survey of Mythos in pop culture, and the only reason I get half the references without constantly flipping back to the works cited is that I own that half of the Mythos-stuff.

I think the hypercondensed format of this essay works against it; Jones seems to know what he's doing, but he's bitten off too much for the space, which means not only does he miss half of everything but his critical comments are generally weak afterthoughts that lack any real penetrating insight, and in some cases simply seem incorrect. For example, he felt obliged to bring up tentacle rape in Japanese anime and manga because he felt it was vaguely connected to the Mythos, but admits:

The specific Lovecraftian elemes within Japanese horror fiction, manga and anime, are often disfficult o ascertain, as the Old Ones ofte mingle unobtrusively with raditional Japanese mythological figures

I'd like if Jones went back and tried again, focusing on a single branch of the Mythos Media family tree - comics is where he's done some of his best work, and he's certainly got more to do in that field, so maybe that would be a good project for him. Certainly if there was a definitive guide to the Mythos in comics, I'd buy and read it.

And that's the book, minus the author notes and the index. No surprise, pretty much everybody listed in this book is an academic wonk whose entries start out with "senior lecturer," "professor," or "teaches," with a couple of PHD candidates thrown in for good measure.

Overall estimation of the book: well, it's not H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. It's good to keep the mulch turned over every now and again, and as much as I rant about wonkishness in the first couple of essays I do appreciate the new viewpoints and will probably work at least a few citations in to my current project. The book as a whole is a lot of gristle for not a lot of meat though - we've got, for example, two essays "Co(s)mic Horror" and "Tentacles and Teeth" which deal extensively with Lovecraft in the comics for example, but both of them obviously would have benefitted substantially from stealing each other's notes; neither is particularly authoritative or groundbreaking, both of them try to make too much of too little. Much the same can be said about "The Infinitude of the Shireking Abysses," "Slime and Western Man," and "Comrades in Tentacles" - while there might be something there, I think the authors have tried to make too much of it and so missed what they were aiming to prove or argue.

And, maybe this is just me, but I think the formal wonkishness of the book's tone weighs against it. There's just too many of these people that have read and teach and talk about pop culture for so long, but they're in an academic culture and the language and attitude of pop culture still somehow eludes them, or they bury it under a wealth of moderately obscure allusions to some literary theorist. It's a bad way to approach the Mythos, because Lovecraft and co. were never academic - literary, yes, but with limited wonkishness. The academics are outsiders, and half of them really haven't even done the proper research. I can't blame them for that though, because so many of the books and references are obscure and it takes time and effort to look them up, with none of the easy academic tools available...still, it makes you appreciate when someone does make an effort.