Fantastic Worlds - Review of "The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft" (2011) by Marc Laidlaw

[jordan179]

"Review of

'The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft'

(c) 2011

by Marc Laidlaw"

(c) 2012

by Jordan S. Bassior

This is a genuine horror story, set in Providence, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1929, about Douglas, an imaginative and intellectual boy who becomes fascinated by the works of H. P. Lovecraft.  When Douglas learns that Lovecraft lives in the same

Comments

[jordan179]

Indeed. What's worse, it's a line which Lovecraft would have said, if he was in the right mood (much of the time he would have been too much of a gentleman to say it to the kid's face, but he probably would have thought it). The story sets up such the situation to put him in the right mood: Lovecraft is embarassed by the fact that he was seen going to a movie (he scorned them but obviously watched them from time to time) by someone he considered of (much) lower status.

Lovecraft's action comes as a surprise, and thus sucker-punches us, for these reasons:

(1) Lovecraft was normally a polite and good man who was noted for his kindness to young fans,

(2) Douglas is himself very much like a young Lovecraft, which would normally make Lovecraft even kinder to Douglas,

(3) The first clue we have that Douglas is black comes in literally the last word of the story,

and finally

(4) Even if we know that Lovecraft was racist (and I, as a longtime Lovecraft fan, was well aware of this fact), we (I hope) are not racist, and hence we don't feel it in the same visceral manner that Lovecraft would have felt it.

Not only were dreams destroyed, but Lovecraft unwittingly acted against most of his own goals and principles. He was rude; he was rude to a child; he was rude to a fan; he discouraged someone from becoming a writer of weird fiction. He has impoverished the genre by slaying, in someone else, precisely the same dreams that he valued in himself and his friends; the dreams that in his stories and essays he worked hard and passionately to evoke in others.

And what's worse, he might well have behaved in exactly this manner, in the given situation. He was reported as "uncomfortable" when he met a full adult black weird fiction fan in a prepared social setting; how would he have reacted if some strange little black kid followed him into the movies (in which he would have been embarassed to be found)?

And this blindness on his part to the humanity of non-whites (in his youth he was even somewhat blind to the humanity of non-Northwest Europeans, but by his adulthood he had become more accepting owing to having made friends with various people of Southern and Eastern European origin) was quite ironic. By the end he was actually starting to realize the potential fellow-humanity of his imaginary creatures, as is obvious from "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time," but he never really grasped that black and yellow men were also his fellow-humans, not very different from himself.

The horror isn't really mitigated if one reflects that Lovecraft himself might have felt guilty after the fact for snapping at Douglas like that. (He was a racist, but he was normally kind and polite to others, even others whom he considered his inferiors). What Lovecraft would have felt afterward is irrelevant to Douglas, as the damage would have been done.

And this is but a microcosm of something America did routinely, in so many many ways, to its blacks from the 17th to most of the way through the 20th centuries. "Mute inglorious Miltons" indeed -- or Douglases.

:(

------
P.S.

A story with a similar theme is "Dark Interlude" by Frederic Brown and Mack Reynolds. That's more brutal, and less plausible, but quite possible given the prejudices of the time and place of its setting.