[Tour de Lovecraft] The Moon-Bog
The saving grace of "The Moon-Bog" is that Lovecraft doesn't appear to have cared enough about it to over-write, or at least he doesn't fill every scintilla of narrative space with his Poe-esque spasms. On the other hand, aside from one or two concepts that will pay off big in later works -- such as the notion of archaeology as the Gothic sin of 'awakening the past' -- and another intriguing example of lunar trouble (along with "Sarnath"), this story, by its very pro forma nature, is almost worse than something like "The Outsider."
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Again, though, I like the use of Greek myth as Elder Horror.
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For racism-watchers, it's interesting to note that despite the anti-Irish sentiments he sometimes expressed in HPL's letters ("try and reason with an Irishman!"), the simple Irish workmen in this story are far more notable for their class than their ethnicity. They're not even the colorful, childlike Irish country folk you meet in, say, Ray Bradbury's Irish tales, but rather generic peasants, who drop exposition in their "wild legendry," bustle about as servants, and then get kidnapped by the Fair Folk, er, naiads. The story could just as easily have been set in England (as its great descendant "The Rats in the Walls" was) or Pomerania or Spain; a remarkable deafness to setting from HPL, although the bog itself is a familiar New England swamp. For "The Moon-Bog," HPL chose the setting because the piece was meant for a St. Patrick's Day meeting of his amateur fiction group; Dunsany aside, Lovecraft doesn't seem to have felt Ireland to be much of an inspiration. Indeed, the sole other Irishman named as such in all of Lovecraft's fiction is the "great wholesome" policeman in "Haunter of the Dark." [EDIT: I'm an idiot. Of course Detective Malone, the "Dublin College man" from "Horror at Red Hook," is an Irishman, and another good cop at that.]
In Lovecraft's correspondence with Robert E. Howard, who claimed to be of "Celtic stock," they seem to have agreed that the Celt provided a necessary leavening of poetry and magic to the hardy and stolid Anglo-Saxon, and that was about it. (Seriously, though, even in our enlightened era, who doesn't have a little bit of that antique ethnography still rattling around in their brain?) One suspects that between Dunsany, Maturin, Stoker, and LeFanu, Lovecraft may not have shared quite the disdain and contempt for the Irish that his self-image as an 18th-century Englishman would otherwise demand.
NEXT: "The Other Gods"
****
Again, though, I like the use of Greek myth as Elder Horror.
****
For racism-watchers, it's interesting to note that despite the anti-Irish sentiments he sometimes expressed in HPL's letters ("try and reason with an Irishman!"), the simple Irish workmen in this story are far more notable for their class than their ethnicity. They're not even the colorful, childlike Irish country folk you meet in, say, Ray Bradbury's Irish tales, but rather generic peasants, who drop exposition in their "wild legendry," bustle about as servants, and then get kidnapped by the Fair Folk, er, naiads. The story could just as easily have been set in England (as its great descendant "The Rats in the Walls" was) or Pomerania or Spain; a remarkable deafness to setting from HPL, although the bog itself is a familiar New England swamp. For "The Moon-Bog," HPL chose the setting because the piece was meant for a St. Patrick's Day meeting of his amateur fiction group; Dunsany aside, Lovecraft doesn't seem to have felt Ireland to be much of an inspiration. Indeed, the sole other Irishman named as such in all of Lovecraft's fiction is the "great wholesome" policeman in "Haunter of the Dark." [EDIT: I'm an idiot. Of course Detective Malone, the "Dublin College man" from "Horror at Red Hook," is an Irishman, and another good cop at that.]
In Lovecraft's correspondence with Robert E. Howard, who claimed to be of "Celtic stock," they seem to have agreed that the Celt provided a necessary leavening of poetry and magic to the hardy and stolid Anglo-Saxon, and that was about it. (Seriously, though, even in our enlightened era, who doesn't have a little bit of that antique ethnography still rattling around in their brain?) One suspects that between Dunsany, Maturin, Stoker, and LeFanu, Lovecraft may not have shared quite the disdain and contempt for the Irish that his self-image as an 18th-century Englishman would otherwise demand.
NEXT: "The Other Gods"