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

[vakkotaur]

Now that's a real horror story, dreams destroyed by one line...

[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