Texts From H.P. Lovecraft

by Mallory Ortberg · August 24, 2015

hpHoward
Howard are you in there?
WHO IS IT
it’s me
how long have you been locked in here?
LONGER THAN TIME
are you planning on coming out anytime soon?
for food or for anything?
I WENT OUTSIDE ONCE
IT WAS TERRIBLE
EVERYONE WAS WALKING DOWN THE STREET BUT THEY WEREN’T DESCENDED FROM THE MAYFLOWER
yes that
that happens sometimes
will you come out of the bathroom just for a minute, though?
how many races of people
would you say are outside right now
I don’t understand
out here in the hallway?
just outside in general
would you say that there’s mostly just the one race
or more than one
like some races
I mean
yeah I think it’s some
this is a big city
it’s probably some
THEN I SHALL STAY IN THE BATHTUB
THIS BATHTUB IS WHITE AND SMOOTH, LIKE ME AND ALL OF MY FOREFATHERS
I don’t think hiding in the bathtub is going to stop anyone from being a different race than you, Howard
YOU CAN’T PROVE IT WON’T NOT STOP THEM
what?
LEAVE ME ALONE
I DECLARE THIS BATHTUB NEW NEW ENGLAND
AND I AM ITS KING

 

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE MOST TERRIFYING THING IN THE DARK AND SWOLLEN HISTORY OF THIS SHUDDERING EARTH IS, LAD
no
what is it
ARCHITECTURE
what?
ARCHITECTURE
I’M GOING TO WRITE THE WORLD’S GREATEST HORROR STORY ABOUT ARCHITECTURE
that certainly sounds novel
BECAUSE WHAT IF SOMEONE BUILT A CITY THAT HAD
YOU KNOW
SOME WEIRD ANGLES
THAT WOULD JUST BE THE WORST
DON’T YOU THINK

 

IS THAT A WOMAN I HEAR ON THE STAIRWELL 
I’m not sure
it’s hard to tell what women sound like from this distance
GET HER OUT OF HERE
FAUGH
UUUGH
A WOMAN
I’m sure she’ll keep taking the stairs and be gone in a moment
TELL HER TO STAIR FASTER
AND TELL HER THAT I’M A REMARKABLE LOVER
BUT I WON’T HAVE SEX WITH HER OR ANYONE
PEOPLE ONLY WANT TO HAVE SEX WHEN THEY’RE NINETEEN
AND IF THEY DON’T GET MARRIED THEN THEY JUST SORT OF FORGET IT EXISTS
THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS, YOU KNOW
NINETEEN OR BUST
I’M PERFECTLY NORMAL SEX-WISE BUT I DON’T WANT TO HAVE IT EVER AGAIN
ESPECIALLY WITH WOMEN
UUUGH
WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY’VE GOT GOING ON UNDER ALL THOSE
GARTERS AND STRAPPADOS AND WHAT HAVE YOU
FOAM AND MIST AND PROTUBERANCES, I’VE NO DOUBT
GET RID OF HER
I don’t see anyone
GOOD
PERHAPS SHE WAS SCARED OFF BY MY RAW MASCULINE POWER
perhaps
I don’t like men either, if you were wondering
I wasn’t
well
i don’t
i don’t like anyone
just Harry Houdini and my mother and that’s it

 

do you know what i hope
what’s that
i hope that if, years from now, some people aren’t quite so organized in their racism as they are now
i hope when they look back on my work
they don’t just dismiss me as “a man of my time”
that would really upset me
if they didn’t realize how seriously i take my racism
i hope they don’t try to do that
I’m sure they won’t do that
perhaps I’d better write another poem about race-mixing just in case

 

UUUUUUUUGHHH
GUUHHHHHHHHHH
GUUHGHHHGHHHHGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH
what is it?
GUUUUUUUNNNNNGGHHHHH
my God man, what’s wrong?
what’s happened?
NOTHING
what’s wrong?
TIME
what?
YOU KNOW
TIME
IT’S VERY OLD
I see
AND PEOPLE USED TO BE FISH
really?
well
broadly speaking
that seems like an enormously broad reading of the process of evolution
WELL
SOMETHING USED TO BE FISH, ANYHOW
AND THERE ARE STILL FISH NOW
AND ALSO TIME
what about time
IT KEEPS HAPPENING
AND THE STARS ARE VERY OLD BUT WE AREN’T
I
that’s not untrue, exactly
GAAAAAUUUUGGGHHHHHH

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108 Comments

  1. liesandperfidy +193

    the only problem with this is that it implies HP Lovecraft had any idea how human beings talk to one another

    but it’s still amazing

    1. liesandperfidy +189

      shit, guys, i guess the jig is up, HP wasn’t bigoted and we’ve been misreading him this whole time!

    2. Cthulu II +90

      You know HPL had arms, right?

      (What I’m saying here is I no idea where you think your comment was going.)

      1. Pattom +18

        Was that what happened? Sonia was also the breadwinner between them, and I always figured she left him for being a deadbeat shut-in who couldn’t hold down a real job.

    4. arthurtheref +151

      You know his marriage was a total disaster which led to him abandoning Sonia Greene (at least partly because he couldn’t hack it living in New York with people not like him) but refusing to divorce her because he believed Proper Gentlemen didn’t get divorced, right? We’re talking about a dude who, when Robert E. Howard mentioned in a letter to him that, much as he approved of white men standing up for themselves, he found the tenor of Nazi Germany a bit totalitarian, he wrote back to REH essentially saying “Well, OK, I know it goes against the grain of your more libertarian instincts, but how else are the Germans supposed to solve their Jew problem?”

      Lovecraft learned literally nothing from his marriage and it made him double down on more or less all of his bigotries. It’s no accident that the most famous story from his New York period – the Horror at Red Hook – is one of those stories which his fandom doesn’t even bother to defend.

      1. thewhelk +32

        Wait is the horror at Red Hook the one where it’s basically a gay pick up gone horribly wrong? Which includes the phrase “even more forgotten squares ” cause that’s stuck in my brain, not just little thought about squares in the city, but EVEN MORE FORGOTTEN ONES

        1. Addison +32

          I feel like you’re thinking of “He”? Horror at Red Hook is the one where instead of tentacles, the horror is the existence of asiatic/mongoloid/arabic/negro people (not, like, four separate groups. This is all the same set of people, Lovecraft just can’t decide on a consistent set of adjectives.)

    6. halloweenjack64 +78

      By all means, do go on. I’m curious to see how long it takes you to get around to mentioning Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

    7. Zelenka +32

      He MARRIED someone? I mean … someone married HIM? Who? Why? Off to find out about this woman, whoever she is.

      1. queenofbithynia +71

        married him and supported him for two years as a traveling hat saleswoman while he complained about his low standard of living all the while! But then she got sick of it so he had to go be supported by his aunts.

        I have not read her memoir and don’t know how hard it is to get hold of but my understanding is she was a writer and fan and thought marrying Lovecraft would be a fun side project? Which I’m sure it would be if you approach it with the right mindset.

        1. paige +10

          Yes, by all indications he was her project, and she pursued him aggressively, even suggesting she “stole” him from another woman, a friend and sorta-girlfriend (who herself had been married to a black writer; if only Howard had known, oy). Sadly I think Greene fell into the all-too-typical trap of thinking she could change Lovecraft, and there’s hardly been anyone more set in their ways than HPL.

    8. Adam L Brinklow +7

      I knew that, and you knew that, and we assume Lovecraft knew that, but the evidence suggests it slipped his mind at least long enough to be bamboozled into some vows, and at that point, well, what are you going to do, yeah?

    9. Maura +49

      Yes, in addition to being an awful racist, he was also a hypocrite. He had close friends who were gay, Jewish, on the actual board of the NAACP, and yet he continued to be just the awfullest. I enjoy a lot of his writing but he does not make it easy.

  3. damanoid +197

    Just imagine if all racists were as creatively brittle as Lovecraft, though. Instead of headlines like: “Yet another white cop shoots unarmed black man for no reason,” we’d hear about stuff like: “Yet another creepy white shut-in invents peculiar horror subgenre (this one based on secret race of black people with no arms, like horrifying were-worms).” It’d be a calmer, more rational world, yet with the constant uneasy spidery sound of quill pens scratching ceaselessly in a thousand attics.

    1. liesandperfidy +59

      Unfortunately, today’s cabal of racist, paranoid spec-fic authors is waaayyy less talented than ol’ Howie.

      1. damanoid +190

        Strangely, their preferred scenario of: “white men achieving victory through superior intelligence and firepower” is actually far less realistic than Lovecraft’s: “white men confronting the uncontrollable alien truth of reality, failing to cope, then going insane and running away.”

        1. arthurtheref +103

          Yeah, to be honest for me that’s part of what makes Lovecraft’s better stories reclaimable – they’re all about the dominant social mores of his time fading away into nothingness in the face of then-recent cosmological discoveries about just how unfathomably old the universe is and just how world is and just how strange its workings are. It’s like he’s this totally pedestrian racist wannabe author but then suddenly one day he encounters the Total Perspective Vortex and in the face of cosmological irrelevance is never able to believe in the weight-supporting pillars of his society again.

        2. Unreadaethel +76

          It really is fascinating how most of his horror writing boils down to “guys, what if white men weren’t in charge of everything? I’ve developed a terrible brain fever just thinking about it.”

    2. grace_adieu +22

      The irritating thing is that he didn’t even invent it. Most of his style is a bad rip off of The King in Yellow.

      1. arthurtheref +48

        Yeah, even as a fan who is often embarrassed by the guy I don’t really read Lovecraft and think “gosh, this guy is a stylistic genius” – his ideas were regularly more interesting than his attempts to communicate them. I think his best works were those which leaned more on science fiction and less on the sort of poetic horror-fantasy that Chambers* pioneered – things like The Whisperer In Darkness or At the Mountains of Madness, where he was trying to evoke the sort of sheer vertigo you get when you try and consider just how tiny our culture’s lifespans are compared to the age of the planet and so on.

        * Who also had some real, uh, developed ideas about race.

  4. supernanify +43

    Uuugghhhh Mallory, I’ve got so much work to do but obviously now I’m stuck reading the entirety of Lovecraft’s wikipedia page.

    1. vlyra +32

      “Lovecraft contracted a marriage to an older woman he had met at an association conference.” He contracted a marriage…. like you would an illness

      Also: “Both of his parents were of entirely English ancestry, all of which had been in New England since the colonial period.” [steeples fingers together like Dumbledore] Ah…. inbreeding?

      1. Zelenka +16

        To be fair, he was racist against the entire human race. Everyone who wasn’t of English descent was a mongrel of some kind, and the pure English were, in his stories, inbred to the point of degeneracy. So everyone was equally revolting.

        1. vlyra +9

          Okay? My comment had nothing to do with his racism, and everything to do with his complete weirdness

  5. ScriptioPlena +214

    …Yep, pretty much. And I’ve definitely got some protuberances, but foam is pretty rare, and I don’t think I see any mist under there.

    …Or is that just what I want you to think? *wiggles tentacles salaciously*

    1. maccrocodile +108

      If it’s not misting regularly, you might want to see a doctor/priest. It could be infected or haunted.

        1. maccrocodile +110

          Ooh, if it’s slithery, you might be pregnant with unspeakable horrors. Congratulations.

          2. maccrocodile +92

            Well, I’m sure you’d love a twisted, nightmarish warning of horrors to come just the same, as long as its healthy.

          4. apple_pi +57

            This entire exchange gives me life. (Sure, it’s a nihilistic, subterranean life filled with twisted, unimaginable horrors dripping ichor from their boney exostructures and pulsing tentacles – and as Mallory pointed out, so many WEIRD AND VERY WRONG ANGLES – but still. life.)

      3. alula_auburn +14

        I am not particularly a comics person, but every couple of years I google this to make sure I read it and didn’t dream it, in a dream that would make me say upon waking. . .”but where would she GO?!?”

        (NSFW, probably) http://www.the-isb.com/?p=980

    2. Rillquiet +86

      It’s heartening to hear that waxing is out and the full Innsmouth look is popular again.

  8. irishbreakfasttime +143

    I want to text him a bunch of photos of young women of color happily playing Arkham Horror or doing elaborate cosplay based on his work, or heck just wearing tentacly jewelry because they dig his spooky aesthetic, just a constant barrage of those photos.

    But I bet Texting Lovecraft is a guy who aggressively brags about not having a smart phone or a data plan.

    1. halloweenjack64 +52

      I’d like to believe that HPL would just flip out if he realized that people today were selling plushies of Cthulhu.

  10. nostack +120

    The best thing about Lovecraft is that, from his perspective, pretty much all readers of the Toast are post-human monstrosities, and thus, the apocalypse is actually kinda cool. For example, I’m about to use my Internet-Telepathy powers to see if there’s a lovely person of another race who wants to do forbidden things with me. Frankly, the stars are finally right if you dig that sort of thing. Yes, the species is about to drown in its own carbon dioxide, the way yeast suffocates in its own excrement, but what-ya-gonna-do? None of this matters a whole lot, anyhow, so just enjoy the moment while you’ve got it.

    1. Mrs_Peel +18

      “from his perspective, pretty much all readers of the Toast are post-human monstrosities”

      I mean, in my case, he’s not wrong…

  11. beakbreath +126

    I love that the only part of this which doesn’t reflect ol H.P.’s general awfulness, as a person, is his dream of writing a classic horror story about architecture, and how that dream was actually achieved by Shirley Jackson.

      1. maccrocodile +182

        God, they would have been the cutest couple.

        “You know what I hate, Ayn?”
        “What’s that, H. P.?”
        “People who aren’t me, or at least exactly like me.”
        “Really? I hate people who aren’t me or exactly like me, too!”
        “We’re so much alike.”
        “Yeah, but not exactly.”
        “No, not exactly.”
        “You should leave.”
        “Yes, I think I should.”
        “See you tomorrow.”

        2. Laconic +73

          It would have gone great until she asked him what he thought of trains and then it would all come tumbling down.

  13. Laura +125

    I WENT OUTSIDE ONCE
    IT WAS TERRIBLE

    is the center of the Lovecraft/Grumpy Cat Venn diagram.

      1. redheadedwolf +18

        Yes yes, thank you for correcting that citation! The Grumpy Cat people owe her quite a lot of dollars.

  15. crawlkill +38

    his letter were truly unspeakable

    or unaussprechlich as I’m sure he would’ve preferred we remember him

    actually the whole Unaussprechliche Kulten thing was a great pun, although I have no idea if he intended it, because it can be either unspeakable or just “unpronounceable,” a fitting joke by the man who gave us Cthulhu and R’lyeh. if he had one undeniable talent, it was thinking up weirdfuck skincrawling names.

  16. Turnip Truck +48

    No Lovecraft, no Mountain Goats song “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” though.

    Woke up afraid of my own shadow–like, genuinely afraid–

  17. ltpatridge +49

    I’ve read an exhaustive two-volume biography of the man, and I am here to tell you this is spot-on.
    His poor wife. I want to write a stage play about what their courtship was like.

    2. Maura +17

      Someone actually has! It was presented as a staged reading at NecronomiCon in Providence this past weekend.

  18. autumnlorayne +33

    Is it fitting to say to an author, ‘You are worthless,’ And to Lovecraft, ‘You are problematic’?

  19. vmartinipie +52

    I have a feeling there will be some excellent deleted comments in tomorrow’s roundup…

  22. alula_auburn +32

    I love the endlessly patient text-responder to these guys. I hope they get hazard pay.

    In my limited experience, Lovecraft fans are a little less knee-jerk defensive than RE Howard fans in terms of providing grist for the spam filter. But we will see, I hope!

  23. chai_party +15

    THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS, YOU KNOW
    NINETEEN OR BUST

    😀 Mallory, I do love your sense of timing and wording

  24. Heather +29

    i’m a big fan, not of Lovecraft himself, but of the subgenre he spawned. or at least what contemporary writers are doing in that genre. I don’t actually call it ‘Lovecraftian’ except when trying to communicate with non-me persons. the term i use internally – in my own head – is ‘Kiernanesque’.

    Because Caitlin Kiernan rocks. Her stories about fish-people (lovecraft’s ‘Deep Ones’) have a recurring motif where people with fish-person ancestry experience what is recognizably dysphoria regarding their human bodies. (Kiernan is trans.) I love those stories, because they tap into weird love of monster girls and the sea and also my mermaid fantasies (apparently lots of trans girls have mermaid fantasies)

    The girl in Kiernan’s story ‘Tears Seven Times Salt’ dreams of scaly sex with a fish boyfriend (complete with needle-toothed hickies) and somehow that is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things i’ve ever read. Not in a sexy way, she just nailed the feeling of finally being oneself and belonging and being loved. Coming home to a place you’ve never been before. Maybe I’m just an odd person.

    But yeah Lovecraft himself was an asshole.

    2. laurenipsum +5

      Holy crap I guess I need to read some Kiernan.

      I haven’t actually read much Lovecraft but I quite like the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, which is a coupla nerd boys who are problematic faves. They’ve somehow made me feel fond towards and yet also critical of Lovecraft himself. And they’ve also made me very fond of the themes. And so it sounds like I need to seek out more of Caitlin Kiernan than I’ve gotten so far in the “Best Dark Fantasy & Horror” anthologies.

      1. A pleasing terror

        I just want to second the recommendation of the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. It’s quite delightful.

    3. halloweenjack64 +7

      Some of my favorite authors have dabbled in Lovecraftiana. Stephen King* has gone to that well a bunch of times; in particular, the Dark Tower series hinted broadly that the destruction of the universe would result in reality being flooded by Lovecraftian chaos monsters. (Some of his early stories are also explicitly based on Lovecraft stories and tropes.) Terry Pratchett also had some fairly familiar extradimensional chaos monsters in his early Discworld books. And Charles Stross included both Deep Ones and another chthonic race in his James Bond send-up The Jennifer Morgue; in fact, a major character turns out to be a Deep One.

      *It should be noted that King isn’t as racist as Lovecraft, but he does have his issues with black people, in particular a fondness for Magical Negroes.

    5. Ruina

      Kiernan is excellent! I also recommend Wilum H. Pugmire. His Lovecraftian stories are very poetic and very queer.

  25. Beata Secunda +11

    Guys, do you remember the time in The Shadow Over Innsmouth when the ancient sigil that protected the Kanaky islanders from the evil race of the deep was…a swastika?!

    Or the time in Medusa’s Coil where the trademark Lovecraftian horrible-secret-revealed-in-last-line was…that some guy’s great grandmother was A NEGRESS?! (his words not mine)

    I do, because I was reading the collected Lovecraft last night for the first time in ages, which makes this almost UNSPEAKABLY good.

    1. halloweenjack64 +7

      To be fair, or fair-ish, at the time that “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” was written (1931), it was still plausible that the swastika was associated with other cultures much more than Nazism. In fact, the 45th Infantry Division in the U.S. used to have a swastika on its division patch, due to being based in Oklahoma and the swastika being used as a symbol by some Native American cultures. (It was changed to a thunderbird well before America’s entry into WWII.)

    2. Camille +1

      No no, it was the woman with the LIVING HAIR that was a tiny little bit black. But that’s much scarier then the HAIR THAT KILLS PEOPLE.

  26. rattyknits +16

    I’m sure there has been a huge amount written on this already… but Lovecraft is really so, so reminiscent of Conrad, isn’t he? They’re both terrified of dense vegetation, mist, time, other races and women; plus they really love baroque grammar and vast, vague modifiers. All those implacable forces brooding over inscrutable intentions.

  30. paige +5

    Lovecraft’s supposed fear of or aversion to women is, unfortunately, quite exaggerated. His physical aversion to sexuality is well known, but it didn’t translate to misogyny. He had many female friends and colleagues and there’s no real evidence he didn’t like or respect them. He even had more than one chaste near-romance, and letters to a friend after meeting his future wife are really kinda cute (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/sources/lrk.aspx).

    1. Ruina +5

      From his letters and memories of his wife I’ve got the impression he wasn’t phisically repulsed by sex, just thought it primitive, unglamorous and not very interesting. But even if he was, making fun of asexuals is not exactly progressive, and this bugs me about this poem that otherwise is quite amusing. His views on women were complicated – he supported emancipation but strongly disliked femininity and all quilities considered “feminine”.