Introduction
Building Strange Temples
by Don Webb
The puzzling question is why? Folks in my city wear burnt orange t-shirts when the Texas Longhorns are playing football. Some are former students, others identify because they live here. It’s a fairly easy tribalism. I was a UT student and when I wear my UT gear, I get positive feedback—whether it’s smiling from a 16-year-old African American that cuts my lawn or the 93-year-old white woman that is in front of me at the pharmacy. It feels good. When I wear a Lovecraftian t-shirt at a SF convention I get some smiles, but what is this tribe saying?
1. We like being scared? No, not quite. Reading Lovecraft—although there are moments of visceral horror—is not scary in the same way as watching a serial killer movie. No one reads ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and worries about the sounds in the basement. No one reads ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and wonders if his cousin got knocked up by the Guardian of the Gate. At least no sane person.
2. Is it because we are fans of Lovecraft’s racism, his sexism, or his often-terrible politics? No, the readers of HPL—at least the hundreds I have met—are very quick to either apologize for his attitudes or simply say that they are of strong enough mind to enter into the world of a writer and separate the wheat of wonder from the chaff of racism. Lovecraft did not write to advance these agendas (in his commercial pieces), nor are there any small presses out there that feature say Lovecraft and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.
3. Is it because we are unaware of quality writing and are drawn to Lovecraft as a cut above Fifty Shades of Grey? Although such differentiation did no doubt earn Lovecraft a readership in Weird Tales days, Lovecraft’s readers are often the readers of Kafka (a writer who he is very similar to) or Borges. Many of the practitioners of Lovecraftism such as Ligotti (or even Borges) belong firmly in the literary camp.
My answer to the t-shirt question is that we are in on the joke. Lovecraftians wink knowingly at one another, smirk at their little pranks—such as dropping a Lovecraftian name in a corporate training manual, and (at the best of times) use Lovecraft’s philosophical speculations as a way to explore and expand their own thinking. At the worst (that is to say the least creative) this is expressed as slavish imitation of the master—creating those endless pastiches that kept Lovecraft’s writing in the pulp fiction ghetto for years. At the best it can create philosophy and magick. So, what does it mean to be “in” on the joke?
There are two levels of response. The first level, the fannish level, is to decode the material. This means activities such as finding which New England cities become which fictional cities and then recoding the world with these names. Thus we have Lovecraft branded absinthes or “Arkham Asylums.” This is a religious activity which one can note in converts to new faiths. The new Jew, Buddhist, Satanist, etc. goes through the remapping of the world effecting clothing, diet, etc. The new Lovecraftian changes her types of play.
The second level is to adopt Lovecraft’s ideas of the disease and the cure. The disease is nihilism. Face it: we are temporary beings that can exist under a small set of circumstance (temper-ature, pressure, gravity). We exist on a small world circling a rather uninteresting yellow sun in a perfectly ordinary arm of (what appears to be) a rather conventional galaxy in a small local group of galaxies. I will be dust, you will be dust, this book will be dust, this language will fade in time (if mankind does not destroy itself), and even the mountains and seas of this world will take on new shapes in less time than a single nap of dread Cthulhu. Your politics, your religion, art, are tiny bubbles of foam on the oceans of eternity. It does not matter if you love your spouse, pet your cat, or pray today. It will be forgotten tomorrow, or if not tomorrow in weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, aeons . . . So knowing this—how do I get out of bed and type these words? How do you go to work Monday morning? Why should we care if the bridges and infrastructure of our cities become rust? Why should humans worry about continent of garbage that now floats over R’lyeh?
One could react to this undeniable truth in various ways. We could become hedonists of the most debauched sort. We could end our existence in a variety of either pleasurable or dramatic ways. We could simply sleep in . . .
Much of Lovecraft’s life, as pointed out by even his semi-favorable critics like De Camp, can be seen as a reaction to this truth. He made enough money to eat and eventually his mal-nutrition contributed to his demise. Finding typing a great chore he didn’t even type some of his best known tales, made small attempts at marketing them, didn’t buy a home—didn’t even see to his legacy. He should have been blown like dust save for the Cure (and conditions of the Cure).
The Cure—both for Uncle Howard and us—is Wonder. Lovecraft is firmly part of the gosh-wow tradition of American Science Fiction. He differed from his contemporaries in two things. He could not fake optimism. His heroes didn’t get to bed egg-laying Martian women with big tits. His sense of wonder was not attached to the wonders of human invention or human progress. Secondly, he was not motivated by money. He made the usual whining sounds all writers must make to each other—yet much of his output was geared to produce nothing of economic value. His wonderful history of weird literature, Supernatural Horror in Literature—which took decades to research, two years to write, and months to revise—was written for a one-shot non-paying fanzine. It was guided by a published work, Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror, which, although never a bestseller, proved the existence of a paying market for such a piece of work. Lovecraft did not fail to make money because of lack of public interest, simply because of lack of motivation. This leads to the second question: Why did Lovecraft write at all? His literary output shows great craftsmanship—stories (as I am always discovering do not write themselves). If Wonder was a self-sustaining state one need only have recourse to imagination. One could dream of sinister Egyptian pharaohs one day and killer cats the next.
Wonder is shared. Wonder has two moments. The first is that moment of joy where the work or Art or the beauty of Nature or the marvel of Science takes the psyche beyond the limited experience of the here-and-now. The second moment is witnessing another so transported. It is a feeling that all of you have. You are excited when you have your moment of transcendence, and then comes that second moment when you initiate another. You know the thrill of turning on someone to a writer, a film, a piece of music. All of Lovecraft’s output is enshrined in this quest—not just his fiction, but also his essays and most importantly his voluminous letter writing. We are made ashamed by the common capitalist values of our time to admit this mood—because (by and large) we don’t make money from it. If you talk your aged aunt into watching Dr. Who or lure your chiropractor into reading ‘The Raven’ you feel a thrill that hasn’t put a dime in your pocket. You are being a bad modern.
Lovecraft initiated readers and writers into his sense of Wonder. In the Lovecraftian system it is better to momentarily fool some Weird Tales reader into believing there is a Necro-nomicon than to make a buck by copyrighting the idea. It is better to steal the Yellow Sign and therefore provide a backdoor into Chambers than to simply use your own words. This joy of intertextuality is what sets Lovecraft’s work apart. His words blend into other’s writing, whether the connect to a Borges short story or a third imitation of a Lin Carter story put on a blog that got two hits. I began writing as part of this mood and I am informed by this strange need.
One of my stories here, ‘Night Gauntlet,’ has the writings of both men that influenced me to write at all (Walter C. DeBill Jr.) as well a young writer I encouraged and mentored. I have included tales influenced by writers that influenced Lovecraft (William Hope Hodgson in ‘Lute’), writing inspired by Lovecraft’s friends (Clark Ashton Smith in ‘Polarion’ or ‘The Red Rite’), writing derived from his students (Frank Belknap Long in ‘Doodles’)—I even incorporated an unfinished fragment of Lovecraft’s own writing in one tale (‘The Hollow Man’). I have worked with great poets like Denise Dumars, amazing literary critics like Robert Price, writers with very different literary aims than me (Nick Mamatas, William Pugmire, Jeffery Thomas). I have included in-jokes from Lovecraftians of other times (such as borrowing the rock group Electric Commode from the late James Wade). In ‘Tomahawk’ I give a story that began as a collaboration between myself and Michael Swanwick; we could not come to a single vision and so he let me have the words. There are still some of his sentences, the better ones I imagine, hidden in that work. In my last piece of play I took one of Lovecraft’s unfinished stories and finished it.
My hope is that some of my pieces will give you the moment of Wonder, that change in your subjective universe that is neither terror nor ecstasy but a refutation of the concept of Order. And in turn that you spread some of that Wonder into the objective universe finding some other soul you can share it with. Maybe it will be story that you will tell by the campfire, maybe it’s buying this book as a Groundhog Day present for your chiropractor. Then perhaps long after I am dust and you are dust and this book is dust—something a bit more durable than dust can recognize itself in worlds and ways literally beyond our current imaginations.
And if such is not to be, at least you and I were on the Joke.
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!