About
Background
Welcome to the H.P. Lovecraft Digital Humanities Portfolio.
Since the turn of the century, main stream interest in the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft has been on the rise, and his work has been released by a number of mainstream and academic publishers. These include recognizable names such as Penguin Classics, the Library of America, and Oxford World Classic, in addition to numerous “omnibus,” “definitive,” and “annotated” editions of his work from publishers such as Barnes and Noble and Modern Library Classics. His influence can be found throughout American pop-culture and beyond in nearly every form of media and has influenced creators from across the globe. Perhaps most surprisingly, despite his reputation and penchant for racism and sexism, his work has found a home among those who vilified and othered, including Academy Award winning director Guillermo del Toro, Japanese comic creator Junji Ito. In recent years, this interest has moved from mere influence and into the realm of reclamation and repurposing. Such is the case with Victor LaValle and Ruthanna Emrys, authors of the Lovecraft inspired works, The Ballad of Black Tom, and The Innsmouth Legacy series of novels respectively.
During an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, LaValle discussed his attraction to Lovecraft’s work, noting that despite his gestures towards “aristocracy, Lovecraft in his own life felt incredibly powerless. He was from a family that once had wealth but had lost it all”. This sense of loss and powerlessness meant that in many ways he “was also this…flailing 10 or 11-year-old kid. And the complement that you can pay to his art is that he actually got that down on the page in a way that this 10 or 11-year-old black kid from Queens could also relate to”. It was this sense of powerlessness that connected with LaValle, despite the other racist aspects contained within Lovecraft’s work. Indeed, regarding his racism, LaValle notes, “I think I just couldn't have processed it. And then when I was about 15 or 16, I started being like what is this dude - what did he just say?...And yet by this point, I already loved the stories, so it made for these very conflicted feelings”. While this explains his fondness and his ability to overlook or set aside Lovecraft’s racism, something which may have driven LaValle away from his work during his teen years, it does not explain his reasoning for working with Lovecraft.
In an article she penned for NPR, Ruthanna Emrys discusses her own decision to work with work that is bigoted and sexist. She explains how, “Pervasive in cosmic horror is the conflict between attraction and repulsion. Lovecraft's narrators stumble into terror because they can't look away…I feel the same way about Lovecraft”. She goes on to note how this dichotomy of repulsion and attraction manifests itself sympathetically within otherwise racists works,
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” begins with the town's amphibious inhabitants being forced into internment camps…Yet “Shadow” also contains moments of strange sympathy for its monsters and a protagonist who ultimately discovers himself to be one of them, and transforms to “dwell amidst wonder and glory” beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
It is this sympathy which provides authors such as LaValle and Emrys a door into works which would often cast those social, ethnic, or gendered groups they belong too as the monstrous source of Lovecraft’s horror. As Emrys explains, “Perhaps we keep building on his creations in the hope that we can finally complete that half-hinted transformation” that he was afraid to embrace.
While this explains LaValle and Emrys’ interest and fondness for Lovecraft, it still leaves many questions unanswered. For example, how have the creations of an obscure pulp fiction author from the first half of the twentieth century been able to survive and thrive into the twenty first century? Why have certain figures within his body of work become cultural touchstones? In an attempt to answer these questions, I will apply various Digital Humanities methodologies and tools to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and house the results here, on Rat(ios) in the Walls (of Text).