There’s also a nasty little grace note toward the end, one which for whatever reason struck me as particularly foul. Jermyn makes a deal with a Belgian agent to acquire the ape-goddess from “the once mighty N’bangus…now the submissive servants of King Albert’s government.” The Belgian believes that the N’bangus “with but little persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity…” Given the charnel nature of the Belgian Congo, reading Jermyn’s willingness to traffic in genocide-enforced theft of sacred objects…well, eeeww. Though one can’t mention the Congo and Lovecraft without adding a recommendation for David Drake’s hammer-blow of a story, “Than Curse the Darkness.” ♠
I would like to point out that again, Lovecraft removes, or denatures, race from his source material even as he emphasizes lineage and ethnicity. HPL borrowed the stress-atavism concept from a rather distasteful story by Irvin S. Cobb in which a Frenchman of mixed blood, run over by a train, cries out in an African dialect words used by his ancestor who had been gored by a rhinoceros. Sadly, of course, Lovecraft named Delapore’s cat in the story after his own beloved cat Nigger-Man, and there are those “howling negroes” on the old family plantation (Carfax, a lovely Dracula tribute), so there you go with that. In other, happier racist-writer news, though, it’s thanks to the cod-Celtic he used at the end of “Rats” that Lovecraft got a nitpicky letter from Robert E. Howard, and thus began their legendary correspondence and friendship. ♠
Much as we saw words as the manifestation of, and theorized them as the entry-way for, the horror in “Statement of Randolph Carter.” ♠
At http://chrisperridas.blogspot.com/ ♠
Steampunk is also, it suddenly occurs to me, a kind of domestication of technological unease, analogous to the Victorian domestication of the fairy tale. ♠
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
A Brief Survey of Lovecraftian Criticism
The Stories
The Tomb
Dagon
Polaris
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The White Ship
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Terrible Old Man
The Tree
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
The Cats of Ulthar
The Temple
Celephaïs
Nyarlathotep
From Beyond
The Picture in the House
The Nameless City
The Quest of Iranon
The Moon-Bog
The Outsider
The Other Gods
Herbert West—Reanimator
The Music of Erich Zann
Hypnos
The Hound
The Lurking Fear
The Rats in the Walls
The Unnamable
The Festival
Under the Pyramids
The Shunned House
The Horror at Red Hook
He
In the Vault
Cool Air
The Call of Cthulhu
Pickman’s Model
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Silver Key
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow Out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark
Conclusion
Sources and Resources
About the Author
Endnotes
Foreword
Introduction
A Brief Survey of Lovecraftian Criticism
The Stories
The Tomb
Dagon
Polaris
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The White Ship
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Terrible Old Man
The Tree
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
The Cats of Ulthar
The Temple
Celephaïs
Nyarlathotep
From Beyond
The Picture in the House
The Nameless City
The Quest of Iranon
The Moon-Bog
The Outsider
The Other Gods
Herbert West—Reanimator
The Music of Erich Zann
Hypnos
The Hound
The Lurking Fear
The Rats in the Walls
The Unnamable
The Festival
Under the Pyramids
The Shunned House
The Horror at Red Hook
He
In the Vault
Cool Air
The Call of Cthulhu
Pickman’s Model
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Silver Key
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow Out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark
Conclusion
Sources and Resources
About the Author
Endnotes