Otherworldly Horror Distracts from the Mundane

In a period of sadness and a family crisis that will not end well, I have taken some refuge in fiction. I realize that this is the sort of refuge that, as a friend in college from England told me, the English find in tea. She explained that to an English person, tea was used to celebrate joy and to mitigate bad moods - it is a panacea so universal that it can augment the desirable even as it ameliorates the regrettable.

Fiction, particularly that which falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction, is my universal drug of choice.

Continuing to make my gradual way through a collection of Lovecraft works, I seem not to have hit the more famous stories, reading recently on the plane back to Boston both The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space.

The former I had actually read before, though some new details resolved into focus on a second reading. The major one being the implication of multiple murders. Previously I had attributed the deaths of the Cthulhu witnesses to a kind of supernatural despair, but reading the story again I now feel inclined to interpret the deaths of the narrator's uncle, the Norwegian sailor who actually saw Cthulhu, and the narrator himself to all be the work of the global Cthulhu cult, eager to silence anyone who would dare unravel their secret truths.

In an odd sense, this actually makes the whole thing seem... slightly... less terrifying. Though it also hints at a more complex story that might have been if Lovecraft had chosen to write a full-length novel. The story is actually a kind of assembly of related anecdotes, all second-hand knowledge at most to the narrator. But what is very clear about this story is that it was here that Lovecraft really began laying down the world-building for his mythos, while other stories like the Shunned House and the Colour Out of Space just hint at it.

The Colour Out of Space is definitely creepy. Like a lot of these stories, there's a kind of second-handedness to the narration. The story is basically about a story told by a guy in rural Massachusetts (west of Arkham, which appears to be based on Salem) who recalls looking into the case of a family whose lives were utterly destroyed after a meteorite landed on their property. The meteorite, it becomes clear over the course of the story, was carrying some alien entity that drained the life-force out of everything near, and drove the family insane, driving at least two of the boys in the family (and several local animals) to drown themselves in a well that the entity seemed to be inhabiting.

Creepier still is that, while the "blasted heath" as the blighted remains of the family's property is now called, is thankfully about to be flooded over to make a reservoir, that reservoir is going to provide water for Arkham, and it seems like drinking said water would be a very, very, very bad idea for anyone.

Oddly, the effect that the unnamed alien that emits an otherworldly color (or colour, as the title suggests) has on its victims is actually reminiscent of Metroids from the popular game series (though as far as I know Metroids don't have psychic abilities.) I wonder if they were inspired at all by this story. I know that the main inspiration for Metroid was the Alien series, which itself was, I would think, heavily Lovecraft-inspired, so it could be that there's a transitive property there.

A Taste of Lovecraft

Given his influence on the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres (even Tolkien borrowed ideas from him) I figured it was time I read a significant amount of H. P. Lovecraft. I got a collection of his short stories, and it has been interesting so far.

The book was assembled by Joyce Carol Oates, and the first three stories (the stories I have read) are The Outsider, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Rats in the Walls.

I'm enjoying the writing, with some important caveats. One of the really strange things I'm noticing is the similarity to a lot of writing I do. As Oates points out in her introduction, Lovecraft had a fascination with setting and atmosphere, often favoring an establishment of mood over nuanced characters. While I strive to make my characters interesting, I do think that this element of storytelling does draw me. I think my favorite story of the three I've read is the Music of Erich Zann.

In this story, the narrator recounts living in a tall house on a narrow and steep street in "the city" (one assumes Paris or at least somewhere in France.) His upstairs neighbor is a mute musician named Erich Zann, and the narrator is drawn to meet him after hearing incredibly strange but beautiful music coming from Zann's attic apartment.

Ultimately, of course, it turns out that this strangest of music is not coming from Zann, but from some unfathomable void that his window opens out into - not the city skyline that the narrator would have reasonably assumed.

The "of course" there is a consequence of Lovecraft's influence. Having been an establishing trope codifier, some of the "twist" endings to his stories wind up feeling rote and familiar, but I wonder if they felt original when first written. The Outsider's ending, when the narrator describes, in italics, the sensation of touching the horrific monster's hand was, in fact, the act of touching a cold glass mirror, seems utterly hackneyed, though of course there is fascinating imagined geography to the bizarre underground (or other-planar) castle that the narrator grew up in.

Two stories in, I was pleasantly enjoying the work, but the Rats in the Walls confronted me with one of the biggest problems with Lovecraft, namely his racism. Not only does the protagonist have a beloved cat named N---Man, but there seems to be a kind of matter-of-fact acceptance of phrenology as a respectable science. (The story's ending is also very abrupt, with the madness that descends on the narrator and mentions of Nyarlathotep coming sort of out of the blue, as if Lovecraft was thinking "hm... how do I end this?")

I had compared Lovecraft to Poe in an earlier post, and I think that comparison is apt. Lovecraft was clearly working from the Gothic Horror template, and was fascinated by the notion of protagonists reduced to madmen - his modification of the genre was the extrapolation of a universe built on madness - that there was a material cause for madness rather than guilt, trauma, or cruelty.

A Story About Huntokar Drops A Huge Amount of Night Vale Lore

Apparently it's Huntokar, not Huntocar. I got close!

Anyway, in the latest Welcome to Night Vale episode, we actually don't hear anything from Cecil. Instead, we merely get a confession of responsibility from Huntokar, one of the gods of the Night Vale multiverse.

We also get confirmation that the Woman From Italy, the Distant Prince, the Glow Cloud, and apparently, collectively, the Five-Headed Dragons, are also gods.

Huntokar is the Destroyer, but she never intended to be. In fact, among these gods, she's the only benevolent one. There are an infinite number of Night Vales - all towns within the small desert valley that she declared her domain when the gods were picking areas (ironically, the Woman From Italy is everywhere except Italy.) She's the object of Bloodstone worship, and they honored her with ceremonies wearing the soft-meat crowns. But it was the first Night Vale that she created that led to the current disaster.

It was her primary Night Vale that was threatened with obliteration in 1983 by a Soviet missile launch, but in attempting to protect her city, she shattered reality, causing every variation of Night Vale to collapse in on itself.

Now I don't exactly know if this means that the Night Vale we've spent our time in has been that combined Night Vale or if the effects of the events she is describing are only now manifesting. It could be that this combination of Night Vales is why the town is so weird (though the existence of these strange gods prior to Night Vale suggests that there's plenty of weirdness to go around.)

The shattering reality in the last episode does now seem to have an explanation, and how Cecil could be meeting his nonexistent brother. We're getting close to the "season finale," but I think it's remarkable how much backstory is revealed in today's episode - backstory that I frankly never expected to get from Night Vale.