Shoggothic Literature
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm by Ben
I recently finished the March 2008 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and my favorite story from that crop was Shoggoths in Bloom, by Elizabeth Bear.
My experience with H. P. Lovecraft’s work is limited to three Penguin Classics paperbacks, and countless horror movies and games that credit him with as an inspiration. That was more than enough to appreciate this skillful evocation of a bleak New England setting and an air of unnatural mystery.
But Bear’s exploration of racial strife and slavery move the story beyond mere fan fiction. After all, Lovecraft and racism go together like the conjoined tentacles of an unspeakable horror. The union of his mythos and her progressive perspective is refreshing and perhaps inevitable.
Yet in one respect this offspring is strangely bloodless.
To paraphrase Faulkner, it seems to me the point of Lovecraft is to show the human mind in conflict with madness. There is madness in “Shoggoths in Bloom,” but it is not the deeply personal insanity of so much of Lovecraft’s fiction. Instead, it is the tragic insanity of mass murder so familiar in our modern world.
Lovecraft is at his best when he unmasks the horrors that lurk just beyond our sight: in the next town over; in our friends and neighbors; and within ourselves. His ideas lose much of their unique power when used to confront the wholesale atrocities we routinely ignore.
Whether this is a fault in her story or a flaw in myself, I leave as an exercise to the reader.
