"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

By the time I got to this story by H.P. Lovecraft I had accepted that all roads in horror fiction must presently pass through the Bard of Rhode Island. He died at 46, mostly neglected in his life, but is now considered one of the giants in the field—or, putting it another way, he used to be underrated and then he was overrated. Mostly he worked in the '20s and '30s and mostly he only wrote stories (my particular intersection), though some were more like short novels—the size of Heart of Darkness, say. A number of them created mythoses unto themselves (most famously Cthulhu but also the characters Erich Zann and Herbert West, "Fungi From Yuggoth," and an extensive so-called Dream Cycle). Extrapolations have since been assiduously worked by aspiring and established writers alike, and still are. It's certainly a type of influence, but at least in the realm of short stories it's hard for me to take such continuities as a particular strength, especially in horror. Then, in 2011, the Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor won a World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. The award at that time was a bust of Lovecraft and Okorafor went on to detail her mixed feelings, which reminded everyone that Lovecraft was a rank bigot and always had been. The evidence is in many of his stories.

This 2017 write-up of "The Horror at Red Hook" includes more details about Okorafor and fallout for the World Fantasy Award, and also spells out main problems with the story. In fact, as a result of articles like it (specifically this one from 2015, part of an invaluable series), I was led to believe that it's his most egregious, set in a Brooklyn well-populated with immigrants and swarthy foreigners. I wasn't reading it for that reason—I found it in the When Evil Wakes collection edited by August Derleth. Later I would come to Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls," which has a black cat with an extremely unfortunate name, and that seemed worse to me (or certainly more repulsively distracting) than anything in this story. The events recounted here are merely ridiculous, with its first scene for example a practical demonstration of a man reduced to abject terror at the sight of three-story brick buildings. Because of this man's extraordinary experience in a Brooklyn tenement, you see, taller brick buildings now apparently not only unnerve him but reduce him to gelatinous blathering insanity, at least until his field of vision can be altered. ("Yeah, right." That's me speaking aloud as I read.) Yet this turned out to be the story where Lovecraft's effects finally went to work on me.



It reminds me a bit of early experience with cannabis. You don't always get high the first few times—you have to learn to recognize it. "The Call of Cthulhu" worked on me as a kind of novelty, with its creaking slow pace, outlandish imagery, and solemnity. I enjoyed it almost with irony (even as it did work on me at some level, which was the wonder of it I hadn't noticed yet). Every time I tried to read Lovecraft further I bumped up on exactly those elements. What, he's trying it again? I was not getting it. I know Lovecraft is a terribly obvious quantity to many—the acolytes embracing as well as those now categorically rejecting—and that this is a terribly obvious point to make, but he is an old-fashioned writer, a creature of the 19th century and leisurely exposition, attempting to work in the expressly modern form of the 20th-century short story, with all its publishing requirements even in genre fiction. It creates interesting and useful tensions.

It's hardly any surprise Lovecraft had a hard time selling these stories. You have to gear down to his pace. You have to accept the awkwardness of his furniture-moving style, where for example a whole section and several big paragraphs can be devoted to a man's unlikely phobia of architecture: our man "staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing." The painfully obvious point: powerful forces are afoot. ("No shit, Sherlock." That's me again.)

This story circles and circles, carefully aligning its furniture pieces and stumbling now and then over its pinched view of humanity (those monsters lurking near the docks are merely people of color to the rest of us). And suddenly we arrive at this literal gaping maw of hell inside a Brooklyn tenement that is somehow very convincing. It's the steady accretion of detail. Not that I'm phobic about buildings now, but it's like cranking up an engine-generator to speed. Suddenly it's quite powerful. Lovecraft has a fine vocabulary and sense of language rhythms but seems less to me a writer (let alone a short story writer) than an overactive fantasist who really takes seriously the adage about pictures and 1,000 words. Every fat paragraph is a polaroid from inside his head, caught in the flash as it were, meticulously and even obsessively described. And he can hit these unlikely crescendos like this collapse of four brownstone tenements in Brooklyn, in an absurd detective story setting, and they work. I have to give it to him for making it believable as read, and for delivering a certain kind of experience which he's capable of replicating and outdoing. He wasn't that prolific but he did produce some remarkable stories.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)
Read story online.