THE DEEP ONES: "The Horror at Red Hook" by H. P. Lovecraft

"The Horror at Red Hook" by H. P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins May 17, 2023.

First published the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41895

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

You'll Need a Night Light
The Outsider and Others
H. P. Lovecraft: Masters of the Weird Tale
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hrh.aspx

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Kh33oCgXs

MISCELLANY

http://stjoshi.org/intro_epicure.html
https://nyheritage.org/organizations/historic-red-hook
https://tinyurl.com/yc2uabw9

I was going to read this out of my old Ballantine The Tomb and Other Tales paperback, with the cover below. After I pulled it off of the shelf and opened it, however, I discovered that a section containing part of "He", all of "The Horror at Red Hook", and part of "The Strange High House in the Mist" had been ripped out! Then it suddenly came back to me how, decades ago in high school, a bad actor (as we call them now) savagely attacked my book for no reason at all during study hall one day. I can only hope that he was ultimately doomed to be found years later, gibbering insanely, and rather closely resembling that grisly classic of a cover. Anyway, I realized that the only volume I own which contains this controversial story is the massive Centipede HPL Masters of the Weird Tale, which takes at least two people to lift. I think the online version might be the way to go, after all.

That old Ballantine cover is brilliant. Certainly better than the original Weird Tales flying monkey attack.

I don’t think I’ve read this since I had my own Ballentine edition (I really need to replace those!)

I have no interest in either justifying the bigotry that spews out of Lovecraft in this story, or using that as an excuse to dismiss his many admirable qualities. Suffice to say, the early parts of the story are pretty much unreadable. The tedious repetition of adjectives like “slant-eye” , “swarthy” and “dusky” are not just offensive, but lock the reader out of any kind of engagement with the story or identification with Malone.

Once the narrative finally gets under way, the evil activities being investigated are soon traced to a familiar cast from the vaguely Greek pantheon of diabolical demigods and spirits (Gorgo Mormo, Magna Mater, etc) that Lovecraft also used in Rats in the Walls

I will admit that the final subterranean scene was rewarding, if only for this reason alone: the appearance of the glowing gibbering entity seemed like a crude dress rehearsal for Call of Cthulhu. I’m sure Joshi or Price have pointed this out before, certainly there has been discussion of how Lovecraft needed to be safely ensconced back in Providence before writing his best stories. I think this story also suggests that he also needed to ditch the borrowed cosmology of antiquity and create his own.

I haven't had the opportunity to reread "The Horror at Red Hook" yet. I think I'll use Leslie S. Klinger's annotated Lovecraft edition (it's in the second volume).

I've read quite a lot of biographical material about Lovecraft but in the form of book introductions and things like that. I haven't read S. T. Joshi's biography but I assume that what I have read, draws from his work. This story is presented as almost a howl of pain and anguish, before Lovecraft's marriage falls apart and he goes back home to Providence, licks his wounds, and starts processing his traumatic experiences and alchemizing them into his Mythos - those feelings of alienation and fear of the Other projected onto his imagined Evil Space Gods instead of his fellow human beings (except, I guess, for those Cultists lurking on the Waterfront or in the backwoods - it just occured to me tha he never took the step of having them take over the Government or the military, did he?).

Anyway, that taking the story as a key point in Lovecraft's development as a writer, rather than as a second-rate example of his work (and possibly his most racist one, to boot) I think has boosted it's prominence in the past two or three decades.

Added to which, there's the retelling of it in the early part of Alan Moore's Providence and, I would think even more importantly, in Victor LaValle The Ballad of Black Tom.

Finally got around to re-reading this today. It's another Lovecraft story that I hadn't re-read since first encountering him nearing two decades ago, and I didn't remember much of it, mostly just the presence of a sect of "Yezidis" (real Yezidis, needless to say, aren't much like Lovecraft's protrayal here).

Given the story's reputation as second-rate and odiously racist, I was pleasantly surprised at Malone's underground vision(?), which I thought was a nice example of atmospheric writing. Unlike >5 papijoe:, I found it perfectly enjoyable on its own. And there are advantages to borrowing pre-existing mythologies - HPL doesn't need to tell us what incubi are, frex.

This not to say I thought the story as a whole was very successful. Too much of it reads simply as a racist rant, and the supposed protagonist, despite a relatively large amount of characterization for a Lovecraft character, adds little but a viewpoint to the story.

I re-read this out of the Klinger annotated version. He points out that most of Lovecraft's occult references come straight from an article on "Demonology" from the Encyclopedia Britannica. It's sort of the last gasp of Lovecraft using off the shelf supernatural and occult references before creating his own mythos. I think of this and "He" as Lovecraft's "I really hate New York" stories.

Lovecraft himself thought it overwritten, and I agree. There's a bit too many of those "myriad unexplainable details" nobody inquires into it.

While it's definitely a minority opinion, I actually like the opening and closing parts the best of the story. It's Lovecraft at one of his most emotional and honest moments in fiction, a cri de cour. An annotation in the Klinger version suggests the story was inspired and celebrated the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which greatly restricted immigration to the U.S.