Losing at Lovecraft

Lovecraft and Me

Launius and Wilson have made Arkham Horror open to all kinds of interpretation. Mine seems political, but it’s also personal. Lovecraft wasn’t merely a dick, he was a dick to me and my people.

I found Lovecraft in obscurity. My father used to keep his adult magazines and pulp novels in cardboard boxes next to a sagging pool table in our cellar. Around the age of eleven, while digging through stacks of Penthouse and Oui, I happened upon a copy of the 1973 Ballantine edition of The Tomb and Other Tales, with its inspiring cover illustration by John Holmes (no relation).

The central terror of Lovecraft’s story The Tomb concerns an ancestral taint passed down to the modern day, a taint revived by a young man’s fascination with his familial burial grounds. As I lived then on an old New England farm, boasting a house from 1795 and two cemeteries (one a slave graveyard), I empathized with this tale and with many of the others that evoke ‘Lovecraft Country’, the backwoods breeding-ground of weirdness that sets the scene for so much of his best work. But I soon grew uneasy with the horror distilled from this landscape and its inhabitants.

As it turns out, I belong to an ancient Rhode Island family of rural provenance, once of great fortune and good standing, but now impoverished and degenerated from its class. In other words, I am a stock Lovecraft villain. In “The Shunned House”, he places his anatgonists, French immigrants, for a time in the Frenchtown locality of East Greenwich”"precisely the neighborhood where I grew up. In the same story, he introduces a character from “the Nooseneck Hill country” and alludes to the Mercy Brown vampire legend from that region. As it happens, my grandmother, a French Canadian, wished to name her third daughter ‘Mercy’, but my grandfather’s relations, native to Nooseneck Hill, wouldn’t permit it, because of the legend. Mercy had been a vampire, and so the name was bad luck.

Thus, we have two of Lovecraft’s fixations embodied in my house: rural Yankees and Latins. Shall we make it a three-fer? My father was a fisherman. We not only consumed, but made our living from those dread inhabitants of the sea that so bothered H.P.L. I am a triple-strength distillation of everything Lovecraft most despised. This colours my relfections on the man’s works.

With “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” Lovecraft seriously expects to induce in his readers a horror for miscegenation. In his mind, the prospect of an Englishman’s discovering he’s part Portuguese is terrifying. “…I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm” says Olmstead, “as his Innsmouth Look comes in like a beard on a teen-ager.

And here I am, the son of a fisherman, descended from the French, descended from American Indians, the scion of a line that has toiled in a rural corner of Rhode Island for three hundred and forty years. I am the anti-Lovecraft. When Olmstead looks in the mirror, he finds me looking back.

What a kick I get out of playing Arkham Horror, then, lining up professors, urbanites, and dilettantes for devouring. Fantasy Flight admits to no plans for developing any new major sets, though it’s obvious which one would follow in the sequence: Providence. Launius and Wislon have expressed trepidation‚  at the prospect of making a game of a real city, rather than a fictional one. They need not fear. How dearly those of us who have lived in that town would love to feed it to an Ancient One, at least in fantasy. And we shouldn’t forget the epigraph on Lovecraft’s grave marker: “I am Providence”. As Launius said, it’s all players against the board. Imagine all players against Providence, which is Lovecraft.

Rhode Islians would get the joke.‚  Arkham Horror is meant to be a hilarious game, not a scary one. Lovecraft meant to scare us, but we can only find him funny. In both cases, we can laugh as Lovecraft’s heroes slide down the gullets of his villains, but, with the game, we laugh generously, rather than derisively. To smile as we lose to Lovecraft is to win against him.