Phew! Controversial first post for a literature blog.For those of you who don't know, 'The Horror at Red Hook' is a story by H. P. Lovecraft, remembered almost exclusively for being the apogee of racism in his fiction. The tale revolves around a cult of foreign Satanists infiltrating the slums of New York to practice their black magic. According to his wife, the story was inspired by Lovecraft's very real fear and hatred of foreign immigrants, particularly Asians and Arabs. It's full of dog-whistle racism, "slant-eyed folk" and "swarthy hags", permeated by a deep sense of xenophobia, and features an oddly specific attack on a real-life ethnic group, the Yezidis, whom Lovecraft describes as "Persian devil-worshippers".
Still, I liked it.
First I want to say that while 'Red Hook' is racist, it's not really much more racist than several of Lovecraft's other works, or those of other pulp writers. From what I'd heard before reading I expected it to be a stinking pit of bigotry, but it's actually quite similar in premise to 'The Call of Cthulhu': there's an evil cult doing evil things, and everyone in the cult just happens to be non-white. If you didn't know about Lovecraft's personal views and didn't pick up on phrases like "slant-eyed", you might not find it objectionable at all.
And as in 'The Call of Cthulhu', a story can still have artistic merit even if some elements of it are morally despicable. 'Red Hook' is unique among Lovecraft's stories in that it's set in the city rather than the countryside or some far-flung wilderness. The horror of the city, of the criminal underworld, of chaos creeping gently into even our most fortified bastions of civilisation, is an interesting theme to pursue. I love the way Red Hook festers like an infected sore on the body of New York, and how the buildings merge together with subterranean tunnels: a dungeon to rival the cyclopean cities of 'At the Mountains of Madness' and 'Dagon', but this one a dungeon that we have built ourselves. Sadly Lovecraft doesn't take it as far as I'd like because he generally stops at "The city is cruel and dark and rancid... that's because there are so many NEGROES there, obviously!" Perhaps I'll tease out this thread further in a story of my own some day - a noir/horror crossover, and not just of the two-fisted pulp variety.
The other reason I like this story is for the climactic scene, a Satanic fever-dream which surely ranks among the best of all Lovecraft's descriptive passages. Contrary to his usual dark unstated implications, here he really lets the words flow, combining the pagan horror of 'Dreams in the Witch-House' with the wild inventiveness of the Dreamlands stories. The first section is here:
Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and Ægypans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould.
It's not his best story - the middle section in particular is weak - but it's far from his worst, and if we can celebrate other stories by Lovecraft, or for that matter by R. E. Howard or C. A. Smith, acknowledging but also looking past their moral failings, then I don't think that 'The Horror at Red Hook' deserves to be cast in the dustbin of literature.
