The Ballad of Black Tom & At the Mountains of Madness
Lovecraft Adaptations by People He Would've Regarded as Subhuman
In this installment of Science Fiction Double Feature, we’ll be talking about HP Lovecraft adaptations by people who Lovecraft would regard as subhuman: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle and HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness Vol. 1+2 by Gou Tanabe.
I don’t know if I could ever call Lovecraft one of my favorite writers, but I’m a tough scare (and a tough laugh), especially in print, and “The Thing on the Doorstep” & “The Whisperer in Darkness” are some of the few pieces of prose that gave me goosepimples. I almost always revisit his work around Halloween time.
My reticence to deem him a favorite stems mostly from the fact that he was a pampered, inveterate racist and sexist New England fancyboy. And unfortunately, that’s not subtext. That’s text.
In his New Annotated Lovecraft, Leslie S Klinger includes this excerpt from Lovecraft’s prodigious letters about Brooklyn:
The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could [not] by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.
Yeah, so that’s a capital-r Racist.
The Ballad of Black Tom is a retelling of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” a twisty little yarn Lovecraft churned out for Weird Tales in the late 20s.
It’s about an Irish New York police detective, Malone (the Irish were one of the few ethnic groups Lovecraft regarded highly…perhaps why he gets a pass from me), and his descent into madness while performing reconnaissance on Robert Suydam, a local black magician, basically. Lovecraft’s not big on plot.
“Red Hook” is also Lovecraft’s most overtly racist story:
The population [of Red Hook] is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another…It is a babel of sound and filth…
Or:
Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan—and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.
Suydam is one of those oily characters who crosses class and racial boundaries, reputedly in the name of anthropological research into alternative religions.
Malone and Lovecraft know better. Suydam gathers these people together in a tenement he buys and performs black masses in the basement.
The Ballad of Black Tom tells “The Horror at Red Hook” from the perspective of a black man who gets caught up in Suydam’s circle.
I won’t give it away, but Charles Thomas Tester, the titular character, finds the dark arts seductive because of his material situation as a black man in 1920s America, and deaths in his family, which stem also from that plight.
Instead of an insidious malingerer, LaValle’s conception of Suydam is a pompous white savior with some unresolved issues. But his lack of racism is more opportunistic than good-natured. He’s just as willing to exploit people of color as white in order to gain forbidden knowledge.
LaValle’s writing style is opposed to Lovecraft’s. Where Lovecraft is verbose and circumspect, LaValle is clipped and direct. They represent different mindsets, different circumstances, but they both depict the cosmic horror behind reality.
LaValle remains pretty respectful to the source material. Before I read it, I thought it might be an angrier, more incisive reimagining along the lines of Ishmael Reed’s work.
But LaValle, in his introduction to the second volume of Klinger’s New Annotated HP Lovecraft, compares cancelling Lovecraft to splicing undesirable traits out of the human genome. For better or worse, he’s part of the DNA of American literature:
Include Lovecraft’s tales, and a healthy critique of them, too.
Lovecraft will never be cancelled, but the folks who dismiss, or try to drown out any criticism of the man and his work are as preposterous as climate change deniers. Both are telling you to disbelieve your lying eyes. But I assure you that no such choice is necessary.
You can love something, love someone, and criticize them. That’s called maturity.
HP Lovecraft’s AT the Mountains of Madness Vol. 1+2, on the other hand, is a much less revisionist affair. Japanese manga artist Gou Tanabe, through translation, treats the Lovecraft novella uncritically, from a place of great affection and reverence.
For those of you who don’t know anything, Guillermo Del Toro attempted to stage a big-budget production of At the Mountains of Madness starring Tom Cruise, to no avail. Tanabe’s two-volume adaptation is as close as we’ll likely ever get, which I think makes it worth a trip to your local library at the very least.
At the Mountains of Madness is the story of a doomed university expedition to the Arctic that encounters a prehistoric metropolis that might not be so dead after all.
Tanabe is a talented artist, especially his inking, and his black-and-white illustrations are top-notch. There are some eye-popping visuals, from the fallen arctic metropolis to the wars between the elder things, the shoggoth, the star-spawn of Cthulu, and the mi-go. It makes you wish it was in a bigger edition, like Dark Horse’s Berserk reissues.
Tanabe as an adapter has a great sense of scene. He divides narration into dialogue effortlessly and compresses and heightens the structure of the piece, making Lovecraft’s ominous, meandering tale into a tight, pulse-pounding thriller.
Highly recommended.
But Tanabe has no axe to grind with Lovecraft. There’s no friction in his adaptation, there’s no tension. LaValle wants to interpret Lovecraft through a very contemporary perspective, whereas Tanabe wants nothing more than to be a faithful expansion.
At the Mountains of Madness itself has no racial politics…perhaps why it’s one of Lovecraft’s more enduring works. It also would look the coolest drawn. By the same token, LaValle chose “Red Hook” specifically for it’s racial content, to push back against it.
And yet, I can’t help but impose racial animosity on At the Mountains of Madness… Perhaps because I know too much about the man. There is racial warfare between aliens in it, after all.
But for better or worse, that’s the question we have to ask ourselves if we’re going to engage with problematic works, which I like to do: what’s going on here at every level?