{"id":1978,"date":"2018-06-06T17:21:22","date_gmt":"2018-06-06T21:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2019-08-15T12:55:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-15T16:55:49","slug":"the-horror-at-red-hook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/the-horror-at-red-hook\/","title":{"rendered":"The Horror at Red Hook"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Horror at Red Hook\u201d is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft that first appeared in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales<\/em>. The protagonist of the story is Detective Malone, who investigates a series of kidnappings linked to a mysterious recluse named Suydam. The recluse has been involved in shadowy dealings with gangsters and other criminals operating in the slums of the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The detective discovers that Suydam is the leader of a cult and the story climaxes with Malone witnessing a scene of human sacrifice and Lovecraftian carnage.<\/p>\n

This is widely considered to be H.P. Lovecraft\u2019s most notoriously racist story, and although you can easily find it online, it often gets left out of Lovecraft’s “Best Of” collections these days. Because the tale\u2019s reputation preceded it, I opted out of reading it until I learned about Victor LaValle\u2019s The Ballad of Black Tom<\/em><\/a> and decided I needed to read Lovecraft\u2019s tale before I read LaValle\u2019s novella.<\/p>\n

I found Lovecraft\u2019s story to be a frustrating but worthwhile read. I\u2019ll discuss the problems I found in the story below, but I did find it useful partly because it gave me important insights into what LaValle is doing in his novella, but also because the final scenes of the story do contain excellent nightmarish imagery.<\/p>\n

Having read \u201cThe Horror at Red Hook\u201d for myself, I certainly agree that it\u2019s Lovecraft\u2019s most overtly<\/em> racist story. The story\u2019s central theme is that civilized, white America is under threat from the subhuman throngs of brown and black illegal immigrants seething in crowded ghettoes: \u201cPolicemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion.\u201d Lovecraft describes a neighborhood of Asian immigrants as \u201cslant-eyed folk\u201d and later describes a sailor as \u201can Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Racism and xenophobia are front and center in this story. But having read several of Lovecraft\u2019s other stories and novels, nothing in this story struck me as shocking or surprising. Racism and xenophobia are themes baked into Lovecraft\u2019s work, but they\u2019re usually camouflaged somewhat better than they are in this tale.<\/p>\n

For instance, take his novella At The Mountains of Madness<\/em><\/a>. The story is set in Antarctica, and all the characters are white men, so on the surface it doesn\u2019t seem like there\u2019s much opportunity for racism there. But the back story of the novella is that disaster struck the noble, alien Old Ones who\u2019d colonized Antarctica when their slave-race, the shoggoths (dangerous black blobs of corruption, clever but lacking any ability to create or think at a high level) rose up and slaughtered them all. It doesn\u2019t take a great deal of effort to realize it\u2019s a metaphor for the white fear of freed African slaves destroying American civilization.<\/p>\n

A big difference between the racism in At The Mountains of Madness<\/em> and in \u201cThe Horror at Red Hook\u201d is that Lovecraft doesn\u2019t bother with metaphor in this story. But another critical difference between the two narratives, though, is that the racism and xenophobia in \u201cThe Horror at Red Hook\u201d undermines Lovecraft\u2019s world building, and that in turn damages the story.<\/p>\n

I think about world building a great deal, particularly in cases where I\u2019m creating a modified version of the real world. Whenever a writer sets out to create a work of fantasy, he or she has to work to \u201csell\u201d the reader on the believability of fundamentally unbelievable elements. One critical way to ensure that a reader can properly suspend his or her disbelief for the duration of the narrative is to ground the story in as many real-world details as possible; the setting is a crucial place for this kind of grounding. So I was frustrated (but of course not surprised) that Lovecraft let bigotry get in the way of writing a well-thought-out piece of fiction.<\/p>\n

The main thing that Lovecraft does to damage his world-building is to present us with melting-pot slums (\u201cThe population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another\u201d) with a recent illegal influx of Kurds, who have brought with them a Scary Oriental Cult:<\/p>\n

Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan \u2013 and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My head actually started hurting after I read that paragraph. It reminded me of some of the crazy pseudointellectual racist stuff my elderly male relatives spouted off about Those People (for whatever value of non-white ethnic group you care to insert there: I heard crazy, unfounded stories about them all). Further, the premise of the story\u2019s plot is that Suydam recruits all these Spanish, Italian, Syrian, and black people as worshippers for his weird devil-worshipping Kurdish-Persian-Tibetan cult … because why? And how?<\/p>\n

Because Those Brown People Are Evil. That\u2019s all the story\u2019s got. There\u2019s no real explanation of why all these different ethnic groups would throw in with Suydam and join a new cult. The problem here is that real people cling tightly to their beliefs. Religious faith is powerful. If modern Satanists showed up in my hometown of San Angelo, TX and said \u201cWe bought out all the Thin Mints. We control the Thin Mints! Come worship with us!\u201d I seriously doubt the local Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics would reply, \u201cThin Mints, you say? Sold! Praise Baphomet!\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s exactly the kind of scenario Lovecraft is putting forth here. He\u2019s ignoring the whole vast history of religious conflicts happening after attempts at forced conversions and putting forth the unexamined, unsupported idea that all these different groups would be entirely fickle and easily subvertable in matters of faith.<\/p>\n

So, I think this story is most useful to writers who want to study overt portrayals of racism (as an example of how not<\/em> to describe people of color, for instance) and to examine the narrative malformations that this kind of unexamined bias can create. I’d have to stop short of recommending this story be read in a class, though, because I suspect a fair number of students would look at this and say \u201cThis is garbage and I\u2019m not reading it,\u201d and they wouldn\u2019t be wrong.<\/p>\n