Day 29: lovecraft

Miles:12
Water: 3l
Bacon pancakes song: .8

Another nice day, but feet are, hurting. Spent most of the day down in swamps. Waking either on roads, or on a steady supply of wooden planks. Which is how I like my planks, Constant.

We saw, two turtles. The second one is in one of the photos, but he is very tiny, my phone lacks as a camera.

I finished the  Ballad of black Tom last night. It was a very good novella. The premise being a lovecraftian story, but from the perspective of a black man in the 20's rather, than a typical lovecraft studious white dude.

It's interesting to see the themes of lovecraft played out by competent authors. It's nice to have perks like coherent plot, good characters, varied vocabulary and the like. And black Tom has the added layer of having something to say on top of the tropes of weird fiction.

One thing that lovecraft could do, that his descendants either cannot do or wisely don't try to do, is slowly pull you into the world and mindset of the character through literary abuse. Piles of words and redundancies, vague descriptions that mearly hint in the direction of what something looked like. You trying to parse his prose made the whole experience similar to one of his protagonists trying to understand a tome, or some architecture.

When I first discovered lovecraft it was at a used bookstore, and nobody had told me of him before. I remember reading a book about a guy in a house, where nothing happened, then he disappeared. I was on a plane headed to visit my brother in Oregon. Reading that book made me feel a bit crazy.  Of course I haven't read anything by him in decades, but he looms large still in pop culture.  I think because he hit on a kind of horror that resonates with where humanity is right now.
He talks about things that will end humanity as a whole. Before our horror mostly dealt with stuff that would destroy us, or our families. He goes right into the insignificance of humanity as a whole. With nukes, and more pressing right now global warming, I think species wide eradication is lurking somewhere in our brains.

This brings us to black Tom again, spoilers!!! In this paragraph.  What sets black Tom apart from traditional lovecraft stuff is that the main characters aren't obsessed with the occult. Rather they are interested enough to fear it. In normal lovecraft the hunger for knowledge or power corrupts. In black Tom it is the pervasive racism that pushes the main character into the void. When Tom reaches the point he is ready to destroy the world, it feels like the author saying maybe all those racist jerks in the lovecraft stories, maybe even the whole lovecraft universe deserves to die at the hands of the sleeping king.

Anyway, I think I'm reading the ian banks book next, need some sci fi.