Introduction: Adapting Lovecraft in Weird Times (original) (raw)

In 1974 Angela Carter declared “we live in gothic times” (133). It is perhaps more apposite these days to suggest that we live in weird times. This is not to say that the Weird (as a literary mode) has superseded the Gothic; rather that it comprises a polymorphous outgrowing emanating from and intertwining with it. What does it mean to say we live in weird times? Perhaps it is a pervasive sense of unreality, or a reality that has been fractured. Certainly, the ecological moment is one of ontological shock as widespread extinction and the effects of climate change prompt pleas across the globe for governments to declare an emergency. Meanwhile, the stranger monsters and specters of the gothic mode, in particular the uncanny appendage of the tentacle, have proliferated across cultural media, especially in the West. In his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), writer of weird tales, H. P. Lovecraft suggests that “[t]he appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life” (n.p.). Contrary to Lovecraft, we are surrounded by weird intrusions every day. These are not only to be found in playful and referential cephalopodic literary fiction, including Kraken (2010) by China Miéville, but in a wider range of fictions drawing on multiple cultural narratives, such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series (2015-2018). In popular culture, the weird manifests in unlikely places. In the opening credits of the recent James Bond film, Spectre (2015), for example, the tentacular becomes emblematic for the unseen machinations of conglomerate control. The attraction of the Weird seems then to be anything but “narrow,” and Lovecraft’s creations in particular have proved to be highly adaptable. The monstrous creation, Cthulhu, pervades the high street emblazoned on t-shirts, mugs, mouse-mats, and any other malleable object that can sustain its image. This very reflexivity of the Lovecraftian permeates a host of media, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, from film and television to video and roleplaying games, comics, and graphic novels. The weird emerges at the fringes but also in the mainstream; it is mobilized by top-down media power for profit as well as grassroots, indie productions. In the podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012-current), the dulcet tones of Cecil Baldwin reassures listeners that the great cosmic void awaits us all. It is this very popularity of the Weird, which attracts a self-conscious referentiality, to which this special issue is dedicated. The knowing deployment of a Lovecraftian aesthetic is a form of adaptation, which Julie Sanders defines as the “reinterpretation of established (canonical or perhaps just well-known) texts in new generic contexts or perhaps with relocations of an ‘original’ or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift” (Adaptation and Appropriation 27). This issue interrogates a variety of Lovecraftian and Weird adaptations. What do these remediations offer beyond pastiche or homage? Why has the Lovecraftian become such a “popular” contemporary medium and what does it portend for not only cultural and literary studies but wider ontological framings? In Postmillenial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017), Catherine Spooner suggests that the Gothic comes to permeate a person’s life and influences not only their media consumption, but their aesthetic outlook, the clothes they wear, and the values they hold. Certainly, the Weird, and particularly the Lovecraftian, seems to have followed a similar trend in its spread beyond the cult roots of the initial magazine run of Weird Tales (1922-1940) into mainstream appeal. As Xavier Aldana Reyes points out, Lovecraft owes much to his Gothic predecessors, and his oeuvre represents a sustained engagement with the Gothic as he adapted elements from Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis to name a few (ix). Lovecraft did not deny the connection, despite his dismissal of “bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule” (n.p.). If the Weird develops from the Gothic perhaps it does so much like the nameless color central to “The Colour out of Space” (1927), which gestates and ruptures in an inexplicable and indescribable conjuring of a “real” that cannot quite be encapsulated. For the Weird and Lovecraftian is interested in all that is strange, eerie, and unusual, pushing anthropocentrism to its limits and scrutinizing perceived definitions of “reality.” As Benjamin Robertson suggests in None of this is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (2018)—which is reviewed later in this issue—the Weird confronts the very notion of any conceivable “norm” until it is rather the subject’s perception that is brought into question. Such a framework seems uniquely positioned to engage with the ontological terror of our current ecological moment then, where the cracks are beginning to show in the corrosive “reality” that humanity took for granted. As Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman suggest, in a borrowing from Thomas Friedman’s “global weirding,” our climate has perceptively gotten “weird” (7). They argue that such terminology offers a “cognitive frame . . . to refocus our attention on the localities within the totality of the global,” to critically deploy the Weird as a frame to engage with contemporary eco-anxieties or the non-real in which “readers discover they’re entering zones of radical uncertainty: can this be real?” (8, 10, original emphasis). The Weird offers no solution to such uncertainty, but it does offer a means of engagement with it.