#183: Heroes of Red Hook
A short story collection that would scare the pants off H.P. Lovecraft
This review was originally posted to Twitter on October 13, 2019.
Initial publication: September 2016
Authors: Various
Edited by: Brian M. Sammons and Oscar Rios
Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s racism has always been an ugly stain on his work. You know, I know it. It’s that uncomfortable elephant in the room when talking about cosmic horror, because at the end of the day the man most responsible for the creation of the genre (even if he wasn’t the only one) was informed by his fears and biases. But few of his stories are more virulently bigoted than “The Horror at Red Hook,” which paints a vibrant ethnic community as a festering den of iniquity and blasphemous rituals. Given Lovecraft’s feelings on queer people, Jewish people and people of color* it’s understandable that people might dismiss his work as bigoted trash.
*(Oddly, he held no special animosity for women, he just didn’t feel he could write them well so usually didn’t bother — which, not the best excuse, but it does at least explain why there are almost no female characters of any kind in his work. The man was something of a shut-in who didn’t know how to talk to women, despite having been married, but there’s little evidence in his body of correspondence that he was any sort of serious incel type.)
But that’s doing a disservice to the hundreds of people who fit those very categories he so despised or disdained and yet were drawn in by his dark tales of cosmic indifference and unacceptable truths lurking in the shadows beneath our feet and around every corner. To that end, the short story collection Heroes of Red Hook was envisioned as a response to both Lovecraft’s personal bigotry as well as the oppressive society of 1920s America, where if you weren’t just the right combo of white, straight and ideally male, you were a second class citizen. To that end, Brian M. Sammons and Oscar Rios have put together a collection of eighteen short stories from a variety of authors, each with protagonists who are queer, or a person of color, or a woman, or some combination of the above — or, in some cases, Jewish or neurodivergent. The end result, like many short story collections of this type, is a bit of a mixed bag; while I hesitate to call any story bad, some are clearly better than others (I especially liked “Men and Women” and “Old Time Religion.”) Not every story is set in New York City’s Red Hook neighborhood, either; indeed, a couple are set in Seattle, or San Francisco, or the New Orleans area. The common factor is that they’re all set in the United States of a bygone era, mostly the 1920s, and are a modernist reflection of the period.
Since this is a collection of several different stories I felt like I should at least give them some individual attention, and with that in mind I spent some time writing down quick summaries and mini-reviews of each. Here goes:
A True Telling of the Terror that Came to Red Hook (William Meikle): The original Lovecraft tale, flipped on its head as a black jazz player reframes everything as being a series of misunderstandings on the white, prejudiced original protagonist’s part and the mysterious old man being the true evil plaguing Red Hook. This is an awesome way of subverting the original story, one of Lovecraft’s most xenophobic. Reframing his protagonists as being a bunch of easily-terrified racists blinded by bigotry into missing the bigger picture is a clever idea, and sets the tone for the rest of the book.
Ivan and the Hurting Doll (Mercedes M. Yardley): An old Russian myth about a doll that grants wishes, handed down from a grandmother to her grandson, takes on a sinister importance in his adult life as a hard-living immigrant day laborer looking for a way out. The original tale of Vasilisa the beautiful is a feminine one about what women leave for their daughters; in this take, the protagonist is a man embodying a certain ideal of masculinity, and yet in the end even he resorts to a legend of and about women for aid. Neat idea.
A Gentleman of Darkness (Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire): An unpleasant artist conjures a monstrosity from which one of his associates must be rescued by his Syrian neighbor, whose music disturbs him. Based on a real complaint from Lovecraft about his neighbor when he lived in New York. The repugnant artist who dabbles in the sinister and otherworldly is clearly intended to be, if not a parody of, then a middle finger to, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who had to have been the worst neighbor for those unfortunate enough to live near him. Great concept.
Hungry Ghosts (Cody Goodfellow): The white agent of a Chinese-American fraternal order is tasked with aiding an expert in the supernatural brought over from China following the brutal murder of a racist union leader in an alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1910. A very strange story that meanders a little but has a modernist streak. Equal parts critique of European Orientalist stereotypes and commentary on the mistreatment and suspicion towards Chinese immigrants in the famously overcrowded Chinatown around the time of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Tell Me No Lies (Sam Stone): A wealthy, grieving heiress gets far more than she bargained for when she hires a fortune teller to tell her who murdered her girlfriend in heavily segregated 1920s New Orleans — and finds that the Old Ones have a twisted sense of humor. This story makes no bones about the racism and homophobia that dominated 1920s New Orleans, but has all the trappings of a film noir with a darkly supernatural theme. The twist ending hits like a knife between the ribs… or perhaps a sacrificial dagger. One of my favorites of the collection.
O Friend and Companion of Night (Vincent Kovar): The daughter of a wealthy black family in New Orleans goes to Seattle in search of her sensitive, artistically-minded brother and uncovers a sinister plot to forcibly convert Seattle’s gay community through eldritch science. One of the longer stories in the book, this dark tale doesn’t even scratch the surface of the oppression LGBTQ people have historically faced, but the brother’s ruminations on white Seattleites’ barbarian ancestors is a smirking irony on Lovecraft’s own twisted views on race.
Across A River of Stars (Scott R. Jones): Two Cree First Nations boys are shipped off to fight for Canada in the Great War. The lessons they learned from their grandmother and the exorcism of a wendigo prove important when a strange mission goes awry. The author’s note expresses his desire to approach the horrors of the Canadian residential school system as well as that of the wendigo legend with the appropriate amount of respect, rather than basing it on stereotypes. Up to you whether he succeeded.
Old Time Religion (Paula R. Stiles): A young black teacher in 1928 is given the dubious task of visiting a remote Cherokee village to determine the origins of an odd folk song, sung to the tune of “Old Time Religion.” The locals are kind enough, but the children are strange. Based loosely on a real segregation-era teacher (Annie Wealthy Holland), North Carolina geography and Cherokee legend, as well as a real folklore cataloguing project in North Carolina in the 1920s, this is a very benign, almost sweet take on Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”
Men and Women (Oscar Rios): A mystery-hunting couple stumble upon a twisted plan by a fertility cult that worships a certain mythos deity with a kinda-racist name (who we’ll call Shubby in true Quake fandom tradition) and manage to find a unique way to disrupt a ritual. Rios is one of the two editors of the book and wrote this story with a specific message in mind. It’s a little silly with the “Lovecraft meets Hart to Hart” theme but ultimately a great story. I don’t want to spoil the twist, but I will say that TERFs won’t like this one.
The Eye of Infinity (Sam Gafford): Led by an artistic Jewish kid with an eye for detail, Jewish and Italian immigrant kids in New York City in the summer of 1930 learn to put aside their differences when kids all over the lower east side start mysteriously disappearing. A fun, deliberately pulpy tale that seeks to address Lovecraft’s disdain and disregard for the wave of immigrants who came to America looking for a better life in the early part of the 20th century. No prize for guessing who the main character is — he spells it out for you even!
Lords of Karma (Glynn Owen Barrass and Juliana Quartaroli): A Hindu convert living in San Francisco, who has strange, inhuman dreams, hires a detective from Chinatown to help her find the man who gave her two years of amnesia, and discover what she did during that time. The themes of alien mind-swapping and lost time as presented in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” are unsettling enough to be reused in later stories, but this pulpy, Mignola-esque tale that tries to incorporate a little bit of Hindu mythology ends on something of a flat note.
A Ghastly Detestable Pallor (Penelope Love): The niece of an Italian immigrant couple in Seattle confronts the white supremacist group responsible for their deaths and discovers the sinister experiments they’ve been attempting to bring “whiteness” to perceived undesireables. This story builds on the 1919 Galleanist bombings and the first Red Scare to tell a story of how sinister and corrupting racism and racist ideals of “whiteness” really is. The finale in the Seattle underground is pretty spooky. Interesting take.
Crossing the Line (Tom Lynch): A half-white, half-Chinese kid in New York’s Chinatown is caught between worlds; his only friends are a group of monks who set up a temple in an old storefront, but his uncle is very suspicious of them — and, it turns out, with good reason. It paints a picture of how tough it is to be both a member of an outgroup and ingroup. Those who know me know that the deaf community is less than welcoming to those “merely” hard of hearing, so I can relate. The finale feels a little rushed, maybe even nonsensical.
The Guilt of Nikki Cotton (Pete Rawlik): A young woman who escapes the great flood of 1927 and moves to Red Hook finds work as a nursemaid to a theater troupe that has fallen ill with a real and unexplained sleeping sickness… until a suicide triggers a horrifying event. A creepy tale that touches a little on the discrimination that a young black woman from the south would have experienced in 1929 New York, but that’s mostly a platform for a particularly creepy zombie story. That it’s basically accidental makes it creepier. Cool idea.
Brickwalk Mollies (Christine Morgan): A young scholar from Arkham with a flair for overwrought prose is sent to Red Hook on the suspicion that the man he’s supposed to find is part of a cult that’s been scooping up girls off the street for sinister purposes. This one uses repetition to good effect, as the full lyrics of a folk song are gradually revealed and the drug-fueled doings of the cult provide a backbeat to the day-to-day life in Red Hook haunted by a modern-day Jack the Ripper. The scholar should get over himself. Nice gothic vibe.
The Backwards Man (Tim Waggoner): A young man living in red hook, who fixates on numbers and is compelled to count everything in sight, is the only one to see an ethereal, backwards-walking man who seems, with every step, to undo reality. OCD? Autism? Whatever it is, this kid’s fixation is the only thing that helps him repair the cracks in reality left behind by the villain, which reeks of “the magical neurodivergent” trope. And yet he’s not at all helpless, and has agency. Fun use of the Fibonacci sequence.
Beyond the Black Arcade (edward m. erdelac): The real life black author and historian Zora Neale Hurston heads down to Louisiana in her university research days and finds the site of the cult ritual from Lovecraft’s “The Call of Chtulhu.” The guff about hoodoo and all that and the “Call of Chtulhu” ties aren’t half as interesting as this attempt at capturing the mindset of a young Hurston as she flatters and kowtows to wealthy white patrons to get her research done.
Shadows Upon the Matanzas (Lee Clarke Zumpe): A Cuban-American journalist and war correspondent is asked by his detective friend to look into a series of murders of young women in the Tampa area. What he uncovers involves family, friends, secret societies, and Nyarlathotep. This feels like a bigger story heavily compressed to fit the word limit; a lot of things happen in a short amount of time, and it feels like one of those extended trailers that tells the whole movie plot. Linking the last Incan emperor with Nyarlathotep is interesting, though.
As you can see, a bit of a mixed bag. Some of them barely even connect to Lovecraft! Regardless, this is still a great book for fans of the weird fiction genre and while the $30 asking price (for the physical copy anyway) is steep the book itself is generally worth the cost.
