Living With the Ghosts of H.P. Lovecraft

Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

Scandal rocks the ivied streets of ancient Ulthar: a young woman has fled with her beau to another world. The great university city of the dreamlands, Ulthar is prestigious, but precarious. In order to maintain the balance with human benefactors and capricious gods, Professor Vellitt Boe volunteers to track the young woman down and bring her home. But what should’ve been a brief mission becomes a massive quest when it appears the woman has entered that great forbidden realm: the waking world.

Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Kij Johnson grew up reading H.P. Lovecraft, according to her annotations. Like many readers, she loved his ability to create feelings of creeping dread and nightmare-like atmosphere, without resorting to easy jump scares. But she also wondered at his deep-seated racism and casual misogyny. So, like many good readers, Johnson dived back into Lovecraft’s published corpus and crafted this, a companion to his legendary Dream Cycle stories.

Professor Boe, an erstwhile nomad, rediscovers the joys of crossing the dreamlands, a continent where distances are arbitrary and monsters lurk behind every corner. Death, to citizens of the dreamlands, is a comfortable neighbor. Accompanied by one of Ulthar’s legendary cats, Boe traverses cities with nameless streets, and forests overgrown with vines, until she finds the temple leading to the waking world. But the temple priests don’t have the key to cross; that lies with Randolph Carter.

Yes, Randolph Carter. Just as Lovecraft’s works include frequent references to his own work, Johnson liberally inserts dense references to Lovecraft. Professor Boe knows she must locate her missing student, before Ulthar is destroyed like ancient Sarnath. She names, and fears, Lovecraft’s fickle Elder Gods. In her allusions to Lovecraft’s works, Johnson channels his nightmare-like tone, without collapsing into mindless pastiche. This is both a Lovecraft work, and something more.

Readers familiar with Lovecraft’s works recognize Randolph Carter as Lovecraft’s Mary-Sue character. Which leads me to wonder: is Vellitt Boe Kij Johnson’s Randolph Carter? (Let’s not grammatically parse that sentence.) Boe and Johnson are similar in age, profession, and even appearance. In chasing Randolph Carter across the dreamlands, and finding him a shadow of his former self, is Johnson confronting Lovecraft and his influence on her writing? That’s what I would do.

Kij Johnson

I’m unsure that’s what Johnson does, though. Rather than confront Randolph Carter, Professor Boe utilizes him to pursue her own goals. If Vellitt Boe serves the same role for Kij Johnson that Randolph Carter serves for Lovecraft, then Carter/Lovecraft is neither a monster to defeat, nor a lover to embrace, though Boe implies he might’ve been both once. Instead, Carter becomes part of the youthful influences that made adult Boe. Johnson handles this better than I might.

H.P. Lovecraft was decades ahead of other writers in the weird horror genre, and his influence echoes across today’s publishing world. He was also so unbelievably racist, even by his day’s standards, that his friends and colleagues felt compelled to comment upon it. This duality, between the progressive writer and the regressive man, influences his dreamlands, a landscape that stretches across multiple stories, populated by bigoted stereotypes and, notably, very few women.

Johnson comments upon Lovecraft’s unexamined prejudices by doing the opposite of anything he would’ve done. His world was overwhelmingly male, so she creates a female protagonist. Lovecraft considered the waking world real, and dream people subordinate, so Johnson gives us a dreamlands native. Randolph Carter refused to age, even as Lovecraft handled the years poorly, so Johnson’s Vellitt Boe wears her iron-haired years with resolute pride. Everything Lovecraft would’ve hated, Johnson puts front and center.

The result feels like both a love letter to Lovecraft’s influence, and possibly a Dear John letter. It’s also a self-contained narrative, a story that doesn’t require any previous familiarity with Lovecraft, because Johnson creates character and atmosphere entirely her own. Vellitt Boe walks through a world that resembles our own dreams: we can traverse the land, but can never return, because the path we’ve taken returns whence it began, our own brains. I create as I speak.

If Vellitt Boe is Johnson’s alter ego, she occupies Lovecraft’s world with grace and dignity seldom seen since the original. And if Vellitt Boe is a woman crossing dangerous territory in her own right, she’s a dauntless heroine, a weird fiction icon for the present generation. This book is short, barely 160 pages, yet finishing the story, you feel like you’ve undertaken a momentous journey. Because maybe, in Lovecraftian terms, you have.