Upsetting Day: The Horror at Red Hook

I have sympathy for H.P. Lovecraft’s ghost. Most canonized American authors simply tiptoed around slavery and shoe polish to focus on their dads, leaving Lovecraft holding the bag for racism in the ideal career for opinionated recluses. This shade is too diffuse, let’s look at what he actually wrote and come to a verdict on whether or not Lovecraft was S-Tier racist, or just normal American racist for his very racist time. Specifically, we’re reading a short story that aged like Coinbase: The Horror at Red Hook.

Racism has a few definitions floating around. To imitate balance, I’ll use four judges.

Judge One - Merriam-Webster

The dictionary offers inoffensive neutral ground. Consider it our panel’s Paula Abdul.

Judge Two - Conservapedia

Conservapedia is a Wikipedia alternative, replacing stringent editorial culture with Jesus. Here’s how the open-source Federalist defines racism:

Alright, racism sucks and is Karl Marx’s fault. Which sounds like they blame taxes for plantations cutting corners. But at least they acknowledge the concept.

Judge Three - Actual CRT

Turns out critical race theory actually exists outside of campaign ads. Here’s the most quoted definition of racism in modern pass/fail lectures:

I didn’t read the whole thing either. But “prejudice plus power” is retweetable.

Judge Four - Mom

During one of my earliest Warhammer 40k rants, my mother dropped her definition of racism.

I don’t know what that has to do with Holy Terra’s directive to cleanse Xenos scum, but we might have a winner.

I think we have enough perspectives to reduce incoming bomb threats. It’s time for the main event: a surprisingly fish-free short story.

“The Horror at Red Hook” originally ran in Weird Tales, like many Lovecraft stories about our absentee father God. That wasn’t the plan. He aimed the story at pulp detective magazines, after hearing that they paid in money instead of frowny-face I.O.U.’s. While the gambit failed, it gave us a unique story about the failure of two-fisted justice against infinite-mouthed G’raklkojth.

One or two of his opinions on the real Brooklyn and its accents trickled in. “The Horror at Red Hook” is considered regressive by Lovecraft standards, and he had a cat named Black Equal [note to self: fact-check cat name, feels off]. It’s perfect for today’s exercise. Meet our very unwell hero, Thomas Malone:

He could be doing better. Unprovoked screaming and urination are perfectly normal in the second half of a cosmic horror story, but in the opening they mark a troubled soul.

Granted, It’s 1927. This might just be a trench warfare flashback. Therapy came from those Freud-loving Central Powers bastards, so veterans drank past memories of siblings turning into pink mist. But Malone’s workplace isn’t as underfunded as an army:

An NYPD detective! Just like the one watching me write this. Now I know Malone well. Malone can pistol-whip a smiling subaltern without dropping his coffee. He’s underpaid, but stomps with six-figure enthusiasm. He’s also Irish, which gives him voodoo radar under 1920s race science:

Our boy’s a mess. An Irish Third Eye (please bring this stereotype back) just let Malone see star lobsters in high definition. Pure liability. Now he’s one unspeakable/unnameable/indescribable vision away from long sleeves and an electric hat. It’s a shame he’s not in our enlightened age, where he could take prescription Skittles until his ideas went away.

That said: even though I came in primed for daemon calamari, violent insanity threatening an NYPD career strains my suspension of disbelief. And race science says I’m pretty gullible. One mayor criticized the police union in my lifetime, and they ate his soul like Shang Tsung.

As the title hints, Malone’s in Red Hook. Today, you can’t afford to live there unless a servant is reading this to you. But that’s not Lovecraft’s perspective. He’s slumming it with everyone the peak Klan hated, and finding he agrees. You know that old lemon of listing races, then American? Here’s the 1927 scratch track:

As you can see, distaste for mixing’s part of the subtext-

As you can see, distaste for mixing’s part of the text-

As you can see, distaste for mixing’s our main theme. Cultural diffusion is the horror at Red Hook. Witchcraft and Satanism are side effects of Ellis Island, and it’s already too late to sink it. When you sleep with someone that mispronounces your name, you serve dead gods.

Let’s check in with our judges: Is this racist?

A split ticket! We’ll have to delve further into the unthinkable.

Malone’s in a tough spot: the 1920s NYPD is too politically correct to see the truth. For the first time, those people are actually up to something. If they’d built a distillery or mixed-race nightclub, Malone could get a squad in there before sundown. But a hell portal’s harder to explain, especially to sergeants without Irish Magic Radar™. Our hero needs evidence, the eternal shackles of justice.

Luckily, he has a promising lead: a rich guy with brown friends. The enigmatic Robert Suydam spends a suspicious amount of time in Red Hook, and also screams in public about opening a hell portal and seizing the Black Throne. It takes a few years on the beat to get an ear for these things, but Malone’s no rookie.

That’s how you write horror for a dual audience. Casual readers are unnerved by any wealthy lunatic mumbling about angels or Mars. Meanwhile, hardcore fans shudder when Suydam sits on a colored bench unarmed. At the time, either got you committed.

Malone gets more involved, because a rich family wants it. He unearths the story’s second-greatest horror: paperless foreigners.

Recall that the author lived in Red Hook at the time, playing a well-read Archie Bunker. The cadence of “thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants” feels less like worldbuilding and more like a letter to City Hall. An excellent reminder to save everything you write. You never know when you can use it in a second, angrier letter to City Hall.

Suydam goes free, since standing near “Asian dregs” wasn't banned until the Patriot Act. But this is mass market short fiction, so there’s no such thing as a red herring. There’s a hell cult, Suydam’s in it, and we’re finding out why before a full-page ad for laudanum.

But first, we have our own case to solve. Is this story, at this point, racist?

Still divided! It’s not looking good for me. I might be a bully, and bullies only prosper in business, politics, religion, entertainment, law, law enforcement, education, crime, animal husbandry, anti-bullying nonprofits, most families, any organization with more than three people, internet comedy, and lynch mob organization. Speaking of which:

A Frankenstein-hunting mob’s formed, and Malone’s in the vanguard. But this time the lynching’s overt and heroic. It’s a shame Hollywood avoided that direction. I can’t read “sturdy Vikings” without fight-or-flight kicking in, so it would’ve made for a tense scene.

If a dancehall sounds like an odd place for a hell portal, you don’t understand island music’s power. The last time “Temperature” came on in a club, I woke up covered in virgin blood. From satanic murder, perverts. This is a family column.*

*Until Part Two.

The Ninth Crusade reveals the true enemy…

…human bigotry. The Horror at Red Hook is Lovecraft’s fable about understanding, written after a reflection on his early mistakes. The mob attack and police harassment reveal nothing, except the traumatized, small-minded fear of the locals. Wracked with guilt, Malone finds the “squinting orientals” working on some poetry:

Rock on.

I’ve repeated “hell portal” like my Pokemon name for a reason. Suydam’s DEI cult opens a child-fueled hell portal, and it’s awesome. It’s a streak of shameless purple prose elevating the tale from “Grimdark Chick Tract” to “Awkward Seminar Feature.”

Every perfect band name is highlighted in red:

Don’t see it? Try this.

At first, this snippet seems dope. Then you remember that “hybrid pestilence” means fusion restaurants and steel drums. Afterwards…it’s still dope. Life would be simpler if every fanatic wrote like Anne Coulter. But it’s often Clayton Bigsby.

That tension’s what drags me back to Lovecraft jokes like a jilted spouse. After everything above, Lovecraft still belongs on Haunted Mount Rushmore. I just hope he uses too many big words for latent Proud Boys.

I’m over my introspection quota. Before going to the judges, let’s check on Suydam’s experiment in Syrian blonde-murder.

Suydam’s the fat zombie. Classic dancehall faux-pass: turning into Baphomet’s corpse-puppet after sacrificing Norwegian children is a tourist’s mistake, and Suydam descends into hell embarrassed. Take it as a lesson.

Malone goes nuts, as the genre demands. The NYPD says nothing happened, as department policy demands. And life goes on, as the mortal cage of time demands. Still, Lovecraft ends the story on an uplifting note:

One more ape line, just before the buzzer. Along with a final warning against the dancehalls spreading jazz to virgin ears. An ending’s a good time to underline key themes for any children or drunks in the audience. Lovecraft makes sure you know that nothing east of Austria or fun belongs in this world.

A tip for aspiring reactionaries: skip blaming immigrants for the decline of the American Dream. It’s a dry well. Just say they’re opening blonde-powered hell portals. Editors will race to claim a fresh voice for their sane and balanced opinion section. You’ll draw clicks from the race realist, progressive ragebait, and unironic wytch communities. Ideally, you’ll even inspire at least one band of the church-burning variety,

Now: is the full shape of this story, where miscegenation tears open a portal to hell, racist?

I’m saved. Though in Lovecraft’s defense, supremacist isn’t the right term for this outlook. In this universe, white people are toast. Boned. Done. The West™ can’t compete with eldritch dancing and spiced meat. No matter what the Freedom Caucus does, diverse horrors predating time have already won. The race war is a total rout.

In victory, I’m not sure how to treat the past. But Grinning March of Death’s first single comes out in October.

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