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Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn. Today we’re …

Written as a back and forth, fun tale between two authors with some polishing I see room for a wonderful adaptation.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

…This story could have said something about the parallel between the Monster and the shoggothim, but no, they were all just scary things trying to stab or swallow each other. It seems like a hell of a missed opportunity.

I like the idea of him surviving inside the abandoned city and watching the shoggoths on their patrols of the old city. We’ve really no reason to think of shoggoths as uncontrollably ravenous or hostile, in their only appearance by Lovecraft they could have just been really pissed at the sight of their supposed to be dead creators. (Also the idea of the shoggoths being stopped by a mere door is silly.)

And shoggoths are restrained enough sorcerers can use them to guard dead bodies without worrying about the body being eaten. So yeah, I think the Creature may be able to avoid them and stay out of reach they don’t consider him an easy snack.

How would the creature react to the murals of the city, actually? Unlike the old explorers, he doesn’t have experience with the Necronomicon to provide context.

I would also make the creature less amoral personally.

(And possibly take a deep look at the association between Black and the Other as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe, possibly revealing the protagonists being dishonest when later writing their attack by the Tsalalians was unprovoked. It would be a good way to top off the idea of the Other. )

@tyrantisterror

And spoilers’s below: Commentary by Anne that I really like and think should be kept in mind for an adaptation, and Ruthanna again on cycles of violence

Anne’s commentary

Funny the creature should mention burning hells—not that all the ones Waldrop and Utley have in mind are literally on fire, but still, they’re stocked with a nice assortment of other Others to provide Victor’s monster with monsters of his own.

The first sphere features Nature’s own Others—predators intent on eating the creature, herbivores intent on keeping the creature from eating them. Prehistoric mammals. More prehistoric reptiles. Mammoths. Velociraptors. Giant primordial fleas and ticks. Nature can sure be a mother.

In the sphere of the apes, he encounters an Other who embraces standing apart. The giant ape exploits his strength to dominate but seems to belong to no tribe. Whether this isolation is an acceptable trade-off to the ape, we don’t know. It does get him killed when the creature stumbles across the ape’s solitary nest.

The sphere of men is lousy with Others, with or without reference to the creature. Each forest tribe Others the next forest tribe downriver, which encourages forays for body part collection. The forest tribes and city states Other each other, and the city states Other the other city states, and it takes the ultimate Other that is Victor’s creature to unite these yapping dogs of war under his gun-toting hand.

Ruthanna

For me, it starts to go off the rails with Lady Megan’s death. Shelley was all about the love of pure and innocent women as a source of angst, and Megan’s death does in fact provide symmetry with that of Frankenstein’s wife—and yet, none of that makes me more delighted with fridging. In a story about the grand literary conversation, I kept waiting for some statement beyond “hey look, this is a conversation.” In the original, too, hatred and rejection drove Frankenstein’s creation to violence—and “Black as the Pit” falls comfortably into the same old round of almost-acceptance, rejection, and violence—and this week of all weeks, this year of all years, I wanted some commentary on that pattern rather than just watching it happen again. That’s not entirely the fault of a story that came out in 1977, and yet nor is it my fault for being a reader in 2018. But lest we take “of its time” as too easy an answer, “My Boat” came out in ’76.

We authors do know, when we send our bottled messages out into the grand conversation, that they’ll be read in the future.

For an epilogue I like the idea of the Creature reading Moby Dick and the The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Mocha Dick’s appearance as an albino whale feels like it could be somehow related to Poe’s White/Black symbolism.

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