Lovecraft in Brighton
Lovecraft and I stroll the Brighton promenade. We pass the skeleton of the West Pier, the blackened iron bones left behind when it was torched. We come to the stone jetty a little further along and walk to its end. Once there, Howard puts his hands deep in his coat pockets and sags. I look toward the West Pier ruins.
“Do you ever wonder what’s under the sea?” I ask.
“All the time,” he sighs. “We should go inland.”
“Why are you here if you hate it so much?”
He has walked a few paces. He stops, turns a little but not enough to face me. “I had no choice. I was summoned.”
He’s told me that a few times but never elaborates. He is resentful, hates being marooned in Brighton, three quarters of a century after he died. This is a man who was disappointed by his first life, where he sometimes went without food to save money for stamps. I tell him he should come out with me to bars, to parties, try to let it go, but he never does. He makes no effort to do anything with his second life.
“The problem with the sea is this,” he declares, turning his back to the water as I move closer to hear properly. “You can never see what the depths hold. There might be hideous things in the dark waters. And most of our world is ocean, inhospitable to all life. It amazes me that any human tribe ever lived in sight of the ocean.”
He shudders and walks away, but I continue staring at the sea. Its strength and power captivate me. The water here is too cold and cloudy to see more than a few inches down. Howard sometimes claims that something monstrous lives in the waters off Brighton. I don’t know if he’s joking when he says this, but he may well be right. That’s the thing about the sea. At least outer space is open – nothing can hide there, and we are tracking every object for millions of miles. The sea is so much closer, yet we have no idea what might lie down there.
The thing sleeps. Occasionally people are drawn to this shore. Sometimes I feel its pull too, a gravity, as if Brighton is tilted, as if it inclines towards the shore. Not everyone can resist this force. August Bank Holiday 1973, the writer Ann Quin drowned herself near the pier, ‘given to the sliding of the water’. Once considered a giant of British literary fiction, her books now only rarely surface into print. I feel so sad for her, stepping into the cold water, nobody calling her back.
I wonder how long I could keep going in that cold water. Once you’re a certain distance from the beach, it doesn’t matter how deep the ocean is, it might as well go down forever. Once you can no longer dangle your toes down and touch the bottom, there could be anything below you.
I turn back and Lovecraft has vanished. I scan the shore and can’t see him, which means he probably went to buy a coffee at the Meeting Place Cafe. I always tell him to try the rock cake, but he declines. I’m tempted to leave him, to walk in the other direction, but I don’t. I’ll buy a coffee and we’ll walk further. Lovecraft and I, bound together, unable to escape one another.
Background
This is a story from a collection that lost its way. Lovecraft in Brighton was an odd project, about alcoholism and being haunted by the ghost of HP Lovecraft; an attempt to write domestic cosmic horror. This was back in 2014, a period where I was struggling to get any writing out, but it seems much longer back.
I find Lovecraft a fascinating figure. I’m not alone in this, and he turns up in so many works of art - I strongly recommend Paul La Farge’s novel The Night Ocean, which begins as an exploration of his life, and ends up in some amazing places. Lovecraft’s reputation has become toxic due to his racism; but the hatred is mixed in with fear and sadness. I don’t think Lovecraft could have written his great works if he hadn’t been so broken.
I might return to Lovecraft in Brighton at some point. I had a weird idea for this book, where it was sold as a booklet with a handful of stories. Each time I sold a copy, the next one was slightly more expensive, with an extra story inside. When it finished I was going to send everyone a copy of the completed book. It was an interesting experiment. Maybe, one day, I’ll try to fnish it.
Kickstarter Update
The kickstarter for True Clown Stories continues to make steady progress towards it’s target, and recently crossed the 75% line. We have 9 days left, and are looking for the last few pledges that we need. This is a book I’ve been working on for years, filled with strange, sometimes sad stories about clowns trying to survive in the modern world. I’ve tried to go beyond the cliche of killer/creepy clowns to produce something more subtle. Please do check out our kickstarter page.
Recommendations
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading James Tynion IV’s comic book series Something is Killing the Children. I have been ekeing it out a chapter a night, enjoying the cliffhangers, something I rarely do with graphic novels.
The story starts with a small town where a monster is attacking children. A young woman turns up to fight the creature, wearing a black bandana with white teeth drawn on it. Like all the best comic books, a simple concept expands as we learn more, and Tynion slowly produces a larger world filled with monsters and the people who fight them.
Tynion is one of my favourite creators at the moment with several ongoing horror series that I’m enjoying. Department of Truth is about a world where conspiracy theories become true if enough people believe them, and the ramifications of that. W0rldtr33 is about ‘a secret architecture to the Internet’. And then there’s The Nice House on the Lake, about a small group of friends who are the only people to escape from the apocalypse. He’s also writing one of the few great Sandman spin-offs, Nightmare Country.
I’m not sure how he’s keeping all these ideas going, but Tynion is definitely in the midst of his imperial phase. There’s also a TV series of Something is Killing the Children coming, produced by the team behind Dark and 1899.