There’s bacon and eggs, and the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast has bacon and eggs. . Necronomicon Providence 2022filled the hotel’s vast ballroom at 8:00 am on a recent Sunday.
To our rejoicing worshipers, Cody Goodfellow, here the Most High Pope, sermon It started with growls like “Doom engine, black and red” and “Big hammer of scouring”.
Then the speech took a left turn.
Goodfellow, who flew in from the underworld known as San Diego, California, “must confess to being one of those people who always believed that a gathering of sexless, black-robed lichs would change the world for the better. The malevolent forces of misguided morality are regrouping from the backlash that stopped them in the ’80s, and the backlash is in full swing.”
And it went with a delicious jab at incel culture (of which, one might argue, lovecraft was a proto member) and plutocrats.
meetingFor the first time since 2019, it was held in Providence, Rhode Island, August 18-21. .)
The problem is that Lovecraft A die-hard racist and xenophobic manHow to deal with the legacy of an apparently offensive person is a major political and cultural issue today. Rather than backing down or trying to defend the indefensible, the event has addressed it by broadening the reach of its program and those invited. Participate.
Cordelia Abrams, 49, a Boston life coach dressed as a monkfish for breakfast, has been attending these events for nearly a decade. “This is weird and literary and local,” she said.
In the Welcome to the New Weird panel, editors and publishers Anne VandermeerOne of the festival’s guests of honor, most people I met or spoke to over the weekend agreed there was a common element of anxiety and restlessness: Clive Barker, David Cronenberg, J.
Impressively, many of the participants solved Lovecraft’s own problems, reusing basic tropes from his fiction. They appropriate that overarching theme—mankind’s powerlessness against immense and unknown forces—and turn the odd into an instrument of self-exploration, liberation, and creativity.
“What brought me here is the fact that I love horror,” he said. Jin E. Rocklin, a 38-year-old queer black writer from Florida who had appeared in three panels. “I love the catharsis it brings, the truth it brings. It’s based on ignorance and fear, but taps into universal fear, and being able to examine it, talk about it, and expand on it is a great example of what can be done with such a business of ignorance. “
In addition to academic papers, the convention offered a rich panel sharing dark sensibilities. “Out of the Shadows: A History of Queer Weird”; and “The Horizon Is Still Beyond You: The Life and Legacy of Zora Neale Hurston”. In the final session, panelists discussed 75 minutes of her intriguing from the irreconcilable differences between Hurston and Lovecraft.
Among the panels that opened the most eyes and minds was the panel on body terror. For those of us in literary fiction, it contained a reminder that subgenres included classics such as “Frankenstein” and “The Metamorphoses.” The panel felt it was pointed out at a time when control over one’s own body was hotly debated on issues related to transgender lives and abortion.
Indonesian-American author Nadia Barkin, in another Bracing session dealing with Lovecraft and Southeast Asia, wrote that Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (ancient gods as powerful as they are malignant) were “European He said he likes the idea of being an aggressor. it’s theirs. Kassandra Kaw, a Malaysian-born author and one of her guests of honor, pointed out the essential differences between Asian horror films and American remakes.
However, many participants preferred games to metaphysical discussions. Some of the sessions were spread over different tables, mainly on two floors, and featured a popular one (“Call of Cthulhu”, widely believed to have rekindled interest in Lovecraft when it was released in 1981). ) to deliberately obscure (“Hecatomb,” a failed collectible card game intended to be a dark version of “Magic: The Gathering” (“Pirate Borg,” close-up of swashbuckling outfit and dice roll) ).
of program volume and variety It was enough to make my head spin like Regan MacNeil. There were also film screenings, readings, concerts, live podcasts, walking tours of Lovecraft Providence, art exhibitions and plays. Mushroom picking was held in a nearby park to commemorate the recurrence. Fungi in Lovecraftian fiction.
According to Niels Hobbs, the convention’s “principal director” and marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island (who was on the panel for “Under the Sea: Horrors of the Deep Ocean”), this year’s edition gathered about 200 guest panelists. , artist and reader. More than 100 volunteer staff and “Minions”. and 1,400 attendees. (It was a prominent Lovecraft expert who was absent from the official minutes. ST girl, he later wrote in an email that he had attended the Necronomicon but “didn’t stand out.” )
Others, like Brian Vann, 53, a data analyst from Costa Mesa, California, preferred to focus on the central myth. “But they went and had terrible consequences. It says a lot about the human condition: how can we ignore the warning?”
Compared to commercial enterprises like Comic-Con, Providence lacked a Hollywood presence and had a negligible amount of cosplay. There was a theme of “Mask of disease”. This was to liberate the imagination rather than limit it to trademarked characters. For example, instead of Darth Vader, there was a woman. A man dressed as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, wearing a tuxedo that looks like her mask in green crochet Cthulhu, the revelers slowly dancing to murder ballads was a sight to behold.
Lovecraft himself may have been surprised to see his work gathering a curious and friendly congregation. But for Goodfellow, 53, the conference is an excellent antidote to the nihilism ravaging parts of America.
“Instead of rooting for apocalypse, we root for sustainability, rooting for people to radically accept who we are and move forward together,” he said. “It’s a wonderfully ironic backhand way of finding the positive out of the absolute negative.”