I’ve listened to the French audiobooks of two Zealia Bishop stories, and the endings are so absurdly racist that I couldn’t help but laugh.
In “Medusa’s Coil” :
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The story ends with the main character saying something in the vein of “But worst of all, she was mixed race.” I was completely floored.
In “The Mound”:
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The main character reads about the horrors inflicted by an underground civilization on those who break the law, try to enter, or try to leave. This information comes from a conquistador whom they’ve kept alive to gather information on the surface world. A noblewoman from this underground society falls in love with the conquistador and shares family secrets with him, hoping to escape and live happily ever after. However, he reveals that he’s just using her to escape. When they’re caught, she suffers the terrible fate he described. She’s used For vile entertainments in an arena, has her head cut off, her body reconstructed, and is turned into a zombie that guards the gate she once hoped to escape through. The conquistador is spared, though, because of his importance. Despite being warned that there won’t be a next time, he tries to escape again. Eventually, our main character digs into the mound and finds a chamber, and the story concludes with something I can summize as : "I can’t believe they did the same thing to white conquistador ".
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Don’t read “The Horror at Red Hook” then. You’ll probably laugh so much you’ll pee your pants. 👌
Quite true. Btw, Victor LaValle has recently written a novella called “The Ballad of Black Tom” where he reimagines “The Horror at Red Hook” from the perspective of an African-American protagonist. The book is quite good and takes the story in an interesting direction. https://lemmy.world/post/16605709
I’ve read most of Lovecraft’s work and liked it. In other stories Lovecraft worked on, racism and xenophobia were part of the narrative. But in “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil,” he ends the stories with a punchline like sentence, making them seem like long racist jokes.
They probably were. HP didn’t spare many in his stories (or letters). He even coined the term “white trash” to describe poor white people from a lower class and remote villages.
His cameo in “Rats in the Walls” was crazy!
