I’ve been trying to write a post about the general comfort of horror, why it works for me and helps so much. Sadly, it’s still too broad, and I find myself sounding more like a manic fanboy (which, to be fair, I am), and it isn’t useful. I want to be useful, even if it’s just recommending good distractions.
For me entertainment is effective when it is meaningful, when it tugs at something deeper that wanted to get out. It is with that in mind, I introduce for your approval; The Music of Erich Zann by HP Lovecraft.
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mez.aspx
I now plan to discuss why this particular work is meaningful, so beware that spoilers are beyond. Go back and read it, it’s a few pages long, maybe a few thousand words. If you have the endurance for one of my posts, you have the endurance for this story.
This story in particular marks for me a way that modernity has robbed us of some of the mystery and majesty of the mess of man. I use and enjoy google maps as much as the next guy, but it killed the concept of neighborhoods that went unmapped. This is part of the key horror of this story; the narrator doesn’t know where he was. He _lived_ there and he doesn’t know where it is, he can’t find it.
I started thinking about this story when I was watching a documentary about Kowloon Walled City, a modern marvel that has relatively recently been demolished. This was a settlement with no building codes, no formal laws, and was for a time the highest density of humanity ever to exist. The thing about it that researchers found out was that the residents had an organic relationship with getting around the settlement. It was all by memory, there were no maps. Further, mapping was utterly futile because homes would be renovated, demolished and built in a matter of days.
The common denomenator here is a place that exists only in memory. A place that you experience intimately, but apart from your memory you can’t find it. A place where the mind is more potent than objective reality.
And this is where I find meaning. My mind is less potent than almost any reality these days. I can barely exert my will on the 10,000 square feet of land I “own”. Further, I know every spot that something has happened to me in the city I live in. I can retrace my steps back to where I proposed to my first wife, had my only nervious breakdown, and every location I have lived or worked in.
I wish I could lose some of them. Right now my idea for getting away is to move elsewhere, to the point that in time my past traumas may be as remote and unfindable as the Music of Erich Zann.
Speaking of, because I won’t be writing of the whole thing, the only bit I ended up liking about the Johnny Depp thriller Secret Window is this ominous line; “I know I can do it,” Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. “I’m sure that in time, every bit of her will be gone and her death will be a mystery… even to me.”
I also enjoy the themes of madness and music. I do long to drown out the insanity with music…. another of my wilder ideas.
The horror here is human, even if there are supernatural elements. A man attempting to push back against the madness with his music, Lovecraft suggests he’s trying to drown it out.
It’s work like this that makes me consider much of Lovecraft to be more profound than scripture, any scripture. Nothing else encapsulates the mad attempt to enforce sanity onto the chaos.
This is also another fantastic example of Lovecraft’s theme of the danger and fear of knowing. The narrator in this tale would have been better off if he hadn’t investigated, if he’d stayed to himself. Yet that quality of humanity that seeks to understand, to observe drives him to see things he cannot unsee, and it breaks him.
It isn’t as complete as many other Lovecraft protagonists, but as a foundation of a trope that persists throughout cosmic horror it provides a good template.
I think the other story that speaks to me in similar ways, for entirely different reasons is “Rats in the Walls”, again by Lovecraft. The closest I’ve found in modern literature is “House of Skin” by Tim Curran, a pulpy novel that somehow like Lovecraft says so much more than is written on the page. In it, there is an extradimensional space filled with all the worst people humanity has ever produced, again unplottable.
I really like characters that the author just observes, doesn’t explain, doesn’t provide suitable excuse, just observe. That is, if they behave in believeable ways. I find Erich Zann a believeable character
all the more meaningful because he cannot speak. His music is his only way of relating to the world.
Cool Air is another good Lovecraft work showing a strange human who harbors an awful secret. I think that’s what I aspire to, to allowing my secrets to go unsaid, and to be a somewhat pleasant but puzzling mystery to those around me.