Cthulhu is in the news again. According to CMON, a third edition of Martin Wallace’s beloved A Study in Emerald is soon to appear. Details are few, but the forthcoming game, dubbed Cthulhu: Dark Providence, appears to take a diverse cast of characters to Washington D.C., where they will presumably assassinate the president. Before you ring J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost, keep in mind that in the previous two editions, the world had been taken over by eldritch Old Ones from outer space, so this universe’s president probably sports emerald skin and feasts on the psychic energies of infants.

As I’ve written before, board games — and Martin Wallace — have an uneven history of tackling cosmic horror and the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft. So today I’d like to offer another perspective. Apart from the royalties-free nature of Lovecraft’s work, is there anything to be gained from using his creations? Be forewarned, this is a sensitive topic.

Investigating difficult truths. (Mansions of Madness)

First, let me tell you something about myself that I haven’t shared with many people.

You might have seen that meme floating around last week. An Instagram reel by one Gaius Flavius announced, “Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire. Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother – you will be surprised by their answers!” Over the coming days, thinking about the Roman Empire somehow became the latest metric of manliness. All sorts of people crawled from the woodwork to confirm that they also spent their days trying to determine whether the Emperor Hostilian had embraced the Mithraic Cult.

I wish my childhood peers had gotten the memo. You see, I spent a great deal of time thinking about the Roman Empire as a youngster. I still do. While my peers spent their summers doing whatever teenagers do when they have too much time on their hands, I was either working for my grandfathers or riding my bike to the library. I went there every day, both to browse the stacks and to use the internet. That’s where I first got my hands on a Latin primer. That’s where I first stumbled onto an unmoderated internet forum celebrating and sharing the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

At first, I was relieved to have found a place that felt safe. Like many of Lovecraft’s protagonists, the community was populated by eccentrics and castoffs. These were people who not only thought about things like the Roman Empire, but could also utter a few Latin phrases. They understood that cosmic horror wasn’t about slaying monsters; it was about the terror of realizing your place in the universe — and spoiler: your place is as a gnat. School and church were spaces that left me feeling alien and alone. Very much like a gnat indeed. In this place, among these people, I could belong.

Except it wasn’t long before some discomfort crept in. One of my grandfathers had fought in the Pacific during WWII and held complicated feelings about the Japanese, but because of his experiences and upbringing he was careful with his language and made it clear that even subtle racism was wrong. Once, when he caught himself saying something about the “Nips,” he apologized profusely and promised to beat me blue if he ever caught me using words like that. So it didn’t escape my notice that some of this forum’s inhabitants were rather free with racial epithets. Even though I lacked the language to describe it at the time, the place was thick with biological essentialism, nativism, suggestions about immigrants and crime, half-understood links to studies about Neanderthal DNA, and a glaring quote under the byline of one prolific commenter. “I know Hitler is a clown, but by god I like the boy!” it read. Signed, “H.P. Lovecraft.”

The Scottsboro Boys under guard.

H.P. Lovecraft died in 1937 at the age of 46. Many of his works were only published posthumously. We know more about his views from his wide-ranging correspondences, of which around 2,000 survive today.

In 1931, a group of nine Black boys and young men aged 13 to 20, only a handful of whom knew one another, were accused of raping two white women on a freight train traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis. These “Scottsboro Boys” were threatened by a lynch mob outside the jail, subjected to multiple trials, and became the target of repeated threats of vigilante justice. Although there was no medical or material evidence to support the accusations, and despite one of the women recanting her testimony in subsequent trials, the boys were sentenced to prison six years later.

The past few years have seen the term “woke” come to mean something akin to “aware of social justice,” provided it hasn’t been reduced to a catch-all accusation. Its original meaning, however, was more selective. As blues singer Lead Belly sang in 1938 in his song “Scottsboro Boys”:

Go to Alabama and ya better watch out
The landlord’ll get ya, gonna jump and shout
Scottsboro boys, Scottsboro boys
Tell ya what it’s all about

Near the end of the recording, Lead Belly explained that the purpose of the song was to “advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down through there, stay woke, keep their eyes open.” In this context, “woke” didn’t mean you cared about social justice. It meant that a Black person living in America was aware that their life could be destroyed at any moment and had to take precautions to survive. “Woke” spoke to the same reality that spurred the creation of The Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936.

The Scottsboro Boys didn’t receive their final sentences until the same year H.P. Lovecraft died, but the sensation of their trials lasted long enough for him to weigh in on the matter. In a letter to fellow horror author J. Vernon Shea, he wrote:

It doesn’t seem natural to me that well-disposed men would deliberately condemn even niggers to death if they were not strongly convinced of guilt. We must not forget that these books of special pleading are compiled and colored by professional radicals and emotional idealists. Although, of course, prejudice and emotion exist on the other side as well. It would probably be better if all trials involving local prejudice could be conducted by federal courts with personnel drawn from all parts of the country, avoiding not only the section where the prejudice against the defendant exists, but [also] those where prejudice in their favor is found. For instance, no jury of New York Jewish radicals ought to try a man accused of labor crimes against law and order, for those bastards would acquit a brute who had shot up dozens of people if they thought he did it for the social revolution. Just how the present cause celebre will come out I don’t know, but possibly some sort of commutation of sentence will occur at the last moment. However, the damn coons are probably rather poor specimens anyhow, so that apart from the matter of precedence, it really matters little whether they are bumped off or not.

In other words, Lovecraft acknowledged that the Scottsboro Boys were unlikely to receive a fair trial, but still concluded that there was nothing wrong with killing them.

A group of fine folk touched by the “Innsmouth look.”

I want to speak carefully here: H.P. Lovecraft wasn’t in any way responsible for the miscarriage of justice that befell the Scottsboro Boys. Despite the ugliness of his opinions on race, eugenics, interracial marriage, and nativism, which he voiced loudly and often, neither was he counted among the most active or virulent racists in America. This is not a call to censor or blacklist anything he’s written, or any book, film, or game based on those stories.

But the racial elements of his stories have come under increasing scrutiny for good reason. When a team of researchers stumbles upon a lost city in At the Mountains of Madness, they learn that its creators were overthrown by a lesser race bred to perform menial tasks. These creatures, called “shoggoths,” were amoeba-like entities with only minimal intelligence, well suited to labor but little else. Moreover, their leftover cellular material was the source of Earth’s eventual evolution. Shoggoths, then, were both natural slaves and vestigial originators that had been left in the dust by evolution and progress. Much like, according to the racial theories of Lovecraft’s day, the inhabitants of Africa.

His racial assumptions extended not only to monsters, but also to humans who had lost their essential nature. When a genealogist stops by a little-known fishing village in The Shadow over Innsmouth, he discovers that interbreeding with fish people has polluted the town’s pure blood. Like many of his peers, Lovecraft believed that western society was decaying thanks to immigration, miscegenation, and early overtures at desegregation, and he didn’t hesitate to insert his views into both his letters and his stories.

A globe-trotting adventure. (Eldritch Horror)

Maybe this is one reason why board game designers have tended to handle Lovecraft’s work at only the surface level, his monsters and gods reduced to recognizable names to be slain or banished rather than as they appear in their source texts. My go-to example is the shoggoth and the shotgun. In the Cthulhu Mythos, a shoggoth is custom-built for indestructability. By contrast, most board games present the shoggoth as a monster of above-average toughness that can be taken down with a scrounged hunting shotgun and some pluck.

But more and more, cosmic horror is drawing renewed attention. As Black horror author Victor LaValle points out, the principal message of cosmic horror — the alienation, dissociation, and terror one feels upon discovering they’re a mote adrift on an uncaring ocean — is only possible if you operate with the assumption that you ought to qualify as more than a mote to begin with. It requires a privilege of position that is withheld or stolen from its subjects. The typical Lovecraft story progresses when a character is faced with new knowledge that strips them of their comfort, privilege, and ignorance. The character realizes that they belong to a wider system that is either uncaring or hostile to their being. They become suddenly aware that they are fragile and can be discarded at any moment. As a result, the shock of this awareness plunges them into madness or despair.

From this perspective, cosmic horror is about the terror of becoming woke.

I would submit that this is the legacy we should be wary of discarding. When Lovecraft wrote about alienation from reality, he was speaking as an atheist in the midst of the Einsteinian revolution. He couldn’t have foretold the numbing effects of life online or the raw solipsism of choose-your-own-news outlets. But these daily realities haven’t exactly helped us stay grounded. When he pondered the listlessness of existing in an uncaring universe and the treachery of knowledge, he was grousing about modernism’s disillusionment with materialism. But we’re no less desperate for anchors amid our current seethe of disinformation. When he depicted ignorance as the sole refuge remaining to mankind… well, some mornings I wish there were a few tidbits I could return to Pandora’s Box.

That goes double for characters in the margins. There’s the reason Lovecraft’s stories are often populated with oddballs. By ensuring that his narrators and protagonists are those who operate on the fringes — occult professors, hard-bitten explorers, scientists who already know a little more than they ought to — it’s more believable when they emerge from their brush with the wider universe still able to describe the encounter. They survive not in spite of their marginal identities, but because of them. Their shortage of privilege better prepares them to confront the horrors behind the curtain. In being alienated and othered, one becomes adept at confronting more literal aliens.

Otherness is found in color. (Arkham Noir)

In our hobby, this legacy is being slowly but surely acknowledged and updated. Designers such as Eric Lang, Tony Fanchi, and Yves Tourigny are quick to fill their games with marginalized characters. Describing the creation of Death May Die, a dice-chucking game about leveling the Elder Gods, Lang described his decoupling of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos from its racist themes as both a pastiche and a reclamation.

This is fair game. H.P. Lovecraft borrowed liberally from other cultures — sometimes in ways that were distressing in their own right — and encouraged fellow writers to do the same. Commentators have noted that one reason for the Cthulhu Mythos’s long-standing popularity is its “open-source” nature. Anybody can write a story about the Elder Gods without owing royalties or permissions to any particular property-holder. That was already the case when Lovecraft was alive. He would trade stories and settings with other writers, even penning revisions of one another’s tales. Writing out the material one finds objectionable is a legitimate way of giving new life to that literary ethos.

In other mediums, authors have taken steps to not only place the gods and monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos into new and more inclusive settings, but also to directly investigate the racial assumptions that were written into the originals.

One popular example is Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and its subsequent HBO adaptation. Both are staffed by Black people dropped into the middle of haunted natural history museums, cult rituals, and eerie astronomical observatories, only to weather these horrors with a world-weary aplomb. Their constant friction with hostile police sheriffs and dangerous sundown towns has honed their instincts to a fine edge. It’s hard to get too worked up about a lodge of sorcerers when significantly less magical grand wizards have targeted you in the past.

Similarly, in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, repeated police killings of Black people see the main character pursing the opposite course. Rather than sealing away the ancient evil, he unleashes it — because at least its predations promise to be equal-opportunity. In both of these cases, H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is not only represented, not only replaced, but challenged down to its bones.

Toppling the rich. (A Study in Emerald, First Edition)

To date, one of the finest examples in our hobby has been Martin Wallace’s A Study in Emerald. While many of its confrontations are found in the game’s subtext or Neil Gaiman’s source material, they remain crucial aspects of its setting. In the United States, the One-Drop Rule determined that a person would be considered a Negro if they could trace back to even a single instance of Black heritage. In Wallace’s game, that dynamic is turned on its head. Here the royalty of Europe, usually the presumable source of “pure blood,” are the aliens. The dangerous miscegenation is not with immigrants and people of color, but with heads of state and Oxford legacy admissions. It’s a game about the strength required to recognize and dismantle systemic failures, about people in the margins striving to fix a broken world, about thriving despite one’s smallness in the face of a hostile universe. The result acknowledges the full legacy of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, the good and the bad and the in-between. In the process, it does more to examine that legacy’s root anxieties than any quantity of finely-sculpted miniatures.

In other words, I hope CMON knows what they’re doing. Horror has always opened a window onto its host culture. That was true in H.P. Lovecraft’s day. It’s still true now. If only today’s anxieties weren’t so familiar. The work is being done in literature and film. Little by little, board games are getting onboard. That kid who rode his bicycle to the library every day and was briefly sucked into the wild world of internet message boards and cosmic horror couldn’t be happier. Let’s preserve the best portions of this legacy and put the rest under a microscope. Because shoggoths can’t be defeated with anything as crude as a shotgun, nor can a legacy be exhumed with any tool that leaves it halfway buried.

This piece was funded by Patreon supporters. My next essay, on why it’s impossible as a critic to interface with A.I.-generated art, is already available on Patreon for supporters. I am deeply grateful to a number of early readers who helped this piece reach its current form, including Jason Perez, Matt Sharp, Matthew A. Jonassaint, and Liz Davidson.

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