It is also worth noting that the story is dedicated to “S.L.” who is universally identified as Samuel Loveman. I am sure that the nerd did this with some delicacy but in my mind a neckbeard stuck his hand up and asked “Excuse me Mrs Greene, but do you fuck?” Her answer was apparently that Lovecraft had been a perfectly adequate lover but she also claimed that Lovecraft tended to view sex with no small amount of revulsion and the tension between these two statements has long invited speculation. Lovecraft’s sexuality has spilled a lot of ink over the years and some people were so obsessed with the question that when Lovecraft’s wife Sonia Greene finally came forward and began granting interviews about her marriage, a Lovecraft nerd nearly fell out of his seat in his hate to ask the elderly lady whether she and Lovecraft had ever actually had sex. Thirdly, it is worth noting that straight men are generally not in the business of picking up random dudes at railway stations and inviting them to come home with them. This is not a man who won over the narrator with his wit and erudition, this more like what the French call a “coup de foudre” in so far as the Narrator sees the guy and immediately knows that the pair are destined to be together for ever. Secondly, there is the fact that the picture Lovecraft draws of this mysterious man is almost entirely physical. This invites autobiographical speculation as we know that Lovecraft (at this point in his life) was not exactly a social butterfly as he never attended high school and had a habit of refusing to go outside in daylight because his mother had spent years telling him that he was ugly. This story’s true subject matter is evident right from the start as the narrator describes meeting a strange man at a railway station and deciding to bring him home:Īside from being beautifully written, this section leaps off the page for a number of reasons:įirstly, there is the fact that Lovecraft says of the narrator that he had not previously had that many friends. However, the means of transportation is now even more complex as it is rooted in the ambiguities of male friendship. “ Hypnos” is a fine example of this later type of story in that it revisits the idea expressed in “Ex Oblivione” that one might escape too far into the world of dreams. These later stories are a lot darker and more ostensibly horrific in terms of their affective payload and they tend to revolve around issues such as death, escapism, suicide, and the urge to take a load of pills in order to escape a reality that has come to feel decidedly unpalatable. These voyages are often downbeat and feature frightening encounters that leave to dreamers dead, psychotic, or trapped in a state of inescapable depression. While all of these stories may have originated in imagery taken from dreams, the later stories are less interested in the content of their Fantastical dream worlds than they are in the fact that people from our world are using a variety of methods to pierce the veil of reality and travel to other worlds. I would argue that if we consider all of the stories that tend to be lumped together under the ‘Dreamlands’ rubric, we will note that earlier Dunsany-like secondary-world Fantasy stories such as “ Polaris”, “ The White Ship”, “ The Doom that Came to Sarnath” and “ The Cats of Ulthar” all have a very different tone and subject matter to the series of stories that started with “ Celephais” and continued with “ The Crawling Chaos” and “Ex Oblivione”. Our willingness to ‘explain away’ and ‘account for’ these kinds of ambiguities is kind of central to the mystique of this story but I’ll return to that question in a little bit. It does not help that while Lovecraft appears to have had very little interest in coherent world-building, he loved littering his work with references to Named Entities from other stories and the clomping foot of nerdism demands that if two stories use the same place names then they must be taking place in the same literary universe. Lovecraft nerds have a tendency to gather all of Lovecraft’s secondary-world fantasy stories under the ‘Dreamlands’ rubric despite the fact that Lovecraft’s world-building is generally so vague and inconsistent that it is often unclear where stories taking place in the distant past of our world end and stories taking place in other worlds begin. This is something of an important distinction. The plot of the story feels very much like a re-tread of “ Ex Oblivione” in so far as it is a story about dreamers that concentrates more upon the act of dreaming than the contents of the dreams themselves. “Hypnos” ( full text) was written in March 1922 and published in the May 1923 issue of National Amateur, the largest and most widely-read organ of the amateur press movement such as it was back in the early 20 th Century. I am Jack’s attendance at a Morphine-fuelled Gay Orgy
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