The Lovecraft Project:

H. P. Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we human beings are a tiny, insignificant fraction of the universe, and that there are things much bigger and more important than us hidden in the depths of the world.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

Old Bugs

Old Bugs is a moralizing tale about the dangers of alcohol. It starts with the description of an underground place where one can get hold of alcoholic drinks despite the Prohibition. The initial focus is on the smell of the room: the acrid, corrupted stench is so strong that it is said that even the air has to fight for space in Sheehan’s Pool Room. Meanwhile, whiskey is aptly described as a “forbidden fruit”; something that entices people, lures them with promises but offers nothing but punishment and damnation.

The protagonist, Old Bugs, is a bum, which is referred to by Lovecraft as a “pathetic species” in a great display of prejudice that would certainly make some fascists smile. Old Bugs’ past is a mystery that intrigues people because, despite his current deplorable condition, the man displays signs that he was once someone with money and education. He carries a photo, for example, of a “lady of breeding and quality” and, when the alcohol inflames his humor, he speaks with “strings of incomprehensible polysyllables and snatches of sonorous prose and verse,” making people conjecture if he was a professor or something of the sort before the alcohol got the best of him.

To further reinforce the horrible effect that drinking had on the man, his physical description is full of comparisons between the past and the present: he was once fat, but now is ghastly slim; he had once noble features, but now is simply “not pleasing to look upon.” The “forbidden fruit” metaphor, then, fits perfectly here because what happened to Old Bugs can be easily considered a “fall from grace”.

And so, one day a young unspoiled lad by the name of Alfred Trever enters Sheehan’s to ask for a drink: “This is my first experience in a place like this, but I am a student of life, and don’t want to miss any experience. There’s poetry in this sort of thing, you know,” he explains.

The narrator points out that Alfred was repressed all his life by his mother – she was once engaged to a bright gentleman who ruined his life by drinking too much – and so now he wants to rebel and experience men’s vices firsthand. When he enters the “vile-smelling room”, he is immediately referred to as a “victim” by the narrator, who is everything but subtle in this story.

Talking about lack of subtlety, upon hearing the name of Alfred’s mother, Old Bugs leaps at the guy, removing the whiskey from his hand, and proceeds to exposes how his life story is a cautionary tale: “Do not do this thing. I was like you once, and I did it. Now I am like — this,” he warns Alfred. Old Bugs gets mad, starts screaming in Latin and naming Belial, which makes everyone run away, and he eventually dies from the outburst.

The story ends with a predictable twist when Alfred gets to look at the picture of the pretty lady that Old Bugs used to carry and realizes it’s of her mother.

In Old Bugs the “unspeakable evil” that drives a man mad, destroying his body and mind is not ancient, unfathomable beings; it’s alcohol. The story, however, doesn’t even concern itself with explaining the destructive power of alcoholism: drinking a single cup of whiskey is, like eating a forbidden apple, enough to destroy a person’s life. The moral of the story, then, is too simple: start drinking and you will end up like Old Bugs.

To say that the narrative in Old Bugs lacks nuance is an understatement; it’s almost a pamphlet against drinking. And with no characters or themes to make up for its lack of complexity and subtlety, Old Bugs is far from being Lovecraft’s best work.

January 23, 2021.