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.

The Transition of Juan Romero

The Transition of Juan Romero is a story about a white man who discovers that associating oneself with Orientals and Native-Americans can lead a person to experience terrifying supernatural events.

The structure here is the same as always. The narrator starts his tale by hinting at horrible events that he “cannot wholly define,” and of which he has “no desire to speak,” but will nonetheless due to a “sense of duty to science” that is never mentioned again.

The story takes place in The United States, to where the narrator went to abandon his past, take a new name, and start a new life. He goes to work in a mine – whose gold made the region a “seething cauldron of sordid life” – and it’s there that he meets Juan Romero, a Mexican.

The narrator explains that, when he lived in India, he felt more at home with the locals than with his colleagues – and he even got a strange Hindoo ring because of that. And yet, despite his affinity with the “other” – he even speaks Spanish – he doesn’t take long to animalize it, calling a group of Mexicans “a herd.”

Juan Romero, who is named after a thief, is one of those Mexicans, although he differs from them for being a bit whiter – he, however, reminds the narrator more of the ancient Aztecs than of his fellow countrymen. Being oddly attracted to his Hindoo ring, Juan soon becomes attached to the narrator – who calls him a servant instead of a friend.

One day, the miners blow a charge of dynamite in the cave and come across an eerie chasm; “an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it.” That very same night, the narrator wakes up to the sound of coyotes and dogs howling outside his tent while a storm approaches.

But the sound that most startles him comes from the earth itself: the sound of terrible drums in the deep that would make even Gandalf shudder. They create a horrible “rhythm” that falls into the “indescribable horror” trope that Lovecraft uses: “To seek to describe it were useless – for it was such that no description is possible,” the narrator explains. And yet he proceeds to describe it, comparing it to the “pulsing of engines,” instilled with a vexing “remote” quality and a constant chanting that reminding him of the sounds of “an Oriental ceremony.”

The narrator gets out of the tent and follows Juan to the cave, seeing that his colleague is acting odd, shouting the name of an Aztec God. His ring illuminates the cave and when he gets to the chasm, he’s witness to a great and terrible event: he believes that Juan became a thing of light that fought unfathomable creatures in the pit.

He wakes up the next day to find that, the night before, no one else heard any sounds coming from the earth. They tell him he never left his tent, sleeping heavily during the storm. There was a cave-in, however, and the chasm is now sealed off. Juan, meanwhile, is found dead – but nobody understands how that happened.

Nobody, except the narrator of course. He shudders at the memory of the events and understands that the fact that he had the ring was the crucial element that made him experience them all.

The Transition of Juan Romero was not published while Lovecraft was alive – he apparently didn’t like the story – but it follows closely his narrative style. It’s imbued with a problematic Orientalism, associating the other with the supernatural, while depicting “indescribable” horrors that traumatize the protagonist. It indeed fails, however, to leave an impression on the reader, as the story doesn’t have a single inspired moment, theme, or character.

February 14, 2021.