Book #131 of 2017:
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
I’ve never read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, the story that so directly inspired this one, but I’ve read enough of his other works to have a sense of the racism and violent misogyny that pervade the man’s writing. Those facets make for uncomfortable reading, and it’s no wonder that most authors who have dabbled in Lovecraftian horror over the past century have generally elided that portion of the author’s legacy. They wisely choose to take up Lovecraft’s vision of humanity’s smallness in a chaotic universe of unknowable gods, and leave behind his own human weaknesses.
What makes Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe so remarkable is that she is not content to simply set her story in the sanitized Cthulhu mythos that so many other authors favor and pretend that Lovecraft has always stood for equal-opportunity cosmic madness. Instead, hers is a Lovecraftian story that fiercely carves out a space for women at its center, demanding that we pay attention to the ways in which that gender was sidelined and demeaned in the original tales. Thus, her Dream-Quest follows an older woman – a professor at a Women’s College that could never have come from Lovecraft’s pen – tracking her wayward star pupil across the indifferent dreamlands, hoping that both women can return before a dreaming god awakens and destroys their home in his wrath. The fate of the College rests on female shoulders, and the male authority figures Boe encounters can offer little help in her quest.
The story itself is well-told, with ghasts and gugs and other Lovecraftian fixtures, all horrible yet familiar to a woman like Boe who has long traveled among them. I would have liked for it to be longer – especially if that additional space could have let Johnson interrogate Lovecraft’s racism as effectively as she does his sexism – but for what it is and what it’s aiming to do, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a triumph.
★★★★☆
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