Review of Boys Weekend (2023)
Mattie Lubchansky (writer-artist).
Read in 2024.
At least since Daniel Gildark’s Cthulhu (2007), there has been a marginal strain of fiction associating the impersonal horrors of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmicism with Judith Butler’s gender trouble. I’ve not understood why. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of misusing Lovecraftian cults as stand-ins for real-world religious conservatism in the gender space, nor about Lovecraft’s personal fear of the unknown or his tendency to externalize that fear where the reaction to Butler internalizes it. Perhaps it’s about the shared alienness of Butler’s utopia and Lovecraft’s indescribable beings from beyond time and space, but that’s a weak link.
Lubchansky doesn’t help me understand the trope, but they make it work. Boys Weekend is a bold and compelling satire of everything except the human condition. In it, the traditional attributes of cosmicism (that is Lovecraft’s murders, conspiracy, tentacles, ancient history, amoral and godlike beings, etc.) are married to a caricature of capitalist culture, including greed, libertarianism, antisocial hedonism, and cyberpunk’s for-profit, unevenly-distributed technological extrapolation. Here, a Lovecraftian cult has the vibe of a cult-like cryptocurrency pyramid scheme, which makes sense. These two evils are loosely tied to gender-conservative contempt and callousness, in a way that is stylized and in-your-face but not sanctimonious or contradictory to Lovecraft’s vision, nor exempt as an object of satire (“I think we should use kinder, ‘I feel’ statements”). It’s fast, thrilling, and funny, while also serving both literary and political purposes.