H.P. Lovecraft was an incredibly influential writer of horror. He’s most famous for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, which involves a network of Gods that are utterly indifferent to the affairs of humanity. And as we’ve mentioned in other reviews, Lovecraft was, alas, incredibly racist even by the standards of his day. Since he lived from 1890 – 1937, that’s really saying something. He wasn’t keen on women either, and they seldom appear in his stories except as background characters or, in some cases, consorts of the Gods.

Given that the very thought of a Smart Bitch might have caused Lovecraft to faint, he’s an unlikely author to show up in our pages. However, we are living in a golden age of women and people of color using the mythos created by the racist and sexist H.P. Lovecraft to create their own feminist, racially inclusive, and empowering stories. One of these re-imaginings is The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, a novella by Kij Johnson.

Lovecraft fans will recall that Ulthar is a town in Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle, a series of stories about the Dreamlands, a place that is only accessible to people from Earth (the waking world) through dreams. In this book, Vellitt Boe is a professor at Ulthar Women’s College. One of Vellitt’s students runs away with a man from the waking world and may be trying to escape the Dreamlands. If the student succeeds, then her great-grandfather, one of the Elder Gods, will surely vent his wrath upon Ulthar. It is up to Vellitt to find her student and bring her back before the god notices her absence.

This book combines gorgeous language and imagery with unexpected twists on familiar tropes. It’s a quest story, with an older woman as the quester. She has graying hair and aches and pains when she gets up in the morning. For her, the Dreamlands are the familiar lands. It’s the people from the waking world who are foreign, and their world that is exotic, “Filled with strangeness and monsters. The sky never ends. The night has a million million stars. There are no Gods.”

Lovecraft imagined a world that only men travel within, and in Lovecraft’s stories, women are a backdrop for the stories of men. Vellitt, who teaches at a college for women, lives her life surrounded by a variety of women from different parts of the Dreamlands. For her, the idea of a passive woman, or a woman who serves only to further the story of a man, is bizarre.

When Vellitt asks a man from the waking world named Carter why the only visitors to the Dreamlands are men, he replies:

“Women don’t dream large dreams,” he had said, dismissively. “It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams.”

Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yet she was disappointed in Carter. Her dreams were large, of trains a mile long and ships that climbed to the stars, of learning the languages of squids and slime molds, of crossing a chessboard the size of a city. That night and for years afterward, she had envisioned another dream land, built from the imaginings of powerful women dreamers. Perhaps it would have fewer gods, she thought as she watched the moon gather over the horizon, leaving her in the darkness of the ninety-seven stars.

As a romance reader who writes for a romance site, I can safely say that I love romance. However, I don’t love it when writers shoehorn romance into a story simply because the story has women in it. In the case of Dream-Quest, the fact that both of the main female characters have had love lives but are happy with their current single state is quite refreshing. Vellitt has had male friends and male lovers, but she’s content in the society of women – and in the society of the black cat who follows her everywhere.

This book is a wonderful story even if the reader doesn’t get the Lovecraft references. With them, it’s marvelously subversive as well as poetic and entertaining. I loved this book because of the wonderful, elegant language and the evocative lands through which Vellitt travels. I also loved it because it’s rare to find a story in which an older woman goes on adventures. Vellitt is physically fit, though she is at times stiff in the morning, and much wiser than she was when she travelled as a young woman. We need more stories about older adventurers, if nothing else because seeing the way they look at their adventures is fascinating. It’s important in terms of representation, a topic on which I have Many Thoughts, but it’s also just plain good writing. The contrast between Vellitt’s current self, her memories of her younger self, and her young student provide fascinating tension. Add the incredibly beautiful language of the novella, and it’s an amazing piece of writing.