The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
Feb. 9th, 2019 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
3/5. Lovecraft transformative work about the professor at a women's college who sets out to retrieve a young student who has left with a man for the waking world.
I read a fair amount of fanfic for source texts with which I am unfamiliar. It's a fun brain exercise for me, filling in a (probably wrong) conception based on negative spaces and shadows. This novella convinced me yet again that I don't want to read Lovecraft; it's particular brand of embittered but enduring feminism suggests . . . unpleasant things. And standing on its own, without consideration of the source, this is a strange, twisty tale of a quest across dreamland and into the waking world, in which the odd setting illuminates character. Enjoyable, though as previously with Johnson's work, I don't quite get what all the fuss was about.
3/5. Lovecraft transformative work about the professor at a women's college who sets out to retrieve a young student who has left with a man for the waking world.
I read a fair amount of fanfic for source texts with which I am unfamiliar. It's a fun brain exercise for me, filling in a (probably wrong) conception based on negative spaces and shadows. This novella convinced me yet again that I don't want to read Lovecraft; it's particular brand of embittered but enduring feminism suggests . . . unpleasant things. And standing on its own, without consideration of the source, this is a strange, twisty tale of a quest across dreamland and into the waking world, in which the odd setting illuminates character. Enjoyable, though as previously with Johnson's work, I don't quite get what all the fuss was about.