In the dark room near the bottom of the ocean a myriad of shadows float by. Strange, undulating fauna grow from an endless floor. Particles of flesh hang suspended between their blue curtains. Silence is a thick blanket where the sun doesn’t shine. The mind is left with nothing to process, it imagines the sounds of wind through leaves, muscle moving through water, breath rattling through an oxygen tank. A diver floats between these places, creating a casual stir in the speckled stars of detritus. Niels-Viggo Hobbs peers into our underworld from slightly clouded goggles, half-hoping to see something, half-hoping he doesn’t. As he continues through the black, cloudless underbelly of the sea, he turns slightly, as if facing an invisible camera. An eyebrow raises behind his mask, a tendril of hair waves above his plastic-covered face. “The natural world is far more bizarre and imaginative than Hollywood. In reality, the things I see in the ocean are far weirder than anything you’ll see in a regular horror film,” he says. On cue, a large squid passes by with the subtlety of a fallen tree pulled downriver, its eyes moving past him like an owl.
Hobbs is the founder of the internationally renowned, premier weird fiction event, NecronomiCon Providence. A professor of ecology and marine biology at University of Rhode Island for over a decade, he has always been fascinated with the natural world and the way fiction blends its boundaries. He started the convention back in 2012 when he was simply “sitting around the dinner table with some friends, talking about fun things to do that highlighted how unique Providence was.” There was a Necronomicon convention years prior that fell out of practice, so they decided it would be fun to bring it back.
The etymology of the early 20th century term Necronomicon, otherwise known as The Book of the Dead, is accredited to Providence native H.P. Lovecraft. It is a fictional book that appears throughout his short stories, as well as the stories of his followers. It supposedly is an instructional tool used to awaken a world of dimensionless, ambivalent monsters who have apparently forgotten about us, and are ready to rain hell on any who catch their attention – if you’re looking for weird fiction, this is as weird as it gets.
Lovecraft defined the term “weird fiction,” in his 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as
“something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
Since then, the genre of weird fiction has taken many future writers under its slimy wings, influencing authors from Stephen King to John Luis Borges. NecronomiCon Providence began with the celebration of Lovecraft at the focal point, but Hobbs is adamant that “it has gone through a series of metamorphoses, and is now more a global general weird fiction convention. The concept of weird fiction vastly predates Lovecraft, but because he was the first one to coin the term, it has its roots here in Providence.”
Unfortunately, Lovecraft’s expansive literary canon is associated with racist and xenophobic tendencies, an aspect that makes it difficult to be morally associated with his writing. Which is why Hobbs is happy to see NecronomiCon Providence growing away from the “Lovecraftian,” and into a diverse and equitable celebration of multinational, weird fiction talent. Hobbs says, “there will always be some central aspect to him, but there is more connection beyond him. It is good to embrace this, but better to continue to work towards the future.”
The convention, and the weird fiction genre as a whole, enamors so many people because of its ambiguity. It offers a sensation we like to linger in; it confronts our relationship with reality, and our uncertain answers on mortality. Hobbs comments, “Lovecraft was very effective at tapping into the worry that maybe we don’t see everything in the world around us. That there are things happening outside our view, and weird fiction challenges us in a way that is slightly believable, unquietting, unsettling, but just generally engrossing.”
We may not know what happens in The Book of the Dead, but Hobbs does offer a brief answer to his own afterlife, “When we die, it’s atomic. Our energy goes back into the universe, our cells and molecules and atoms break down and get passed into new organisms and new parts of the world. I actually find that pretty comforting.”
We may not be dead yet, but one version of Hobb’s prediction is already true. In a way, each new experience changes the person who we were from the day before. Hobbs says Providence is “just the right size to know all the good, right people to do all the fun things, it’s easy to make enough connections to make great things happen.” Through the lens of weird fiction, Providence is just one big energy portal, and us humans are bumping around like little atoms, changing and discovering new parts of ourselves, and each other. •
Necronomicon runs from August 15- 18th, 2024. Find more information at necronomicon-providence.com.
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