Guest Blog Post: Math Is Bad. Just Ask Lovecraft.

Editor’s Note:

At The Capitol Horror, we’re building a community where our writers, readers, and creators can share more than just stories—we want their obsessions, curiosities, and strange little passions too. This piece is a guest contribution from one of our own authors, part of an ongoing effort to give our contributors space to speak in their own voices. You’ll be seeing more of these features in the weeks and months ahead as our community grows darker, weirder, and wonderfully more crowded.

Entering my freshman year of college, I was required to take a math placement test. I hate math and it hates me. I’d barely survived high school math, passing only by the proverbial skin of my teeth and studied so hard for the final the math teacher shouted (literally screamed at me in the hallway!) accusations of cheating just because I managed to not make a total ass of myself on it. His name was Mr. O’Gorman and he was an insane, sadistic bastard. But loving math does that to people. Seriously, just ask Lovecraft. Studying math is the path to unfathomable evil.

I came up with a plan for the college placement test. I was going to do so badly they couldn’t help but put me in the lowest, most embarrassing, how-the-hell-did-you-get-into-college? level. I took my calculator, figured out the answer to every multiple-choice question, and then chose a different one. I was going to get a flat-out zero on the test. Genius.

I got 100%.

So truly horrible at math am I that randomly choosing one of four choices served me better than any attempt at formulaic process. The admissions counselor told me if I had done so well in high school I would have gotten a full scholarship. I was to be placed in an expert-level college math course. Somewhere, Mr. O’Gorman—probably in a fetid catacomb surrounded by the ichor-dripping, crumbling corpses he’d reanimated for hateful purposes using accursed numerical computations—laughed maniacally.

They put me in Advanced Statistics where I almost freaking died. But, of course, this must be hyperbole. One can’t die from math.

H.P. Lovecraft would violently disagree.

The quest to understand the mysteries of math stands as a regular theme in Lovecraft’s most horrifying works, almost always the pathway to madness and often the ebony gateway to gruesome death. Some part of me must have figured this out early and resisted any facility with numbers, clearly the devil’s alphabet.

Walter Gilman—doomed protagonist of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House”—finds this out the hard way. Obsessed with the principles of non-Euclidean geometry, Gilman becomes convinced mastering this satanic science will give him vision of and even interaction with other realms. He studies the math, becomes an expert, begins to see strange and insane angles in the cursed room of his boarding house, and—spoiler alert—is eventually carried off and destroyed by an immortal witch and her weird rat familiar with creepy little human hands. Seriously, picture the horror of seeing a rat with tiny human hands crawling up your bare leg while you lie stuck in sleep paralysis. Don’t like it? Don’t do math.

Even the great god Cthulhu’s cursed city of R’lyeh and the ice-covered, cyclopean (one of H.P.’s favorite words) megalopolis of the Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness are built using architecture from this math, constantly shifting walls and walkways impossible for the brain to comprehend. Like math.

Madness lies in the mastery of mathematics. Sure, you could point to all the famous mathematicians who seem sane and even brilliant, but what do you know of the content of their nightly dreams? How do you know they don’t travel into endless landscapes of indescribable darkness and shapeless, amorphous beings with a thousand eyes? What proof have you they aren’t conferring with the blind idiot god Azathoth or Nyarlathotep, he of the crawling chaos? What evidence do you have Cthulhu’s insidious tendrils aren’t filling their minds with horrendous uses for their numerical knowledge, coercing them to bring about the return of the cannibalistic dead and the annihilation of all humanity? In wakefulness, have they been able to resist poring over the cursed pages of the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred? Are they the true monsters hidden among us, using nightly their supernal (another favorite Lovecraft word) brilliance to shift our reality into the hellish, deathless realms of endless suffering? Are we doomed to discover ourselves decrepit denizens of Unknown Kadath?

I don’t know, but I’m not going to chance it. I remain proudly moronic at math, refusing the lure of the ghoulish Mr. O’Gormans of the world and their quest for that crawling chaos.

Plus, I couldn’t figure it out if I wanted to.

Christian De Matteo is co-founder of the independent comic publisher FugitivePoems.com and founder of Tellworthy.com where he practices the dark art of coaching writers through their dream projects. He is the author of the graphic novel Blood Valkyrie in Vegas and the comic series River, as well as having had many of his comic stories published in both the Containment Breach and Folklore for the Uninsured anthology series. His story “The Nest” was published in Issue 1 of The Bleeding Margin, for which he is endlessly honored. He is a college professor of writing and proud husband to a perfect wife and father to amazing children. He doesn’t math.