The Transition of Juan Romero

The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

—> You can read or listen to the short story for free here.

The Transition of Juan Romero

The Transition of Juan Romero is a story about a white man who discovers that associating oneself with Orientals and Native Americans can lead a person to experience terrifying supernatural events.

The structure here is the same as always. The narrator starts his tale by hinting at horrible events that he “cannot wholly define,” and of which he has “no desire to speak,” but will nonetheless due to a particular “sense of duty to science” that is never mentioned again.

The story takes place in The United States, where the protagonist went in order to abandon his past, take a new name, and start a new life. A land of opportunity. He goes to work in a mine – whose gold made the region a “seething cauldron of sordid life” – and it’s there that he meets Juan Romero, who is * sinister pause * Mexican.

The narrator explains that, when he lived in India, he felt more at home with the locals than with his colleagues – and he even got a strange Hindoo ring there because of that. And yet, despite his self-proclaimed affinity with the “other” – he even speaks Spanish, if you can believe it –, the narrator doesn’t take long to animalize this very same other, calling a group of Mexicans “a herd,” for example.

Juan Romero, who is named after a thief, is one of these Mexicans, although he differs from them for being a bit whiter – Juan, however, reminds the narrator more of the ancient Aztecs than of his fellow countrymen. Not white enough, Juan Romero is. Being oddly attracted to his Hindoo ring, the Mexican soon becomes attached to the protagonist, who of course refers to him as a servant instead of a friend.

One day, the miners blow a charge of dynamite in the cave and come across an eerie chasm; “an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it.” That very same night, the narrator wakes up to the sound of coyotes and dogs howling outside his tent while a storm approaches.

But the sound that most startle him comes from the earth itself: the sound of drums in the deep so terrible that would make even Gandalf shudder. They create a horrible rhythm that falls into the “indescribable horror” trope that Lovecraft often employs: “To seek to describe it were useless – for it was such that no description is possible,” the narrator explains. And yet he proceeds to describe it nonetheless, comparing it to a strange “pulsing of engines,” which is instilled with a vexing remote quality. He also hears a constant chanting that reminds him of the sounds of “an Oriental ceremony.”

The protagonist gets out of the tent and follows Juan to the cave, seeing that his friend – sorry, his servant – is acting odd and shouting the name of an Aztec God – Juan looked like the Aztecs because he was indeed related to them, confirming the narrator’s incredible judgment. His ring illuminates the cave and when he gets to the chasm, the protagonist witnesses a great and terrible event: he sees  Juan becoming a thing of light and battling unfathomable creatures in the pit.

He wakes up the next day to find that, the night before, no one else heard any sounds coming from the earth. People tell him he never left his tent, sleeping heavily during the storm. There was a cave-in, however, and the chasm is now sealed off. Juan Romero, however, has been found dead – but nobody understands how that happened.

Nobody, except the narrator of course. He shudders at the memory of the events and suspects that having that foreign ring was the crucial element that made him experience those things. Juan Romero appears to have secretly saved the day but only because he was the good kind of other: still monstrous, but willing to sacrifice himself for his master.

The Transition of Juan Romero was not published while Lovecraft was alive – he apparently didn’t like the story – but it follows closely his narrative style. It’s imbued with problematic Orientalism, associating “the other” with the supernatural, while depicting very describable indescribable horrors that traumatize the protagonist. It indeed fails, however, to leave an impression on the reader, as the story doesn’t have a single inspired moment, theme, or character.

February 21, 2021.