"Joe Milutis: Lovecraft’s “Call of the Cthulhu,” as well as its immediate predecessor, Machen’s “The Great God Pan” are about data management. I love that Cthulhu has as its ratiocinative center a “clipping agency”—something that I don’t think exists anymore, or exists only in highly rarefied modes, because of the web. It comes as no surprise that these weird stories have as their core, an engine of information technology, or even just the impulse to make meaning out of information gone awry, since it has always been recognized that the supernatural is also a type of allegory of information—no more so than in Bram Stoker’s _Dracula_ of course. We can talk about Dickens’ “The Signal Man” also, and things like _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_ which, at least in the 1939 film version, has at its core, a debate about the merits of the Gutenberg press. We could go on and on with examples both obvious—dealing with the “uncanny” impact of any new technology—and implicit: that all supernatural literature spectacularly stages the absences that communication both exacerbates and attempts to repress.
But there’s something a little different going on in Lovecraft and Machen that I think might be directly related to what Charles Fort was doing with his “data of the damned.” Fort seems to have been his own voracious clipping agency, yet at the same time he was compiling all these news stories about blood falling from the sky, vampire cattle mutilation, and girls spontaneously combusting on beds, he was reflecting on the ultimate absurdity of the human mind to make sense of this data. I’m going out on a limb here, because I haven’t read it in a couple years, but I think _Dracula_ is ultimately positivistic about the ways all the modes of communication that comprise its text allow us to see the vampire in a way that each individual character can not. Whereas, what you start to get with the Lovecrafts and the Forts is this clear sense that data-overload itself is a kind of monstrosity.
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