Alice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone” is superior to the Margaret Mitchell novel it is based on in many respects. Though Mitchell’s prose is quite good, Randall’s is better , earthier and more poetic at once (“It’s a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price.”) Randall’s economical, short book also avoids Mitchell’s tendency to ramble. But perhaps most surprising in a sequel/parody, Randall’s book makes more sense.

It’s a staple of fan fiction to fill in the blank spaces and plot holes. Still, Randall manages to do so with unusual grace. Much of Mitchell’s drawn out plot and her surprise twists are built on her characters lack of self-knowledge. Rhett is so afraid of giving power to Scarlett that he won’t tell her he loves her, even after they marry — and then, finally, he falls out of love with her, thump. Scarlett, for her part, thinks she loves Ashley and hates Mellie, until Mellie dies and she realizes, no that was all a mistake. Ashley has a similar storyline; he loves Scarlett until he realizes he doesn’t and never did. Mellie thinks Scarlett is her best friend even though Scarlett spends most of her life loathing her. Everyone seems utterly severed from their own emotional life. It strains credulity that one character could be this gob-smackingly dumb; but two? three? four? It starts to seem like carelessness.

In Randall’s book the source of the stupidity isn’t carelessness. It’s racism. The main characters in Gone With the Wind can’t know themselves, because if they knew themselves, they’d have to know about black people, and then their world would collapse. Mitchell’s characters, as seen by Randall, aren’t dumb; they live in a society of secrets and lies, in which not knowing is the basis of their existence. So Rhett doesn’t just fall out of love with Scarlett; rather, he always was in love with her half-sister, Mammy’s daughter Cynara, and his vacillations in love are the result of his painful uncertainty about marrying, or loving, a black woman. Ashley, for his part, never declares for Scarlett not because he’s a dishmop, but because he’s gay; Mellie has his black lover whipped to death at one point. And Scarlett, so set on not knowing herself, is not just stubborn, but has a real secret or two — a lifetime spent refusing to think about the fact that her beloved maid and surrogate mother slept with her father, and a lifetime spent refusing to think about her sister.

You’d think that looking unflinchingly at the racism in Gone With the Wind would make the white characters unsympathetic. In fact, though, Randall’s Scarlett, and Rhett,and Ashley are all significantly less awful than Mitchell’s. In Mitchell’s version, they’re all just horrible people, indecisive, whining, opaque to themselves, and fighting ceaselessly on behalf of slavery because they suck. Randall, in contrast, grants them the context that has deformed them. Rhett’s decision to become a Confederate soldier at the last minute, for example, is seen in GWTW as a triumph, and is therefore unforgivable. In Wind Done Gone, it’s portrayed as a painful lapse; a mark of how much racism touches even a man who, in many respects, has been able and willing to get beyond the prejudices of his society. (“R. fought and tried to die in a Confederate uniform to save this place,” Cynara thinks of her lover, and later husband. “I have tried to forget this, but I remember.”) Scarlett’s blank self-centeredness becomes more understandable when we see her parents’ marriage as loveless, and lack of self-knowledge seems more understandable when we learn her life was in no small part a lie. Her mother was partially black,and concealed her past and her own emotional investments from family, and especially from her daughter. GWTW famously (and counter-intuitively for a romance) concludes in bitterness and the break-up of a marriage; Randall’s is the book with the not exactly traditional, but still happy ending. The Wind Done Gone can manage forgiveness because it is able to talk about what needs to be forgiven; GWTW is filled with too much hate to arrive at love.

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Ruthanna Emrys’ novella “The Litany of Earth is version of “The Wind Done Gone” for evil fish-creatures. Where Randall presents GWTW from the perspective of the slaves and freed blacks, Emrys looks at H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, particularly his Innsmouth stories, from the perspective of the monsters — and from the perspective of Lovecraft’s own vile racism. The main character, Aphra Marsh, has had much of her family hunted down and killed by the authorities, who also subjected them to brutal medical testing. Innsmouth people are still regularly policed by government spies; the parallels to the U.S. Japanese concentration camps, and to Hitler’s genocide, are drawn explicitly.

In discussions of Lovecraft, I’ve often seen fans argue that the horror in his stories is not linked directly to the racism. Instead, they say, the terror is tied to his atheism — to the apprehension of an infinite, indifferent cosmos, which was not built for humans and does not care about them.

Emrys keeps the cosmic emptiness in her story. Marsh’s people repeat a litany, in which they number the people of earth, from the distant past to the distant future, who have lived and will live and will all pass away. ““After the last race leaves, there will be fire and unremembering emptiness. Where the stories of Earth will survive, none have told us.” But the emptiness and meaninglessness don’t lead to horror. Instead, “In times of hardship or joy, when a child sickened or a fisherman drowned too young for metamorphosis, at the new year and every solstice, the Litany gave us comfort and humility.”

I think that’s right; knowing the universe is alien isn’t a horrible or fearful thing unless you first believe, as Lovecraft did, that the other and the alien are terrifying. The cosmic horror is horror not because the cosmos is intrinsically horrible, but because Lovecraft was racist. The indescribable gibbering darkness, the unnameable monstrosities; they’re indescribable and unnameable for the same reason that Scarlett and Rhett are irritatingly dense — because racism means you’re not allowed to know those other people, over there, which means you also can’t know yourself. Racism poisons Gone With the Wind, and it poisons Lovecraft’s world too. In Lovecraft and Mitchell that’s the shadow that can’t be named, and that neither wind nor war can blow away.