![]() ![]() Joshi notes that Lovecraft’s love of science wouldn’t have supported his views, since “the brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished.” What is clear is that by the early 1930s, Lovecraft was passionately espousing his racist viewpoints in letters to friends, defending white lynch mobs, and trumpeting Hitler with praise that may seem eerily familiar these days: “I know he’s a clown but god I like the boy!”)īy that time, he’d also established himself as a writer by contributing to the magazine medium commonly referred to as pulp fiction. Even his biographer and ardent supporter S.T. (It’s not clear where Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia originated, though his upbringing may naturally have had a lot to do with it. By the time his mother also began to experience signs of psychological breakdown - perhaps also because of syphilis - Lovecraft was in his late 20s, and his fear of mental illness, his raging xenophobia, and his fixation on the cosmos as a reflection for all the dread he felt were well established through his writing. As a teen he suffered severe social anxiety and agoraphobia, and poured himself into voracious reading and studying, especially horror fiction and astronomy.Īlthough Lovecraft was extremely well-read, between his family’s financial decline in his boyhood and what seem to have been his own episodes of mental illness, he never graduated high school. His father’s confinement in an asylum and his maternal grandmother’s death - which occurred not long after Lovecraft moved into the matriarchal family manse - were looming events of his childhood, and Lovecraft became obsessed with the fear that he, too, might experience a psychological breakdown. When he was 3 years old, his father had a psychological breakdown, probably related to syphilis, and Lovecraft moved in with his mother’s wealthy family. Lovecraft was a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose works were a key part of the subgenre of horror that would come to be known as “Weird fiction.” Born in Providence in 1890, Lovecraft grew up with an agonizing fear of both death and mental collapse. Lovecraft grew up haunted by madness and death LOVECRAFT CALL OF CTHULHU HOW TOWith Lovecraft, it’s helpful to understand both how and why his stories were so influential, and why there’s been so much hand-wringing over how to think about and discuss them since. ![]() His influence is so ubiquitous within horror and fantasy that you simply can’t ignore it - nor is it always easy or simple to subvert it. For the problem with Lovecraft is that Lovecraft is everywhere. Necessarily, Lovecraft Country’s approach to Lovecraft’s legacy is simultaneously one of shrewd affection and resigned repugnance. ![]() LOVECRAFT CALL OF CTHULHU FULLThe story teems with all the typical Lovecraftian tropes: creepy New England villages, dark mansions with esoteric secrets, and tentacle monsters shipped direct from the cosmic void but it’s also full of very realistic horror, in the form of the racist police violence and white supremacy our heroes must confront at every turn. The series, helmed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists and horror nerds at the center of a proper Lovecraftian mystery. With HBO’s adaptation of Lovecraft Country into a 10-episode drama, that broader, overdue cultural reckoning may have finally arrived. In HBO’s Lovecraft Country, cosmic horrors pale next to the reality of racism By centering Black characters who were often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft’s stories, the book allows for a new layer of meaning to map onto Lovecraft’s old fears. Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country was one of the first attempts at an answer. For the past decade or so, as the extent of his racism has become more widely known and acknowledged, horror and fantasy writers whose landscapes are saturated with Lovecraft’s influence have been trying to figure out what to do about him. He injected many of his most famous and beloved stories with overt racist metaphors and frequent blunt literal racism. Lovecraft leaves no room for a debate about separating the artist from their art. Lovecraft and his works of literary horror are long overdue for a cultural reckoning - because Lovecraft may have been one of the 20th century’s most influential writers, but he was also one of its most gallingly racist. There’s a prehistoric sea cucumber named after his most famous creation, Cthulhu. Giger to the otherworldly tentacle monsters of Stranger Things to True Detective’s Rust Cohle. His monsters - and the men who encounter their cosmic evil - have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R. He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror, from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro. His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction. ![]()
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