H.P. Lovecraft: The Father of Modern Horror

[Devan Sagliani]

H.P. Lovecraft: The Father of Modern Horror

We explore the origin story of H.P. Lovecraft and delve into the psyche of the man who would horrify generations to come.

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[Robert B. Marks]

"Legendary horror director John Carpenter's "The Thing" is an homage to Lovecraft's "Mountains of Madness," if not an outright rip off."

Um...while this is a very interesting article, I do feel the need to point out that this sentence is factually incorrect. John Carpenter's The Thing is a faithful adaptation of a story by John W. Campbell, and the only thing it shares with Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is an Antarctic setting. Carpenter did do a Lovecraftian tribute movie, but it was called In the Mouth of Madness.

 

[Guffe]

Interesting read about a very interesting writer/author!
I have to admitt I've been thinking about reading some of his work some time but never got around to it :/
It wouldn't be that difficult as a mate has a few of his books in the shelf...

 

[Ryan Hughes]

Lol. and not one mention of Lovecraft's On the Creation of N****rs. Lovecraft was a hack and racist; his toxic legacy is proof enough of that. Honestly, the Espcapist is all the worse for even bringing him up like this. We all know that Baudelaire was the true inheritor of Poe's will, and no one with any real knowledge of literature even pays attention to Lovecraft nowadays. Just leave him and his work to rot like it deserves. Seriously, he wasn't even smart enough to realize that the Gaelic aspirated T is silent, lol.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

Lol. and not one mention of Lovecraft's On the Creation of N****rs. Lovecraft was a hack and racist; his toxic legacy is proof enough of that. Honestly, the Espcapist is all the worse for even bringing him up like this. We all know that Baudelaire was the true inheritor of Poe's will, and no one with any real knowledge of literature even pays attention to Lovecraft nowadays. Just leave him and his work to rot like it deserves. Seriously, he wasn't even smart enough to realize that the Gaelic aspirated T is silent, lol.

That's quite an ax you have there, do you spend much time grinding it?

I have always believed that an artist's personal politics should have no bearing on the judgment of his work. Sure Lovecraft was a shortsighted xenophobe. But he sure knew how to write a compelling story.

And, for the record, I am also a big fan of Baudelaire. That doesn't preclude loving Lovecraft.

On topic, I am looking forward to the next two articles. I have spent the last few weeks at the persistent urging of a friend immersing myself in Lovecraft's mythos, and feel much the richer for it.

 

[That1Guy]

Good read, can't wait for the next two. I've been meaning to start reading some Lovecraft for quite some time now, just haven't gotten around to it.

 

[Vivi22]

Lol. and not one mention of Lovecraft's On the Creation of N****rs. Lovecraft was a hack and racist; his toxic legacy is proof enough of that. Honestly, the Espcapist is all the worse for even bringing him up like this. We all know that Baudelaire was the true inheritor of Poe's will, and no one with any real knowledge of literature even pays attention to Lovecraft nowadays. Just leave him and his work to rot like it deserves. Seriously, he wasn't even smart enough to realize that the Gaelic aspirated T is silent, lol.

Did Lovecraft jizz in your morning Cheerio's or something?

 

[Ryan Hughes]

That's quite an ax you have there, do you spend much time grinding it?

I have always believed that an artist's personal politics should have no bearing on the judgment of his work. Sure Lovecraft was a shortsighted xenophobe. But he sure knew how to write a compelling story.

And, for the record, I am also a big fan of Baudelaire. That doesn't preclude loving Lovecraft.

On topic, I am looking forward to the next two articles. I have spent the last few weeks at the persistent urging of a friend immersing myself in Lovecraft's mythos, and feel much the richer for it.

No, I spend too much time wielding the axe to actually sharpen it much. The internet treats Lovecraft like he was Nicola Tesla. . . So, I have to set about chopping it all down.

Yeah, I get the idea of separating artist from their work. If we didn't, we'd throw out 85% of all the good books ever written. Dostoevsky was mildly anti-Semitic. Elliot and Pound called Hitler "misunderstood." (Though, in their defense they did voluntarily commit themselves to asylums shortly thereafter, so they knew something was wrong.) I could go on. I get it. Separate the artist from the art. There is just one serious problem with attempting to do that to Lovecraft: it cannot be done, because the racist belief is the art itself. "On the Creation" is not from personal correspondence, it is a published work. Lovecraft's wikia has a whole section on racist and veiled passages from a wide array of work he had published. It is not that he is a racist, it is that his work is racist. And I find it incredibly sad that people cannot see that.

 

[Fox12]

Lol. and not one mention of Lovecraft's On the Creation of N****rs. Lovecraft was a hack and racist; his toxic legacy is proof enough of that. Honestly, the Espcapist is all the worse for even bringing him up like this. We all know that Baudelaire was the true inheritor of Poe's will, and no one with any real knowledge of literature even pays attention to Lovecraft nowadays. Just leave him and his work to rot like it deserves. Seriously, he wasn't even smart enough to realize that the Gaelic aspirated T is silent, lol.

I think Lovecraft is more famous for his ideas then he is for his actual writing.

His prose could be rather poor, and he certainly didn't have the mastery of symbolism that other writers had, but the reason I think Lovecraft matters is because he was tapping into something that society at large was only beginning to wake up to, and that's the existential horror of a world in which Nietzsche said God is Dead. There's a certain crisis of meaning that some people experienced then, and even now, that settled somewhere just below the collective unconscious during the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds. You can see it in the works of Tennyson and other writers as they struggled with their faith as a result of the enlightenment.

In that sense I think Lovecraft touched on nihilism in a way that other writers didn't. Even if he wasn't the best writer (and he really wasn't) he did have some important ideas, I think. His affect on popular culture, and on other, better writers, is really much more important then any individual story he wrote.

You could also call him the George R.R. Martin to Poe's Tolkien. He doesn't even begin to compare to him in quality, but he managed to do something completely different from the Gothic horror people were accustomed to.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

I get it. Separate the artist from the art. There is just one serious problem with attempting to do that to Lovecraft: it cannot be done, because the racist belief is the art itself. "On the Creation" is not from personal correspondence, it is a published work. Lovecraft's wikia has a whole section on racist and veiled passages from a wide array of work he had published. It is not that he is a racist, it is that his work is racist. And I find it incredibly sad that people cannot see that.

I don't know if it's that people can't see it. Half of his stories are about either hereditary degeneration or illiterate hill folks scared of their own shadows. Jesus, he literally named a cat in one story after the most racist word in the English language. It would take some really heavy blinders to ignore his bigotry.

But I still don't think that hurts his work much. It may make us uncomfortable to see him use the N word so casually, but his gift for evokative prose is not harmed by it. It's really hard these days to escape the legacy of institutionalized racism, Lovecraft is not unique in that.

I just think that his ability as an artist deserves as much recognition as, say, Mel Gibson, who is an abhorrent person but still made some classic movies.

 

[Skeleon]

Lovecraft's "personal views" (i. e. racism) seeped into his works on numerous occasions. Just read his books and see how often he references lowly, ugly and dumb foreigners as minions of some big bad guy or half-breeds. He had a big thing for racial purity among humans (so mixed race individuals are usually portrayed as particularly sickening, again usually as the barely human minions of some big bad guy), which also informed some of his other stories about human hybridization with Deep Ones. I still like a lot of what he wrote (not all of it by far, though; there are lots of garbage there as well, among the gems), but it's really problematic to downplay these tendencies rather than acknowledge and criticize them. A lot of people who did or made great things were awful in any number of ways. Don't let their accomplishments blind you to their flaws, don't elevate them onto an altar, don't worship them as heroes but understand them in their entirety, warts and all.

 

[BeeGeenie]

"a loosely connected cannon"... I didn't know Lovecraft owned any artillery.

But seriously, I don't much care for his writing style, and the blatant racism, but you can't deny his vivid imagination or the impact it made on the horror genre.

 

[JustAnotherAardvark]

it's really problematic

The watchword of our times, "problematic".
"We don't wanna burn books, but .."
Fuck it.
You want to start at my house?
Drop me a PM, I'll give you the address.

 

[Skeleon]

The watchword of our times, "problematic".
"We don't wanna burn books, but .."
Fuck it.
You want to start at my house?
Drop me a PM, I'll give you the address.

What the actual flying fuck. How dare you imply I'd want to "burn books"? Especially in light of what I wrote? I take issue with rewriting history and ignoring people's faults, including writers whose works I enjoy. That's doing the exact opposite of trying to erase what happened by burning it.

 

[JustAnotherAardvark]

The watchword of our times, "problematic".
"We don't wanna burn books, but .."
Fuck it.
You want to start at my house?
Drop me a PM, I'll give you the address.

What the actual flying fuck. How dare you imply I'd want to "burn books"? Especially in light of what I wrote? I take issue with rewriting history and ignoring people's faults, including writers whose works I enjoy. That's doing the exact opposite of trying to erase what happened by burning it.

How dare? How DARE? Seriously? It's a *thing* now, in case you missed it, to salt the ground old heroes trod.
It isn't courage, it isn't pragmatism, it isn't honestly, it's the *modern* cursing the *past* for not being *modern* enough, and ignore how they've moved us to the future.
You want to play the victim? Join the fucking queue.

 

[Skeleon]

You want to play the victim? Join the fucking queue.

Nah, you can keep that queue all to yourself, complaining about how awful everything is, because of people actually evaluating the past critically.

"Old heroes"? My very point is not to elevate people to hero-status to the point that it blinds us to their flaws.

How dare? How DARE? Seriously?

In case you're actually as historically illiterate as you've come off so far: You're basically calling me a Nazi, as that is what book burning most prominently implies. I think that warrants a "how dare you". It also warrants a big "fuck off".

 

[DarklordKyo]

To everyone debating the issue of Lovecraft's racism, is it really a topic worth talking about? While anyone with half a brain nowadays knows that racism is wrong, there is the fact that it was a common thing back in those days (hell, Dr. King's famous fight for equal rights wasn't until the 60s, and Lovecraft was a child of the 20s, yes?). Of course, if he was born nowadays, that'd be a different story, but should we really let values dissonance get in the way of appreciating the work of an undoubtedly influential author? (like him or not, he was a major pioneer of the Cosmic Horror subgenre of horror fiction).

 

[JustAnotherAardvark]

It also warrants a big "fuck off".

Have a good one!

To everyone debating the issue of Lovecraft's racism, is it really a topic worth talking about? While anyone with half a brain nowadays knows that racism is wrong, there is the fact that it was a common thing back in those days (hell, Dr. King's famous fight for equal rights wasn't until the 60s, and Lovecraft was a child of the 20s, yes?).

I think it's worth talking about, in context. I mean, he was basically an misanthrope, at the very least. How does our view of our fellow man influence what we write? Why *does* 'the other' scare us so much? It's far, far too easy to dismiss 'lovecraft's quirks' as either inconsequential or, the more popular, 'evil racism'. Fuck that noise.

Of course, if he was born nowadays, that'd be a different story,

Uh...what? Troubled young man who pisses his family fortune away and dedicates himself to his mother would ... be ... different ... now ... how? Sure, different things to be prejudiced about. Maybe he gets himself a twitter and a facebook ... but ...

 

[Fox12]

The watchword of our times, "problematic".
"We don't wanna burn books, but .."
Fuck it.
You want to start at my house?
Drop me a PM, I'll give you the address.

What the actual flying fuck. How dare you imply I'd want to "burn books"? Especially in light of what I wrote? I take issue with rewriting history and ignoring people's faults, including writers whose works I enjoy. That's doing the exact opposite of trying to erase what happened by burning it.

How dare? How DARE? Seriously? It's a *thing* now, in case you missed it, to salt the ground old heroes trod.
It isn't courage, it isn't pragmatism, it isn't honestly, it's the *modern* cursing the *past* for not being *modern* enough, and ignore how they've moved us to the future.
You want to play the victim? Join the fucking queue.

Yes, because the best reaction to people pretending that Lovecraft was the devil incarnate is to pretend that he was an angel. Surely both conclusions will lead us to the truth.

Skeleon is right, no one is above criticism, including your sacred cow. He was a complicated individual, and we should be able to objectively study and discuss his work from an academic standpoint (if he's as worthy as you say he is, and I would argue that he is). His views say a lot about the time in which he lived, both in regards to his views on race and on his views concerning the world at large. He wasn't perfect, not by a long shot. His prose could be shoddy at times, which many professional writers have pointed out, and his narratives were of varying quality. That said, the man had a knack for storytelling and suspense, and he's one of the few artists to truly come up with something wholly original.

Lets be reasonable when looking at the man, and not pretend that he's somehow above criticism. Faulkner, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and any other writer should be susceptible to criticism. Lovecraft isn't any better.