H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Wikipedia) was a nervous racist.
Though progressive in other ways, Lovecraft was uncommonly regressive on the idea of race, even for his time. This is part of his attachment to the past, which he called comfortable “illusion”: a hollow protection from meaningless chaos. In his stories, a thorough inquiry will often result in a negative self-image. For example, in “The Ancient Track” (1930), he wrote:
Too well I saw from the mad scene
That my loved past had never been—
People like to offer biographical explanations for such things. Lovecraft would not admit—perhaps not even to himself—that his father, Winfield, slowly died of syphilis while the boy began to write. His mother, Susan, ended up dead in the same hospital with the same disease. Lovecraft himself then lived as what assholes call a “penniless loser”. He loved the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Both men struggled and died too soon of avoidable causes.
No audience—not even a racist one—will recognize its conscious experience or aspiration in Lovecraft. He was interested in the distant, the unknown and the external. Born six months after Vannevar Bush, Lovecraft was the first SFF writer who understood what both Darwin and Einstein would mean for culture. He failed to break away from bad old ideas, but his focus was otherwise fruitful. By avoiding anthropocentrism, allegory and wishful thinking while retaining the dreamlike Expressionist beauty of writers like Georg Trakl, Lovecraft succeeded in building monstrous metaphors for the subconscious human fear of dysteleology. Paradoxically, this opens him up even to readers looking for themselves.
Articles
- Initial Assessment
- Detwiller’s mathematical Mythos
- Delta Green Tradecraft Manual excerpts
- The revolted hero
- The deconsolidation of liberal democracy in horror gaming
- The pulping of Delta Green
- Tolkning av Cthulhukrig
- Twin Cities By Night plays “Hoard”
Reviewed work
- “The Little Glass Bottle” (1897) Writer
- “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” (1898) Writer
- “The Secret Cave” (1898) Writer
- “The Mysterious Ship” (1902) Writer
- “The Beast in the Cave” (1905) Writer
- “The Alchemist” (1908) Writer
- “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” (1917) Writer
- “Nemesis” (1918) Writer
- “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919) Writer
- “Dagon” (1919) Writer
- “Memory” (1919) Writer
- “Old Bugs” (1919) Writer
- “Sweet Ermengarde” (1917–1921) Writer
- “The Green Meadow” (1919) Writer
- “The Transition of Juan Romero” (1919) Writer
- “The White Ship” (1919) Writer
- “Celephaïs” (1920) Writer
- “Nyarlathotep” (1920) Writer
- “Poetry and the Gods” (1920) Writer
- “Polaris” (1920) Writer
- “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920) Writer
- “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1920) Writer
- “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1920) Writer
- “The Street” (1920) Writer
- “The Temple” (1920) Writer
- “Ex Oblivione” (1921) Writer
- “Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1921) Writer
- “The Crawling Chaos” (1921) Writer
- “The Moon-Bog” (1921) Writer
- “The Music of Erich Zann” (1921) Writer
- “The Nameless City” (1921) Writer
- “The Other Gods” (1921) Writer
- “The Picture in the House” (1921) Writer
- “The Terrible Old Man” (1921) Writer
- “The Tree” (1921) Writer
- “Azathoth” (1922) Writer
- “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922) Writer
- “The Hound” (1922) Writer
- “The Tomb” (1922) Writer
- “Hypnos” (1923) Writer
- “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923) Writer
- “The Lurking Fear” (1923) Writer
- “What the Moon Brings” (1923) Writer
- “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” (1924) Writer
- “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) Writer
- “The Shunned House” (1924) Writer
- “In the Vault” (1925) Writer
- “The Festival” (1925) Writer
- “The Unnamable” (1925) Writer
- “He” (1926) Writer
- “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) Writer
- “The Outsider” (1926) Writer
- “History of the Necronomicon” (1927) Writer
- “Pickman’s Model” (1927) Writer
- “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) Writer
- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) Writer
- “The Colour Out of Space” (1927) Writer
- “The Descendant” (1927) Writer
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927) Writer
- “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927) Writer
- “The Very Old Folk” (1927) Writer
- “Two Black Bottles” (1927) Writer
- “Cool Air” (1928) Writer
- “Ibid” (1928) Writer
- “The Last Test” (1928) Writer
- “The Curse of Yig” (1929) Writer
- “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) Writer
- “The Silver Key” (1929) Writer
- “Medusa’s Coil” (1930) Writer
- “The Ancient Track” (1930) Writer
- “The Electric Executioner” (1930) Writer
- “The Mound” (1930) Writer
- “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930) Writer
- “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1931) Writer
- “The Trap” (1931) Writer
- “The Horror in the Museum” (1932) Writer
- “The Man of Stone” (1932) Writer
- “Out of the Aeons” (1933) Writer
- “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) Writer
- “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) Writer
- “From Beyond” (1934) Writer
- “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1934) Writer
- “The Quest of Iranon” (1935) Writer
- At the Mountains of Madness (1936) Writer
- “In the Walls of Eryx” (1936) Writer
- “The Haunter of the Dark” (1936) Writer
- The Shadow out of Time (1936) Writer
- “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936) Writer
Other
The following make direct references to the H. P. Lovecraft tag.
- “Cthulhu Wars” tag description
- On re-reading The Lord of the Rings after 20-odd years
- Secrets of Sweden
- Trovärdighet i bordsrollspel
- “Haïta, the Shepherd” (1891)
- “Lot No. 249” (1892)
- The War of the Worlds (1897)
- “The Leather Funnel” (1902)
- “The Ash Tree” (1904)
- The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
- The Sheik (1921)
- “The Scorced Face” (1925)
- “Emak-Bakia” (1927)
- Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930)
- Under meteorernas trumeld (1932)
- Berkeley Square (1933)
- “By His Bootstraps” (1941)
- “Goldfish Bowl” (1942)
- The Stranger (1942)
- “The Man on the Threshold” (1952)
- The Quatermass Experiment (1953)
- Aniara (1956)
- “Under Old Earth” (1966)
- Roadside Picnic (1972)
- A Song for Lya (1974)
- Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
- The Brothers Lionheart (1977)
- The Last Wave (1977)
- City of the Living Dead (1980)
- “Hinterlands” (1981)
- The Colour of Magic (1983)
- Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)
- “Silent Möbius” (1991)
- Dark Waters (1993)
- In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
- Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)
- “What’s Expected of Us” (2005)
- The Stories of Ibis (2006)
- The Mist (2007)
- Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008)
- “Plague Gods” (2009/2019)
- The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (2010)
- John Dies at the End (2012)
- Rick and Morty (2013)
- Ronja the Robber’s Daughter (2014)
- True Detective (2014)
- “Régalec, premiers contacts avec le poisson roi” (2015)
- “As Worlds Collide” (2016)
- I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
- New Zealand: Earth’s Mythical Islands (2016)
- The Endless (2017)
- Annihilation (2018)
- Final Space (2018)
- “The Tall Grass” (2021)