Background, or How a Fun Reading Project Can Turn into Years of Homework

No doubt about it, I was a nerdy kid. Bad at sports, into computers, nose always in a book with spaceships or centaurs on the cover. Science fiction and fantasy were my bread and margarine (butter being less convenient in the tropical heat), and I consumed as much as I possibly could. Somehow, despite being (polyun)saturated in SFF from childhood, I didn’t run across H. P. Lovecraft until my late twenties. And yet, I had already felt his weird influence. I had seen movies like Alien and The Evil Dead, The Thing and Event Horizon. I had watched The Outer Limits, read Stephen King. When I finally sat down to read “The Call of Cthulhu,” it was like being ushered through the door of a (gambrel-roofed) house after a lifetime of catching glimpses through the menacingly dark windows. I was immediately drawn into a world of barely-contained despair, in which sanity is something humans cling to only so long as they do not actually understand the reality of the universe as it is. Despite HPL’s Victorian archaisms, purple adjectives, and often predictable plot structures, I felt drawn to something in the background—the atmosphere of dread and pessimistic philosophy that lie at the heart of true cosmic horror. I ate the major works up, and for a while I steeped myself in Lovecraftiana—the H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast being a large part of my education.

At some point in late 2020, my pandemic-addled brain convinced me to go back to the beginning of Lovecraft’s catalogue and make my way through the entire corpus. Ostensibly, I wanted a better understanding of how the man made such an impact. But I think, deep down, I wanted to find more stories that evoke the emotions I most associate with cosmic horror—a disorientation and unease when confronting the endless void. In the face of things too large to comprehend, how do we respond? Lovecraft pioneered a subgenre dealing directly with that sort of question.

Here, I’ll add a note about HPL’s most obvious moral failing. Even the shallowest reading of the greatest hits—”The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Rats in the Walls,” The Thing on the Doorstep—reveals Lovecraft’s racist, sexist views. But the further one delves into the catalog, the sheer depth of his prejudice becomes clear. In his fiction, racial mixing and cultural churn are not just a part of the societal landscape, but often the very locus of horror. He expected readers to resonate with the xenophobia at the heart of stories like “He,” “The Street,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” and even more worthy titles like “Herbert West—Reanimator” and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It’s abundantly clear: Lovecraft was a bigot. One of those infamous Old White Men whose impressive accomplishments sit directly beside their abominable morals. In other words: a racist dillweed.

Unfortunately, many writers who came after HPL carried that blinkered perspective into their own work, producing pastiches riddled with stereotypes and fear of the exotic Other well into the late 20th century. It’s as if they believed the Cthulhu Mythos somehow needed those aspects in order to feel authentic or cohesive. Thankfully, latter-day writers have found ways to incorporate Lovecraftian tropes and cosmic themes without the poisonous baggage of earlier generations (though much work remains to be done).

You may be asking, “If that’s what you think of the man, why do this?” I’m not sure I have a clear answer. If the goal is to grasp the extent of Lovecraft’s influence and, more, to explore those places where writers have left him behind to push the genre in new directions, then I’m nowhere near finished. I suppose I keep going because (to paraphrase Longfellow) “when it’s good, it’s very very good.” I have found some of my favorite stories through this project. A few have actually changed me, given me new perspective. I find my life in general to be short on awe these days. With awe and dread being such close relatives, cosmic horror has the capacity to put me in the vicinity of both.

(To be continued. I’ll write more on this when I have time.)