Quotes About Lovecraft

Wrestling with Race

Real-World Insignificance Made HPL Seem Relevant

“…ten, eleven years old is the time…when I felt incredibly powerless, and like everyone and everything in the world was in control of me. And all I wanted was to be in control of myself. And on some level, that is the essential story that Lovecraft tells again and again and again. And that really spoke to me as a kid.”

—Victor LaValle, interview with Eric Molinsky for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

The Fear of Irrelevance Stops Resonating After a While

“Much of the world—I would say, certainly, most women, many people of color…in the United States—the concept that you are not that important, that you are not central to the conversation that the culture is having, is a given. It’s a given. And so the concept that I would be terrified that I was insignificant is almost laughable to me as a grown-up. Because, to my mind, the sort of narrative that I feel like I live, you know, a good part of the day, is that the world is actively hostile to me. That it finds me a bother. That it wishes I wasn’t there, at least in spaces that are not black or brown. And that’s very different from what Lovecraft is getting across.”

—Victor LaValle, interview with Eric Molinsky for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

Wrestling with HPL

“…not until my 30s again did I pick him up. And when I say ‘pick him up,’ I mean like, I knew which stories had the stuff I really hated, but I was sort of like, you know, it was like I was missing a family member who I knew could be trouble, so I hung out with him when he wasn’t drinking. And then, it probably wasn’t until my, like, late 30s, early 40s that I said, ‘No, you can’t do this. You can’t pretend. You gotta go back, and you gotta read it all, and you gotta figure out how—if and how you can make peace with all of it.’ And then, when I read all of it again, I started to feel like, ‘OK, I can see the ways—much like with family or friends—I can see the ways that I have to call out what’s bad and still be able to embrace what I love.’”

—Victor LaValle, interview with Eric Molinsky for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

HPL’s Fear of White Supremacy’s Eventual Fall

“I think he wholeheartedly believed in white supremacy. But I also believe that he, like many others, suspected and was aware that it was a crock of shit…. He has an overall anxiety about whiteness and the false nature of its supremacy, and he’s anxious about when this will all fall down. So much has been built upon the falsity, the false foundation of white supremacy, there’s no way that it can last. There’s no way. But because of that falsity, I think that the power, the hold on the power, has always been unsure. And I think Lovecraft’s talent was that he keyed into that anxiety and that lack of surety about the hold of white supremacy on the culture, on the nation, on even its own peoples. And because of that, I think he was always writing towards that anxiety.”

—Dr. Kinitra Brooks, lit prof at MSU, interview with Eric Molinsky for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

How Race Plays into HPL’s Cosmic Horror

“And one of the reasons why Lovecraft thought that Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods were horrific is because they see the entire human race, regardless of color, as being unworthy of existence. And that idea terrified Lovecraft, even though it was a fantasy he had made up.”

—Eric Molinsky (possibly summarizing part of his interview with Dr. Kinitra Brooks) for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

Reclaiming vs. Inverting

“Lovecraft the person, yeah, let’s cancel him, let’s fire him out of a cannon into the sun…. With that said, I think his sandbox doesn’t necessarily deserve canceling; particuarly if there are people of color, or women, or gay people, or poor people, or any of the people he hated who can make a focus of why they were so, so bad and bigoted…. I’ve heard people use the term ‘reclaim,’ and I don’t think that’s what people are trying to do. We’re not trying to reclaim it; I think we’re trying to invert it. We’re—we’re not trying to recreate anything of his; we’re trying to analyze it and see what it was that is interesting about it, rather than what’s appealing about it. Because I think we’re all very much into that space where it’s kind of, ‘Well, it’s better if something is interesting than if it’s likeable.’”

—Premee Mohamed, lit prof at MSU, interview with Eric Molinsky for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

”Racecraft” as a Term for the Subgenre

“…you can actually utilize some of the elements from his work and their theoretical underpinnings to create what I call ‘Racecraftian Horror,’ where you’re actually, like, looking at the arcane nature of, like, how race is constructed, and how it gets deployed through narratives. And then utilize, like, the idea of cosmic awe, or, like, utilize the idea of the grotesque, or different things that Lovecraft is dealing with, but filter it through a critical race studies lens.”

—John Jennings, lit prof at MSU, interview with Eric Molinsky for the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode “Inverting Lovecraft,” released July 23, 2020

The Derleth Heresy

Christian Parallel

“It is undeaiably evident that there exists in Lovecraft‘s concept a basic similarity to the Christian Mythos, specifically in regard to the explusion of Satan from Eden and the power of evil.”

—August Derleth, “The Cthulhu Mythos,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 1,” p. vii.

Organized Pantheon and Elemental Alignment

“As Lovecraft conceived the deities or forces of his mythos, there were initially, the Elder Gods, none of whom save Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, is ever identified by name; these Elder Gods were benign deities, representing the forces of good, and existed peacefully at or near Betelgeuze in the constellation Orion, very rarely stirring forth to intervene in the unceasing struggle between the powers of evil and the races of Earth. These powers of evil were variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones, though the latter term is most often applied to the manifestations of one of the Great Old Ones on earth’s extension. The Great Old Ones, unlike the Elder Gods, are named, and make frightening appearances in certain of the tales. Supreme among the Great Old Ones is the blind idiot god, Azathoth, an ‘amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.’ Yog-Sothoth, the ‘all-in-one and one-in-all,’ shares Azathoth’s dominion, and is not subject to the laws of time and space, being coexistent with all time and conterminous with all space. Nyarlathotep, who is presumably the messenger of the Great Old Ones; Great Cthulhu, dweller in hidden R’lyeh deep in the sea; Hastur the Unspeakable, who occupies the air and interstellar spaces, half-brother to Cthulhu; and Shub-Niggurath, ‘the black goat of the woods with a thousand young’ complete the roster of the Great Old Ones as originally conceived. Parallels in macabre fiction are immediately apparent, for Nyarlathotep corresponds to an earth-elemental, Cthulhu to a water-elemental, Hastur to an air-elemental, and Shub-Niggurath is the Lovecraftian conception of the god of fertility.”

—August Derleth, “The Cthulhu Mythos,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 1,” p. viii.

Apparent Acknowledgment of HPL’s Indifference

“It would be a mistake to assume that the Cthulhu Mythos was a planned development in Lovecraft’s work. There is everything to show that he had no intention whatsoever of evolving the Cthulhu Mythos until that pattern made itself mainfest in his work, which accounts for certain trivial inconsistencies amont the stories.”

—August Derleth, “The Cthulhu Mythos,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 1,” p. xi.

Odd Disregard for HPL’s Contributions

“The Cthulhu Mythos, it might be said in retrospect—for certainly the Mythos as an inspiration for new fiction is hardly likely to afford readers with enough that is new and different in concept and execution to create a continuing and growing demand—represented for H. P. Lovecraft a kind of dream-world; and it ought to be pointed out that Lovecraft lived vicariously in a succession of dream-worlds, sometimes only peripherally attached to reality—[including] the domain of fantasy and “remote wonder” which led him into the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, where he indulged his predilection for the fantastic, and the strange and terrible in a series of memorable stories of such strength that even today, more than three decades after his death, they command the respect and admiration of readers throughout the world.”

—August Derleth, “The Cthulhu Mythos,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 1,” pp. xiii-xiv.

Backhanded Compliment

“The very existence of continuing consideration of H. P. Lovecraft on any terms is proof that his work cannot be ignored, and that, a quarter of a century after his death, his place as a major writer in the minor macabre division of literature is secure.”

—August Derleth, “H. P. Lovecraft and His Work,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, (New York: Lancer, 1963), p. 21.

HPL’s Writing

The Mythos as an Aesthetic

That the preponderance of such derivative work has been, in the words of the late E. Hoffmann Price, “abominable rubbish” is less significant than the very real injustice done thereby to the Mythos. Lovecraft’s imaginary cosmogony was never a static system but rather a sort of aesthetic construct that remained ever adaptable to its creator’s developing personality and altered interests.

—Jim Turner, “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1990 ed.

Mythos Stories Should Be More Than Pastiche

The Mythos, in other words, represents those cosmic wonder tales by Lovecraft in which the author had begun to direct his attention to the modern scientific universe; the Mythos deities in turn hypostatize the qualities of such a purposeless, indifferent, unutterably alien universe. And thus to all those Lovecraftian imitators who over the years have perpetrated Mythos pastiches in which eccentric New England recluses utter the right incantations in the wrong books and are promptly eaten by a giant frog named Cthulhu: the Mythos is not a concatenation of facile formulas and glossary gleanings, but rather a certain cosmic state of mind.

—Jim Turner, “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1990 ed.

“…the steps of the Hall of Dagon are littered with the bones of would-be pasticheurs who tried to write a Lovecraftian story but, lacking the Silver Key, failed utterly to attain the incantatory awe of their intended prototype.”

—Jim Turner, “Cthulhu 2000,” in Cthulhu 2000

Nihilism

Lovecraft’s own view of science was as nihilistic (or cosmically indifferent as he would have preferred it) as his views about anything else, whether it be religion, philosophy or civilisation itself. At the turn of the 20th century, man’s increased reliance upon science was both opening new worlds and solidifying the manners by which he could understand them.

—Colin Wilson, “Foreword,” in Crypt of Cosmic Carnage: The Very Best Weird Fiction 1917-1935

The reason the mature Lovecraft was never a writer of conventional horror fiction is that horror presupposes an actively malicious universe, both within and without the individual, whereas Lovecraft all his life was a scientific materialist for whom the concept of “evil” conveyed no absolute meaning. “Only another collection of molecules” was his characterization of an unfortunate encounter with a fellow human being, while in his relation to the cosmos-at-large, Lovecraft described himself as an “indifferentist.”

—Jim Turner, “Cthulhu 2000,” in Cthulhu 2000. (“Collection of molecules” quote by Samuel Loveman in “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist,” originally delivered at the HPL Memorial Symposium [1958]. Since published in Lovecraft Remembered [ed. Peter Cannon, Arkham House 1998].)

Horror vs. Fantasy

Never during the final decade of his life—a period coinciding more or less with the Cthulhu Mythos fiction—did Lovecraft expressly consider himself to be a horror writer. He rather, as a cosmic fantasist, endeavored “to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.” […] The horror element, in other words, is an ineluctable concomitant to his aesthetic theories, not an end in itself. Only decades after Lovecraft’s death, when he was rediscovered by a shell-shocked postwar generation who had endured a cataclysmic global holocaust, followed by the omnipresent specters of Cold War paranoia and atomic annihilation—only then was Lovecraft adjudged a “horror writer” by a generation of readers who had forgotten the meaning of cosmic wonder. Thus the reclusive Providence dreamer was invoked as orchestrator of the major uncertainties of our century, his Cthulhu deities the mythopoeic presentiment of everything from societal collapse to nuclear devastation.

—Jim Turner, “Cthulhu 2000,” in Cthulhu 2000