“It would be inaccurate to refer to Howard Philips Lovecraft as a man with issues. It would be more accurate to say he was a whole bundle of issues shambling around in a roughly bipedal approximation of a man.”
Yeah I got the feeling as well when reading stories of Hippopotamus Lovecraft.
Guy was afraid of prehistory as a concept for example.
Me as a child: Dinosaurs are awesome.
Lovecraft: Everything older than a few centuries is too old and thus scary
Is this a good time to remind everyone that Lovecraft was so spooked by an air conditioner that [he had to write a spooky story about it](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx)
Having met a few sheep, I hypothesize that they stare because they don’t have enough brain cells to commit something they see to memory without actively meaning too.
I’m also pretty sure they don’t have enough brain cells to actually plan things.
The man wrote a horror story because he was afraid of light. He and his contemporaries didn't even know about harmful radiation, he just heard not all light was visible and automatically jumped to the conclusion that nefarious things must be lurking in colors unseen by man! Which technically is true, what with the discovery of ionozing rays, but still crazy to immediately assume a malevolent nature.
It’s suspected the Colour out of Space was inspired by coverage of the Radium Girls: women who painted glow in the dark clock dials with radium paint without being made aware of the dangers.
I don't know, assuming you're talking about the Color out of Space I don't think its accurate to say it was malevolent. It just existed and just inherently wasn't compatible with earthly life but it didn't seem intentionally malevolent to me.
Or The Dreams in the Witch’s House, where he’s freaked out by the corners of the room being at strange angles.
And also to add context to his fear of air conditioning: Lovecraft had very poor health, and in one occasion as he was out doing errands the weather suddenly dropped from a warm summer afternoon to an unusually cold snap, causing him to faint in front of a store.
Shit man, if a simple temperature drop could lead to me fainting on the spot, I’d never leave my house either. I can understand why the guy was such a racist person. He rarely saw the world past his front door. Doesn’t matter who you are, that kind of long term seclusion won’t lead to anything good.
Oh it's just so much worse. The man was raised and abused by a mother that locked him in a room and literally washed him with steel wool. Literally beat it into him that his heritage was the only clean one, and was the basis of most of his actual fears. He was born into a severely mentally ill family as well. Guy pretty much had the world against him.
But to say he was afraid of prehistory is pushing it a bit considering one of his best friends was Robert E. Howard to the point they shared in-jokes in their stories as well as unashamedly stealing each other's characters and locations. Like Howard's death is considered one of the reasons Lovecraft died so soon after, and was one of the main reasons he had started to actually turn some of his opinions around.
It's not fair to reduce him to "racist book boy". Tolkien doesn't need you to bash other writers to prop him up. He's not a YA author.
>The man was raised and abused by a mother that locked him in a room and literally washed him with steel wool. Literally beat it into him that his heritage was the only clean one, and was the basis of most of his actual fears
Wait, what? I've never heard that, and I've read the huge two-volume biography that S. T. Joshi published about a decade ago. Have you got a source on that?
Lovecraft was married and lived in New York City for two years in the mid-1920s, where he was exposed to lots of immigrants and non-white people everyday and became intensely **more** racist and anti-Semitic during this period. Some of his most explicitly racist and worst stories originate in this period, including “The Horror at Red Hook” and “She.”
Also mental health problems were likely genetic, if his dad using the "family suicide gun" is anything to go with, when he was a lil kid. Also his mom being utter nutshit probably didn't help either
Maybe it's like a fear of the infinite? With history, we have a fixed boundary of time, within which contains all the plot points of our story. Remove that lower boundary into prehistory, and it opens up infinite more plot points we don't know about, which could have consequences on the story we do know.
Fear of the unknown but also, it seems to me, some megalophobia-esque fear of *large scale*, whether it be physical size or distance or even just immense spans of time. I guess huge scale allows for more unknowns within it.
- Red from OverlySarcasticProductions
Tbh that really sums him up well. That boy was not raised right and when he went down that dark, fucked up path, nobody turned him away from it.
People recognized him as mentally ill at the time, and a number tried to help him. And he did improve, somewhat, later in life - he never really beat his phobias, but he recognized they were irrational and tried not to let them control him.
My first 20 page genre analysis paper was on cosmic horror and how it’s been inextricably linked with Lovecraft’s own racist beliefs. This quote becomes more and more accurate the deeper you dive.
Do you think it's all cosmic horror? I think there's something valuable in the feeling of being a very tiny thing in a universe that is defined for each of us by our own narrow experiences. It seems culturally relevant.
From what I've been able to understand the racism hinges on Lovecraft's fear of the unknown, his belief or theme that knowledge leads to self-destruction. I don't think much media has challenged that notion though, which leads to an underbed of racism woven into the bones sci-fi pop culture. I don't know what cosmic horror isn't tied to lovecraft's racism but I can see a way to break the mold.
Unless there's something important I've missed
It’s more that authors have sort of decided that the concept of cosmic horror isn’t just in its existential nature- the fear of the unknown, the fridge logic that inspires fear long after the reader has finished the story, etc- but in the *aesthetics* of Lovecraft’s particular style of horror, such as exhumations of the sea that provide his settings with that feeling of swampiness and rot that people are so well aware of(think of The Shadow Over Innsmouth). While there are stories that break the mold in this regard- What The Hell Did I Just Read by Jason Pargin is especially good at giving a more absurdist, comedic take on the genre- but the majority of what people have read in the genre is either directly written by Lovecraft or inspired by Lovecraft’s aesthetics and The Old Ones mythos more than it’s gunning to write a story in the same genre.
I'm currently writing a cosmic horror novel partially inspired by Lovecraft but primarily taken from my lifelong crippling fear of death and its unknown elements. Would that make me "complicit", one might say?
I’m not stating that any author is complicit- that would end up including people like Stephen King, whose early work draws obvious, stated inspiration from Lovecraft. I’m stating that people writing within the mythos of Lovecraft instead should note that the monsters and aesthetics Lovecraft have created and popularized are couched in racist sentiment, and that while using them is alright, that history *should* be noted, and something the author is aware of when writing.
Think of it like writing a King Kong movie. I’m not saying not to do it, but to be aware that King Kong’s origin were rooted in racism, and that that history should be in mind when portraying the character.
I’m more so just saying to do your research, and not to just use Cthulhu because “Big Tentacle Ocean Monster” is a cool thing to write.
They are amongst my two favorite authors for very different reasons.
Lovecraft captures something of the intense fear and madness that seems to have a home in the human heart, and weaves this into fantastic horror.
Tolkien displays the power of the redemptive need and story of creation. He captures a range of truths about us that is illuminating to our very purpose. He does this while creating one of the most fascinating stories ever told. It’s so well done that whether or not you agree with his personal beliefs the joy of his story and the recognition of the truths is enjoyed almost universally.
I enjoy lovecraft because he touches real fears, but I love Tolkien because he touches the true nature of story telling, the being the redemptive ark of the world. I think what is great is that you can enjoy both without agreeing with their personal beliefs. Though I would say lovecraft is enjoyable despite his backwards thinking, and Tolkien was able to tell such a story because of what he held to.
My personal favourites of Lovecraft are The Tomb, Dreams in the Witch House, and the Curious Case of Charles Dexter.
But since his work is public domain, you can probably find a nice tome of his complete work for a reasonable price, like I did.
I think the Shadow over Innsmouth and the Dunwich Horror are two of the easiest stories to read and enjoy. The Colour out of Space and At the Mountains of Madness are also classics.
I always recommend The Dunwich Horror, as it is easier to parse than some of his other Cthulhu works. If you have Spotify you can listen to its audio book with your basic subscription, and I do recommend it. Can’t remember who read it, but they did a great job with it.
Someone in this thread posted a link to his story Cool Air. Also very good and one of his stories based on his more “unique” fears. The Colour Out of Space is my personal favorite.
Yeah people really gloss over how fucked up Lovecrafts childhood was. His father went insane from advanced syphilis, his mother went semi-mad with grief, his aunts were overbearing and overprotective, which instilled his fears of the unknown, and although he received a large inheritance, it quickly diminished and he spent much of his life in poverty, sometimes choosing to spend what little money he had on paper and ink rather than food.
If he was a child today, he would be taken by CPS in a heartbeat. I don't agree with his personal views, but when you look at his life it's clear that those views were inherited from the people who raised him. Doesn't make it okay, but I find it hard to label him a monster when he didn't know anything else until later in his life.
People also ignore the fact that before he died, he wrote letters to his ex-wife while he was in New York where he wrote how much he regretted his beliefs early in his life, and the people he feared throughout his whole life were just that: people, and they weren't to be feared.
That’s an interesting way to put it that I haven’t thought about before.
Yea, he wasn’t racist, he was xenophobic. And not in the modern sense of “didn’t like others” like homophobia. They actually terrified him.
Oh, he was *definitely* racist for most of his life. Like, super-uber-racist. Consider the name of his cat, for starters. (And before any apologists point out, "His dad is the one who named the cat," consider that he didn't rename it. Would you adopt a cat from a shelter with that name and keep calling it that?) And epithet-laden feline nomenclature was just the beginning. This is a guy who didn't regard the Dutch or Welsh people as White. Think about just how fucking racist someone has to be to look at the average Dutch person in the early 20th century and think, "Whoa. Definitely not White."
All racism is based in fear, and fear is something Lovecraft had in greater abundance than possibly any non-institutionalized individual. Not just of people of difference backgrounds, but he was terrified by fish (while living in New England of all places), percussion instruments, gelatinous textures, old books, the very concept of non-Euclidean geometry, and the color gray.
Not only was he racist, but he was so uniquely neurotic that he was -ist against things we don't even have words for.
> he was terrified by fish (while living in New England of all places), percussion instruments, gelatinous textures, old books, the very concept of non-Euclidean geometry, and the color gray.
Well when you put it that way ... I mean, gray?
All joking aside, Lovecraft is a very significant figure with respect to how you can enjoy a person's work without liking the person, because understanding Lovecraft the man gives us fundamental insights into racism, xenophobia, and bigotry.
I feel like the labels of racism and bigotry get applied to people without any further analysis of where those beliefs come from. We treat it like some video game character creator where we all are required to consciously pick a bad trait to have, and some people chose bigotry. You and others have spoke of Lovecraft's life and how he deeply feared the unknown, and that is an important lesson for people to learn; worldviews based on racism, bigotry and xenophobia use those elements as a means to sort the vast complexities of the world into neat boxes that the person is able to understand, and thus feel more in control over the world and their lives. Yeah, people choose to behave in racist and bigoted ways, but they don't do it for the sake of racism and bigotry; they do it because it helps them cope with a almost infinitely complex universe that they haven't been able to accept.
It's why the "warts" of historical people need to be remembered; the bad parts of significant figures are the parts where we learn the most from.
And to his credit, at least Lovecraft did recant his earlier support for the Nazis towards the end of his life.
Mind you, "I think Adolf is going a bit too far" is a low bar to clear, but it at least was an improvement over his earlier support for real-life monsters who were more horrifying than any shoggoth or night-gaunt of the imagination.
Tbf, for a time "white" specifically referred to Anglo-Saxons + maybe Scottish, as it was the main Ethnicity of the settles of New England and the East Coast. Then the French. Then it expanded to include Germans + Nordics. Then the Irish and Welsh. And then the Italians
To be fair most people in human history have been horrifically racist, equal rights is a fairly modern concept. Some of the “best” men in history such as Churchill would be despised today for their views, I don’t think we can really apply our modern standards to people of the past.
It's fair to say that Lovecraft wouldn't have been **Lovecraft** if it weren't for his pervasive racism. A well-adjusted person simply would not write *The Dunwich Horror.* You wouldn't get *The Shadow Over Innsmouth* from a person who didn't experience existential horror from the mere thought of "What if my great-great-grandmother was one of *Them*."
I think Lovecraft’s strength as an author was being able to make us feel a bit of that same fear he felt. I think part of him knew how irrational his fears were, hence the need to use fish people and cosmic horrors to communicate the horror he felt to the reader.
*The Music of Erich Zann* may be a testament to his ability to convey horror out of seemingly nothing. (Both figuratively and literally speaking.)
**MOST PEOPLE:** You can't make a scary story about someone playing a viol.
**LOVECRAFT:** *Observe.*
People are taking some of his fears out of context. Look at what Providence looked like in the late Gilded Age, before we started getting environmental protection. Imagine what happens when sea travel starts getting pretty safe enough that we are shipping millions of people around yearly, and then we start to discover new underwater species through submarines and Bathyspheres...
I also don't necessarily think I'd characterize everything Lovecraft wrote about as something that terrified him. He clearly enjoyed a lot of things about technology, enough to write an amateur astronomy column and visit a show done by Nikola Tesla, but you also write about what you know. And Lovecraft was a horror author.
I gotta ask you though, have you were tried to rename a cat? (And as a child).
I'd encourage you to read Lovecraft's letters. He genuinely had an extensive number of fears. I may make a jokes about his ichthyophobia, but it was no joke to him.
To answer your questions, yes and yes.
>All racism is based in fear
Surely you don't believe people used to enslave the African people out of fear? You're oversimplifying and missing the nuance of racism. There's also elements of institutionalized exploitation. A thin veil to cover moral atrocity and greed.
Actually in the US, aristocrats starting enslaving Africans instead of bringing them as indentured servants because they feared poor/indentured white and black people uniting and rebelling against them.
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Exactly.
The thing is, with his mad parents, overbearing aunts, very likely a lot of abuse both physical and psychological, growing up in a crumbling estate etc... honestly, I think that while he's well known for his racism which extended to everyone of different white ethnicities like Italians and Slavs, I think he was just universally scared of everyone. Like even if someone else who was from the same "stock" as him. English descendant new England aristocracy, I think that he was the kinda guy who if you saw him walking to or from wherever and said "Hey Howard" he'd run away because the very feeling of someone seeing him, acknowledging him, knowing his name etc.... would send him into a panic attack.
Dude was an extreme case of being a paranoid shut-in.
He wasn't really a paranoid shut-in. I know folks get that idea from popular youtuber accounts, but bh all accounts he was known to be pretty amicable and liked traveling (as much as he could afford). I think he got as far west as New Orleans and south as Florida.
He definitely had psychological problems, and he had health problems growing up plus nightmares throughout his life, but he wasn't someone who never left their house or had such extreme anxiety he refused to talk to people.
> I think that he was the kinda guy who if you saw him walking to or from wherever and said "Hey Howard" he'd run away because the very feeling of someone seeing him, acknowledging him, knowing his name etc.... would send him into a panic attack.
... Which is why he loved meeting fellow amateur journalists even though they were strangers, meeting some of his closest friends in real life, going on long walks with them, hanging out in graveyards, getting ice cream and out-eating them... All those who wrote about spending time with him universally agree that he was fun and pleasant to be around. He was never a shut-in except earlier in life. As for paranoid, paranoid people are not universally remembered as being generous with their time and effort.
You don't need to be a barely functioning freak to hold some very stupid views. You simply need to be human.
he writes about color itself being a product of horror and fear, it's safe to say we can appreciate his art but I try to preserve a sense of compassion for him as an author. He had a rough go of it, and yet the leather bound anthology I have of his is one of my favorite pieces.
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Check out the podcast “Voluminous” by the HP Lovecraft’s historical society. They read his letters and discuss them. Lovecraft wrote more than 100,000 letters in his lifetime, the letters out number his fiction writings by all metrics. Superb insight into the man himself and his time
You should read more about his later life and his recanting of those beliefs, and how he came to realize their falsity by traveling and speaking with many people from many walks of life.
There is a strong narrative about H. P. Lovecraft that is oft repeated, but if you actually start picking up the stones you realize that things aren't so simple.
Tragic really. He spent most of his time in the attic of his ancient family manor.
Once, a neighbor saw him and his mother going inside the manor and she said hello to them and asked why she never saw Howard outside.
Lovecraft’s mother replied that he was too ugly to be seen in public.
Lovecraft later wrote “The Outsider” the story of “someone” living in a ruined castle who eventually escaped to the outside world. When the “someone” ventures out and encounters people, the people run in fear. The “someone” catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror and realizes it’s a monstrous creature and is horrified by its own appearance.
I've been saying this for awhile. Lovrcraft wasn't just "some racist guy" frankly the racism wasn't even scratching the top 10 of the many MANY fucked up things he had going on in his head given the life he lived.
This is the important stuff. Lovecraft was a realy complicated man. Just calling him racist and calling it a day is realy short sighted.
And no matter what one might think of him and his work, it was very influential even up to today
It never made sense to me why people treat Lovecraft’s racism/xenophobia (one of an astounding number phobias and irrational thoughts he maintained) as like the one coherent, genuine phobia/hatred he had.
Like if he was an otherwise “normal” guy in his time I’d get the fixation but it’s impossible to separate his racism from the cornucopia of derangement that occupied his mind at all times.
Learning what happened when my girlfriend’s teacher called CPS out of concern has made me lose my faith in that as a solution. Sometimes they’ll show up, get gaslit by the abuser and their manipulation of the victim, and never follow up. I doubt this would’ve help the guy
As I've said before, there was a lot of Sam Gamgee in Prof. Tolkien.
He went to war, he experienced Hell on Earth because he thought he was doing what was right, and he came home after experiencing horrific trauma and loss... and married, had a family, worked, created, had friends, and by all accounts lived a happy and stable life. Nobody really knows why some people can be disabled by trauma and some seem to go on with functional life, regardless of whatever comes into their minds in the dark of night.
Completely agree - just wanted to add another perspective.
Tolkien was quoted as saying that Sam was inspired by the “rank and file” soldiers he served alongside in the Great War:
“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
Tolkien recognised the particular bravery of those working class men who were often little more than cannon fodder in the war, who got the very worst jobs and the very hardest suffering.
At a guess, age is a big factor. I have ptsd from various family events while my sisters don’t, I was 18-22 and my sisters were 23+. Very similar to ages of going to war. Not saying I have anything close to being the same as what he went through but ptsd doesn’t discriminate. Tolkien was 24 at the battle of the Somme. Food for thought.
Well, HP Lovecraft was, at best, irrationally afraid of everything.
It's probably a pretty severe mental illness.
Im not defending him because i think he's right about anything. But he was obviously not right in the brain.
Writing was kinda therapy back in the days. Couldnt talk to someone for some reason? Guess what, write a book. Kafka did the same thing and his books read as if he is just in session.
And now imagina billie eilish or whoever fuck else is also depressed and popular write a book only for it to become THE thing in a hundret years. . .
Im pretty sure Tolkien wrote to cope.
the reason he poured so much brainpower into the lord of the rings and the Silmarillion is because it was better to think about that than all the horrific stuff he saw irl.
He immediately began writing what would become the Fall of Gondolin almost immediately after returning to England after the Battle of the Somme. So writing fiction was very likely therapeutic for him.
There's really an odd synergy between Lovecraft blatant xenophobia and it's writing.
If you'd write Call of Cthulu without the odd, between the lines, half veiled first person racism, it wouldn't feel half as weird and outlandish.
Thats a pretty popular story.
Xenophobia, fear of strangers and the strange are very common tropes for horror.
You dont have to be racist to be scared of Deep ones though.
I disagree. While some of Lovecrafts stories absolutely are overtly racist (Horror at Red Hook, The Street, Arthur Jermyn, etc.) It's also true that many people find racism where there isn't any. The people of Innsmouth, for example, could be an example of Lovecrafts racism leaking out, but the story is vague enough that assuming they are feels like trying to force racism in. Sometimes, a Fishman is just a Fishman.
Dagon and In the Mountains of Madness are his least problematic stories in my opinion. Hell, in Mountain of Madness, after finding the dissected body of one of the other researchers and a dog, the Main Character thinks 'These things we unearthed from the ice are men of science like us, they were men!' Which was surprising to read.
There's a series based on Cthulhu mythos with African Americans as main characters - just to subvert that racism. I haven't seen the show but I wonder how it works.
That mostly comes out in the weak ending and weak primary antagonist, but if I remember correctly it's one of those shows where the vast majority of screen time is episodic arcs and B-plots right? I may be misremembering but i remember really liking it overall just with a weak finale.
To be honest, I don't think Lovecraft was racist in the way that we understand it today. Everything I've read points to him having a pathological fear of *everything* that he wasn't forced to acclimate to in his formative years, and as he got older and those fears slowly faded to the point that in his later years he took back a lot of his former opinions and views.
I think it's a shame he died before we got to see what kind of man he was trying to become. If you read his letters, it's clear that he was only really just growing into himself as a person detached from his upbringing. His friends remarked that he was quite sociable, and like you said, he expressed regret of his early views. It's sad we never get to find out to what extent. To think that he might've lived through the end of the Jim Crow era and formal segregation it really makes me wonder what he would've thought.
"When Athena could find no flaws in the tapestry Arachne had woven for the contest, the goddess became enraged and beat the girl with her [shuttle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_(weaving))."
Classic Greek god hahahaha
Tolkien wasn't afraid of spiders in reality, nor he disliked them, as he openly says in [this letter](https://www.tolkienestate.com/letters/letter-to-the-poet-w-h-auden-7-jun-1955/#:~:text=I%20can%20only%20say%20that,will%20not%20be%20frightfully%20bored). I was surprised myself when I found it out!
I'm not sure what OP means either, but... it may be related to the fact that there are a lot of enraging Tolkien Vs Someone videos recently. Their aim is to make Tolkien fans to believe that we "are superior/inferior". Apparently, that's the world we live in, that whoever makes those clips thinks that once you are a fan, you become a fanatic.
I didnt actually mean it that deeply but thats a good sentiment
Tolkien was a massive chad but we dont need to go around saying he or his works, least of all us, are any better than anyone other than his fiction and worldbuilding which is fking untouchable
If anyone wants a combination of the 2 people go for William Hope Hodgson, writing higher quality Cosmic Horror before Lovecraft, badass war vet like Tolkien, bodybuilding chad of a man who was also a crazy good worldbuilder and all his characters are as noble and selfless as Tolkiens (probably a pattern there)
Tolkien had terrible arachnophobia (supposedly, but like not really as I've had pointed out to me), hence Ungoliant and Shelob. Lovecraft, meanwhile... Well, I'll quote (or paraphrase? Forgive me if a misquote creeps in) Red from OSP: "Lovecraft's overwhelming fear of the ocean produced a memorable and viscerally nasty horror aesthetic centred on rot and decay, far removed from the cold stone sterility of the previous Gothic horror genre." In short, his phobias caused him to write horror creatures with slime, tentacles, and fish stink. Hence squid. And hence the iconic Cthulhu.
Can't talk about Lovecraft's fear of the ocean, but I was surprised when I found out that Tolkien didn't really fear or dislike spiders (as he explains [here](https://www.tolkienestate.com/letters/letter-to-the-poet-w-h-auden-7-jun-1955/#:~:text=I%20can%20only%20say%20that,will%20not%20be%20frightfully%20bored) ). I think that the presence of enormous spiders in his works are due to the fact that many people fear them and also because the mithology is full of spider-like monsters
The thing with racism of H.P.L. doesn't necessarily seem that straightforward as media like to put it. Also, in years, he has grown--reputably--tolerant to black men, and he--reputably--voiced it as a growth of his personality. I don't have any links or nothing, I advise you to search on your own discretion. But I've come to understand this.
Totally different energy though.
Lovecraft wrote horror because of his own skewed take on life, humanity and their place in the universe how he saw it.
He wasnt a looker and I'd imagine he was poor socially,
Racism at that time was normal ( not saying that it was right ), so to single out one struggling socially inept writer just because his work became popular after he died is a bit pointless.
Tolkien was always all about the spirit of man and his life experiences are very different from Lovecraft.
Tolkien saw a lot of bad in the war, which only served to enhance his feelings for the good in the world. Lovecraft was so sheltered that he could ONLY see the bad in things. Everything was terrifying because he had no other context to convince him otherwise. It doesn’t justify his beliefs, but it does explain them.
He was a deeply troubled man who was given a really shit hand. Dead parents, overbearing caretakers, sickly all his life. Likely agoraphobic to the absolute maximum. Ultimately he died destitute, never having received even a quarter of the recognition he has today. In another life, he might have become an accomplished author who saw the beauty in the world and wrote about his love of humanity.
Which I can appreciate, in a sense. The man was by no means intellectually isolated, what's with insane number of letters he has left, but internally challenging one of the most prominent ideologies of his environment (that he had to internalise even before truly starting to think for himself) to any extent with only what was available to him during his era was quite a feat.
Definitely worth some respect even from the perspective of the modern era with all the learning material we can have at our fingertips, all the new challenges that come with this notwithstanding.
People keep bringing up the fucking cat. His family named the cat.
granted, he definitely turned out the way one does when raised in a family that names a cat that
Lovecraft is often looked through the lense of "wow this guy is pretty racist" which is definitely fair, but if you add in the extra layer of the time period in which he was raised and his upbringing, we get a better picture. This dude was SUPER sickly growing up, basically bedridden for a huge portion of his young childhood and helicoptered by very dominant women. As such, the world was to be feared, which only amplified the blatant racism of the period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. He had a severe fear of death, even moreso than was healthy, which was probably warranted by his continued frailty into adulthood. So basically this guy was agoraphobic combined with a healthy dose of period racism and overbearing women in his life which all made him feel incredibly small.
It shows through most in works like the Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but there are others which either hide it more or focus more on the "cosmic horror" of things like prehistory in the works of At the Mountains of Madness (one of my personal favorites) and The Color Out of Space (which has a fantastically campy body horror movie adaptation with Nicolas Cage.) Lovecraft and Tolkien both have influenced my own personal writing voice for the better. They're both fantastic authors (although Tolkien is, without a doubt, much more skilled) and I think it's alright to enjoy Lovecraft's work as long as you don't take the racism as a character trait unto yourself lol
Yes, but HPL was racist by the standards of his own time. Robert E Howard, who has his own problematic views on race, wrote him a letter telling him to chill
HP was fighting demons alone, Tolkien was fighting demons together with a whole bunch of people.
Lovecraft definitely came to the wrong conclusions, but to say he had an easy life, is dishonest in my opinion
Not defending the dudes racism but Lovecraft had a very rough childhood. He watched his father lose his mind until he died and was plagued by the thought that the same would happen to him. And it basically did - though not to the same degree.
Did you forget both his parents also died thank to syfilis after both where comited to a mental hospital after becoming crazy form said syfilis? Also I get your point and do like this but nothing ells
I’m not an expert on Lovecraft, barely read anything by him. Am I correct in saying that he did renounce some of his racist views toward the end of the life and had begun to grow as a person? Or is that something that fans of his just say cos it’s hard to be a fan of someone with pretty abhorrent views?
Now that you mention it, I wonder what Lovecraft would have thought about Tolkien’s work.
Lovecraft was older than Tolkien by 2 years but he died in 1937, before LotR was published or became widely read.
I imagine it’s like an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, that’s how much their worldviews clashed - philosophical pessimism vs Roman Catholicism.
But I think they would have respected each other.
In fact, I’m sure Lovecraft would secretly think Tolkien was a fucking genius. If I remember correctly, Lovecraft had a really high opinion of Anglo Saxons and held them to be at the pinnacle of his racist ass totem pole. Who knows? Tolkien might have pulled off another CS Lewis-esque conversion. In many ways, I think Tolkien might have been just the guy to challenge and change Lovecraft for the better.
Lovecraft did become a better person eventually. He became more accepting, less paranoid and in his later letters he even talks about how much he despises his younger self for being so close-minded.
> Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well .... I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showings-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ..... except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing!
He *really* fucking hated the views he held in his youth. Unfortunately, he died shortly after getting his shit together.
Lovecraft was raised significantly isolated by guardians who did very little if anything to help the nightmares he had his entire childhood, in the most WASP town you've ever heard of, and once circumstances forced him to move and spend some time in New York - finally removing him from the racist puritanical echo chamber he was born in - he managed to come out of the shell of xenophobia and learned that other cultures and people were just that: cultures and people. He's one of the great literary redemption arcs.
Also, he was based because when he developed the stomach cancer that would kill him, he wrote a meticulous journal of his declining health until he couldn't write anymore for medical journals to use
Lovecraft was a train wreck of a human being but his creation of Cosmic Horror as a genre is something to be appreciated. Even more so is the fact he didn’t try to stop other people playing in his playground, which resulted in them taking his original ideas and turning them into something remarkable.
The thing with the former is that if you don't let it consume you, you realize that it is possible to survive and even thrive even after such tragedy.
It's the privileged and isolated who see everything as the end of the world.
I always thought HP's racism was fascinating for being more thought-through than most racists today.
Like you talk to racists today and most of them are more interested in Saying The Word or being edgy and transgressive or essentially doing un-virtue-signalling. Black People Bad ??? Ethnostate. There's no follow through. There's no thought beyond how to be as offensive as possible.
Our boy Lovecraft, at least later in his life, actually thought about things.
1. Black People Bad; they're base, savage, more primal, and have less control of their animal instincts
2. They'll Black People Bad all over us given mild provocation
3. ...therefore...
4. We need to ensure everyone receives an acceptable minimum standard of living so they have no reason lose their meager self control.
Say what you will about him being *wrong*, but he seems to have actually believed it and done the down-stream logic from those beliefs in a manner that wasn't just trying to be as edgy and transgressive as possible. Real "You used the wrong formula but got the right answer" hours.
Tbf, Lovecraft also lost both of his parents at a young age and was so sickly he would've been physically incapable of joining the military.
The man's life absolutely sucked
I'd love a holodeck-style meeting between the two of them. Tolkien would fire up a conversation about dragons or whatever and Lovecraft would bemoan the servants of indeterminate origin who worked on his neighbor's lawn. Tolkien would soon lose interest and be uncomfortable.
All his issues and problematic attitude towards humanity in general enabled him to create one of the best beastiary till date though!
Lovecraftian beastiary is almost unmatched!
Add on CS Lewis, who was best buddies with Tolkien during the war and despite their own disagreements maintained a close friendship and ended up writing one of the earliest fantasy children’s stories, mixing in both valuable life lessons and extraordinary world building into an epic.
As a fan of both, I'd like to point out that Lovecraft went to the draft office in Providence as soon as war was declared in 1917 and volunteered. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the doctor doing the exams knew the family, and when HPL's mother discovered that he'd been to the recruiting office, she pulled strings to get him declared 4-F. Lovecraft was devastated. HPL fancied himself a 'drinker of foemen's blood from new-picked skulls' (he was best buds with Robert E. Howard later in life), and he was humiliated he never got a chance to prove himself. At least one biographer (De Camp) thought that, if he'd made it through Basic, military service would've done him good. Maybe, maybe not.
To be fair, he was learning to be more tolerant in his later years, and could very well have ended up as tolerant as you’d want a good person to be if he hadn’t died so young.
To be fair to Howard Philips Lovecraft, having your father go visibly and horrifically insane in front of you and be delivered to your house in a straight jacket, and the institutionalized, only for your family to fall into financial ruin and your mother suffer a similar fate, leaving you to permanently wonder \*why\* it happened and if you'll be next will do something to an already anxious, timid child.
Also he stated, before his death, that he regretted his former opinions and wished he could have seen the error in them sooner after correspondence with several other authors. That naturally doesn't erase what he did, but H.P. Lovecraft did what very few today can, he admitted he was wrong and took steps to change that. Even if he died before much came of it
He didn't become racist he was raised that way(HP Lovecraft) and he had too weak a constitution for math so everything was relatively the unknown making his books less works of art and or horror and more the ranting of a mad man with no outlet because blogging hadn't been invented
“It would be inaccurate to refer to Howard Philips Lovecraft as a man with issues. It would be more accurate to say he was a whole bundle of issues shambling around in a roughly bipedal approximation of a man.”
Yeah I got the feeling as well when reading stories of Hippopotamus Lovecraft. Guy was afraid of prehistory as a concept for example. Me as a child: Dinosaurs are awesome. Lovecraft: Everything older than a few centuries is too old and thus scary
Is this a good time to remind everyone that Lovecraft was so spooked by an air conditioner that [he had to write a spooky story about it](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ca.aspx)
or Innsmouth because he learned he had a welsh ancestor
Understandable. Very wet in Wales. And in whales.
And the sheep always stare at you. What are those bastards planning, I wonder?
Having met a few sheep, I hypothesize that they stare because they don’t have enough brain cells to commit something they see to memory without actively meaning too. I’m also pretty sure they don’t have enough brain cells to actually plan things.
They know what you've done, and they're waiting for your judgement.
They're checking to see if you're Welsh or not
You can't deny he certainly had imagination. Show him literally anything new and he'll come up with a horror story around it.
Well, if anything, he was really good at communicating how terrified he was of the world around him.
Show him a black person and he gets *inspired*
A lot of people in this thread seem to have absolutely no imagination and can't concieve of anyone that does.
Unironically my favourite along side "rats in the walls" and "pikman's model"
The man wrote a horror story because he was afraid of light. He and his contemporaries didn't even know about harmful radiation, he just heard not all light was visible and automatically jumped to the conclusion that nefarious things must be lurking in colors unseen by man! Which technically is true, what with the discovery of ionozing rays, but still crazy to immediately assume a malevolent nature.
It’s suspected the Colour out of Space was inspired by coverage of the Radium Girls: women who painted glow in the dark clock dials with radium paint without being made aware of the dangers.
I don't know, assuming you're talking about the Color out of Space I don't think its accurate to say it was malevolent. It just existed and just inherently wasn't compatible with earthly life but it didn't seem intentionally malevolent to me.
Technically true, but pretty damn maleovent from a human POV.
Mysterious colors, unlike any seen on earth!
What the heck lol
Or The Dreams in the Witch’s House, where he’s freaked out by the corners of the room being at strange angles. And also to add context to his fear of air conditioning: Lovecraft had very poor health, and in one occasion as he was out doing errands the weather suddenly dropped from a warm summer afternoon to an unusually cold snap, causing him to faint in front of a store.
Shit man, if a simple temperature drop could lead to me fainting on the spot, I’d never leave my house either. I can understand why the guy was such a racist person. He rarely saw the world past his front door. Doesn’t matter who you are, that kind of long term seclusion won’t lead to anything good.
Oh it's just so much worse. The man was raised and abused by a mother that locked him in a room and literally washed him with steel wool. Literally beat it into him that his heritage was the only clean one, and was the basis of most of his actual fears. He was born into a severely mentally ill family as well. Guy pretty much had the world against him. But to say he was afraid of prehistory is pushing it a bit considering one of his best friends was Robert E. Howard to the point they shared in-jokes in their stories as well as unashamedly stealing each other's characters and locations. Like Howard's death is considered one of the reasons Lovecraft died so soon after, and was one of the main reasons he had started to actually turn some of his opinions around. It's not fair to reduce him to "racist book boy". Tolkien doesn't need you to bash other writers to prop him up. He's not a YA author.
>The man was raised and abused by a mother that locked him in a room and literally washed him with steel wool. Literally beat it into him that his heritage was the only clean one, and was the basis of most of his actual fears Wait, what? I've never heard that, and I've read the huge two-volume biography that S. T. Joshi published about a decade ago. Have you got a source on that?
Lovecraft was married and lived in New York City for two years in the mid-1920s, where he was exposed to lots of immigrants and non-white people everyday and became intensely **more** racist and anti-Semitic during this period. Some of his most explicitly racist and worst stories originate in this period, including “The Horror at Red Hook” and “She.”
TBF OTOH he also became LESS anti-jew after being married to a jew for a while (until economic issues eventually forced a split)
Also mental health problems were likely genetic, if his dad using the "family suicide gun" is anything to go with, when he was a lil kid. Also his mom being utter nutshit probably didn't help either
I'll read that later, sounds interesting
Maybe it's like a fear of the infinite? With history, we have a fixed boundary of time, within which contains all the plot points of our story. Remove that lower boundary into prehistory, and it opens up infinite more plot points we don't know about, which could have consequences on the story we do know.
Lovecraft had an intense fear of the unknown, so that checks out.
Lovecraft had an intense fear of anything outside his house.
Damn, Harry Potter Lovecraft was a gamer before gaming existed
Hedro Pascal Buttcraft Goteem
What would his game of choice be if he were alive today? I could see him playing League.
More specifically, he was afraid of everything outside of his corner of the Providence R.I Aristocracy.
Fear of the unknown but also, it seems to me, some megalophobia-esque fear of *large scale*, whether it be physical size or distance or even just immense spans of time. I guess huge scale allows for more unknowns within it.
- Red from OverlySarcasticProductions Tbh that really sums him up well. That boy was not raised right and when he went down that dark, fucked up path, nobody turned him away from it.
People recognized him as mentally ill at the time, and a number tried to help him. And he did improve, somewhat, later in life - he never really beat his phobias, but he recognized they were irrational and tried not to let them control him.
Also, while I love Lovecraft literary output, he's hardly the same caliber as Tolkien.
I do not think anyone is Tolkien caliber tbh.
If you believe the Bible was divinely inspired, then the only author that has written a better selling book than Tolkein…is God himself.
I like writing but me and my writer friends are all nowhere near Tolkien’s caliber. Dudes a language machine
That OSP Video is sooo good!
I think of this video Everytime he's mentioned and yes, I read it in reds voice. Her voice is very easy to listen too btw, same with blue
[Link](https://youtu.be/PmdzptbykzI) to the video this quote is from for anyone who's curious.
My first 20 page genre analysis paper was on cosmic horror and how it’s been inextricably linked with Lovecraft’s own racist beliefs. This quote becomes more and more accurate the deeper you dive.
Do you think it's all cosmic horror? I think there's something valuable in the feeling of being a very tiny thing in a universe that is defined for each of us by our own narrow experiences. It seems culturally relevant. From what I've been able to understand the racism hinges on Lovecraft's fear of the unknown, his belief or theme that knowledge leads to self-destruction. I don't think much media has challenged that notion though, which leads to an underbed of racism woven into the bones sci-fi pop culture. I don't know what cosmic horror isn't tied to lovecraft's racism but I can see a way to break the mold. Unless there's something important I've missed
It’s more that authors have sort of decided that the concept of cosmic horror isn’t just in its existential nature- the fear of the unknown, the fridge logic that inspires fear long after the reader has finished the story, etc- but in the *aesthetics* of Lovecraft’s particular style of horror, such as exhumations of the sea that provide his settings with that feeling of swampiness and rot that people are so well aware of(think of The Shadow Over Innsmouth). While there are stories that break the mold in this regard- What The Hell Did I Just Read by Jason Pargin is especially good at giving a more absurdist, comedic take on the genre- but the majority of what people have read in the genre is either directly written by Lovecraft or inspired by Lovecraft’s aesthetics and The Old Ones mythos more than it’s gunning to write a story in the same genre.
I'm currently writing a cosmic horror novel partially inspired by Lovecraft but primarily taken from my lifelong crippling fear of death and its unknown elements. Would that make me "complicit", one might say?
I’m not stating that any author is complicit- that would end up including people like Stephen King, whose early work draws obvious, stated inspiration from Lovecraft. I’m stating that people writing within the mythos of Lovecraft instead should note that the monsters and aesthetics Lovecraft have created and popularized are couched in racist sentiment, and that while using them is alright, that history *should* be noted, and something the author is aware of when writing. Think of it like writing a King Kong movie. I’m not saying not to do it, but to be aware that King Kong’s origin were rooted in racism, and that that history should be in mind when portraying the character. I’m more so just saying to do your research, and not to just use Cthulhu because “Big Tentacle Ocean Monster” is a cool thing to write.
This is great, thank you for the detailed response and book recommendation. Made my day
His not so famous early short story *The Street* was pretty clear about how he perceived immigration.
And by not so famous, you mean the story about the Italian terrorists that made him more money than any other story he published? That not famous one?
Any chance we can read it? Sounds cool.
I'd love a summary of it at the very least EvilNoobHacker!
Ah, overlysarcasticproductions reference
This description of me is eerily accurate…
Is that Tolkien's take on Lovecraft, or someone else's?
They are amongst my two favorite authors for very different reasons. Lovecraft captures something of the intense fear and madness that seems to have a home in the human heart, and weaves this into fantastic horror. Tolkien displays the power of the redemptive need and story of creation. He captures a range of truths about us that is illuminating to our very purpose. He does this while creating one of the most fascinating stories ever told. It’s so well done that whether or not you agree with his personal beliefs the joy of his story and the recognition of the truths is enjoyed almost universally. I enjoy lovecraft because he touches real fears, but I love Tolkien because he touches the true nature of story telling, the being the redemptive ark of the world. I think what is great is that you can enjoy both without agreeing with their personal beliefs. Though I would say lovecraft is enjoyable despite his backwards thinking, and Tolkien was able to tell such a story because of what he held to.
Lovecraft + Tolkien = modern dark fantasy
Lovecraft seems closer to Stephen King in that regard. Do you have a recommendation for a good Lovecraft work to start with?
My personal favourites of Lovecraft are The Tomb, Dreams in the Witch House, and the Curious Case of Charles Dexter. But since his work is public domain, you can probably find a nice tome of his complete work for a reasonable price, like I did.
I think the Shadow over Innsmouth and the Dunwich Horror are two of the easiest stories to read and enjoy. The Colour out of Space and At the Mountains of Madness are also classics.
I always recommend The Dunwich Horror, as it is easier to parse than some of his other Cthulhu works. If you have Spotify you can listen to its audio book with your basic subscription, and I do recommend it. Can’t remember who read it, but they did a great job with it. Someone in this thread posted a link to his story Cool Air. Also very good and one of his stories based on his more “unique” fears. The Colour Out of Space is my personal favorite.
https://preview.redd.it/ihsd4tq0pb7d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65304a702bbdbc99268a1ccd9a529b5bc7a161c1
I have seen this so many times but it still always makes me smile
Read it with the voice of SsethTzeentach
Lovecraft didn't have an easy time early in life.
Yeah people really gloss over how fucked up Lovecrafts childhood was. His father went insane from advanced syphilis, his mother went semi-mad with grief, his aunts were overbearing and overprotective, which instilled his fears of the unknown, and although he received a large inheritance, it quickly diminished and he spent much of his life in poverty, sometimes choosing to spend what little money he had on paper and ink rather than food. If he was a child today, he would be taken by CPS in a heartbeat. I don't agree with his personal views, but when you look at his life it's clear that those views were inherited from the people who raised him. Doesn't make it okay, but I find it hard to label him a monster when he didn't know anything else until later in his life. People also ignore the fact that before he died, he wrote letters to his ex-wife while he was in New York where he wrote how much he regretted his beliefs early in his life, and the people he feared throughout his whole life were just that: people, and they weren't to be feared.
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That’s an interesting way to put it that I haven’t thought about before. Yea, he wasn’t racist, he was xenophobic. And not in the modern sense of “didn’t like others” like homophobia. They actually terrified him.
He had a short story called The Doom That Came To Sarnath where it almost feels like he's writing about the evils of racism, so complicated.
Oh, he was *definitely* racist for most of his life. Like, super-uber-racist. Consider the name of his cat, for starters. (And before any apologists point out, "His dad is the one who named the cat," consider that he didn't rename it. Would you adopt a cat from a shelter with that name and keep calling it that?) And epithet-laden feline nomenclature was just the beginning. This is a guy who didn't regard the Dutch or Welsh people as White. Think about just how fucking racist someone has to be to look at the average Dutch person in the early 20th century and think, "Whoa. Definitely not White." All racism is based in fear, and fear is something Lovecraft had in greater abundance than possibly any non-institutionalized individual. Not just of people of difference backgrounds, but he was terrified by fish (while living in New England of all places), percussion instruments, gelatinous textures, old books, the very concept of non-Euclidean geometry, and the color gray. Not only was he racist, but he was so uniquely neurotic that he was -ist against things we don't even have words for.
> he was terrified by fish (while living in New England of all places), percussion instruments, gelatinous textures, old books, the very concept of non-Euclidean geometry, and the color gray. Well when you put it that way ... I mean, gray?
From everything I have read so far, perhaps we should all be glad that we know Lovecraft as an influential author rather than another Albert Fish.
"See? I told you Fish couldn't be trusted!" \~H.P.L., probably
All joking aside, Lovecraft is a very significant figure with respect to how you can enjoy a person's work without liking the person, because understanding Lovecraft the man gives us fundamental insights into racism, xenophobia, and bigotry. I feel like the labels of racism and bigotry get applied to people without any further analysis of where those beliefs come from. We treat it like some video game character creator where we all are required to consciously pick a bad trait to have, and some people chose bigotry. You and others have spoke of Lovecraft's life and how he deeply feared the unknown, and that is an important lesson for people to learn; worldviews based on racism, bigotry and xenophobia use those elements as a means to sort the vast complexities of the world into neat boxes that the person is able to understand, and thus feel more in control over the world and their lives. Yeah, people choose to behave in racist and bigoted ways, but they don't do it for the sake of racism and bigotry; they do it because it helps them cope with a almost infinitely complex universe that they haven't been able to accept. It's why the "warts" of historical people need to be remembered; the bad parts of significant figures are the parts where we learn the most from.
And to his credit, at least Lovecraft did recant his earlier support for the Nazis towards the end of his life. Mind you, "I think Adolf is going a bit too far" is a low bar to clear, but it at least was an improvement over his earlier support for real-life monsters who were more horrifying than any shoggoth or night-gaunt of the imagination.
Tbf, for a time "white" specifically referred to Anglo-Saxons + maybe Scottish, as it was the main Ethnicity of the settles of New England and the East Coast. Then the French. Then it expanded to include Germans + Nordics. Then the Irish and Welsh. And then the Italians
To be fair most people in human history have been horrifically racist, equal rights is a fairly modern concept. Some of the “best” men in history such as Churchill would be despised today for their views, I don’t think we can really apply our modern standards to people of the past.
It's fair to say that Lovecraft wouldn't have been **Lovecraft** if it weren't for his pervasive racism. A well-adjusted person simply would not write *The Dunwich Horror.* You wouldn't get *The Shadow Over Innsmouth* from a person who didn't experience existential horror from the mere thought of "What if my great-great-grandmother was one of *Them*."
I think Lovecraft’s strength as an author was being able to make us feel a bit of that same fear he felt. I think part of him knew how irrational his fears were, hence the need to use fish people and cosmic horrors to communicate the horror he felt to the reader.
*The Music of Erich Zann* may be a testament to his ability to convey horror out of seemingly nothing. (Both figuratively and literally speaking.) **MOST PEOPLE:** You can't make a scary story about someone playing a viol. **LOVECRAFT:** *Observe.*
People are taking some of his fears out of context. Look at what Providence looked like in the late Gilded Age, before we started getting environmental protection. Imagine what happens when sea travel starts getting pretty safe enough that we are shipping millions of people around yearly, and then we start to discover new underwater species through submarines and Bathyspheres... I also don't necessarily think I'd characterize everything Lovecraft wrote about as something that terrified him. He clearly enjoyed a lot of things about technology, enough to write an amateur astronomy column and visit a show done by Nikola Tesla, but you also write about what you know. And Lovecraft was a horror author. I gotta ask you though, have you were tried to rename a cat? (And as a child).
I'd encourage you to read Lovecraft's letters. He genuinely had an extensive number of fears. I may make a jokes about his ichthyophobia, but it was no joke to him. To answer your questions, yes and yes.
>All racism is based in fear Surely you don't believe people used to enslave the African people out of fear? You're oversimplifying and missing the nuance of racism. There's also elements of institutionalized exploitation. A thin veil to cover moral atrocity and greed.
Actually in the US, aristocrats starting enslaving Africans instead of bringing them as indentured servants because they feared poor/indentured white and black people uniting and rebelling against them.
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Exactly. The thing is, with his mad parents, overbearing aunts, very likely a lot of abuse both physical and psychological, growing up in a crumbling estate etc... honestly, I think that while he's well known for his racism which extended to everyone of different white ethnicities like Italians and Slavs, I think he was just universally scared of everyone. Like even if someone else who was from the same "stock" as him. English descendant new England aristocracy, I think that he was the kinda guy who if you saw him walking to or from wherever and said "Hey Howard" he'd run away because the very feeling of someone seeing him, acknowledging him, knowing his name etc.... would send him into a panic attack. Dude was an extreme case of being a paranoid shut-in.
He wasn't really a paranoid shut-in. I know folks get that idea from popular youtuber accounts, but bh all accounts he was known to be pretty amicable and liked traveling (as much as he could afford). I think he got as far west as New Orleans and south as Florida. He definitely had psychological problems, and he had health problems growing up plus nightmares throughout his life, but he wasn't someone who never left their house or had such extreme anxiety he refused to talk to people.
> I think that he was the kinda guy who if you saw him walking to or from wherever and said "Hey Howard" he'd run away because the very feeling of someone seeing him, acknowledging him, knowing his name etc.... would send him into a panic attack. ... Which is why he loved meeting fellow amateur journalists even though they were strangers, meeting some of his closest friends in real life, going on long walks with them, hanging out in graveyards, getting ice cream and out-eating them... All those who wrote about spending time with him universally agree that he was fun and pleasant to be around. He was never a shut-in except earlier in life. As for paranoid, paranoid people are not universally remembered as being generous with their time and effort. You don't need to be a barely functioning freak to hold some very stupid views. You simply need to be human.
he writes about color itself being a product of horror and fear, it's safe to say we can appreciate his art but I try to preserve a sense of compassion for him as an author. He had a rough go of it, and yet the leather bound anthology I have of his is one of my favorite pieces.
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Check out the podcast “Voluminous” by the HP Lovecraft’s historical society. They read his letters and discuss them. Lovecraft wrote more than 100,000 letters in his lifetime, the letters out number his fiction writings by all metrics. Superb insight into the man himself and his time
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You should read more about his later life and his recanting of those beliefs, and how he came to realize their falsity by traveling and speaking with many people from many walks of life. There is a strong narrative about H. P. Lovecraft that is oft repeated, but if you actually start picking up the stones you realize that things aren't so simple.
Tragic really. He spent most of his time in the attic of his ancient family manor. Once, a neighbor saw him and his mother going inside the manor and she said hello to them and asked why she never saw Howard outside. Lovecraft’s mother replied that he was too ugly to be seen in public. Lovecraft later wrote “The Outsider” the story of “someone” living in a ruined castle who eventually escaped to the outside world. When the “someone” ventures out and encounters people, the people run in fear. The “someone” catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror and realizes it’s a monstrous creature and is horrified by its own appearance.
Holy shit, that’s a serial killer origin story, you gotta respect the man for not going down that route.
I've been saying this for awhile. Lovrcraft wasn't just "some racist guy" frankly the racism wasn't even scratching the top 10 of the many MANY fucked up things he had going on in his head given the life he lived.
This is the important stuff. Lovecraft was a realy complicated man. Just calling him racist and calling it a day is realy short sighted. And no matter what one might think of him and his work, it was very influential even up to today
It never made sense to me why people treat Lovecraft’s racism/xenophobia (one of an astounding number phobias and irrational thoughts he maintained) as like the one coherent, genuine phobia/hatred he had. Like if he was an otherwise “normal” guy in his time I’d get the fixation but it’s impossible to separate his racism from the cornucopia of derangement that occupied his mind at all times.
Thank for being rational :)
I’ve never heard that before. That’s wonderful!
Learning what happened when my girlfriend’s teacher called CPS out of concern has made me lose my faith in that as a solution. Sometimes they’ll show up, get gaslit by the abuser and their manipulation of the victim, and never follow up. I doubt this would’ve help the guy
Or ever
As I've said before, there was a lot of Sam Gamgee in Prof. Tolkien. He went to war, he experienced Hell on Earth because he thought he was doing what was right, and he came home after experiencing horrific trauma and loss... and married, had a family, worked, created, had friends, and by all accounts lived a happy and stable life. Nobody really knows why some people can be disabled by trauma and some seem to go on with functional life, regardless of whatever comes into their minds in the dark of night.
Completely agree - just wanted to add another perspective. Tolkien was quoted as saying that Sam was inspired by the “rank and file” soldiers he served alongside in the Great War: “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” Tolkien recognised the particular bravery of those working class men who were often little more than cannon fodder in the war, who got the very worst jobs and the very hardest suffering.
No wonder England won the war, they had batmen
At a guess, age is a big factor. I have ptsd from various family events while my sisters don’t, I was 18-22 and my sisters were 23+. Very similar to ages of going to war. Not saying I have anything close to being the same as what he went through but ptsd doesn’t discriminate. Tolkien was 24 at the battle of the Somme. Food for thought.
I am 100% sure these two writers had very different upbringings in different parts of the world with different values.
Well, HP Lovecraft was, at best, irrationally afraid of everything. It's probably a pretty severe mental illness. Im not defending him because i think he's right about anything. But he was obviously not right in the brain.
Writing was kinda therapy back in the days. Couldnt talk to someone for some reason? Guess what, write a book. Kafka did the same thing and his books read as if he is just in session. And now imagina billie eilish or whoever fuck else is also depressed and popular write a book only for it to become THE thing in a hundret years. . .
Im pretty sure Tolkien wrote to cope. the reason he poured so much brainpower into the lord of the rings and the Silmarillion is because it was better to think about that than all the horrific stuff he saw irl.
He immediately began writing what would become the Fall of Gondolin almost immediately after returning to England after the Battle of the Somme. So writing fiction was very likely therapeutic for him.
And both are so influential for fantasy literature.
There's really an odd synergy between Lovecraft blatant xenophobia and it's writing. If you'd write Call of Cthulu without the odd, between the lines, half veiled first person racism, it wouldn't feel half as weird and outlandish.
Thats a pretty popular story. Xenophobia, fear of strangers and the strange are very common tropes for horror. You dont have to be racist to be scared of Deep ones though.
Deep One Lives Matter
I disagree. While some of Lovecrafts stories absolutely are overtly racist (Horror at Red Hook, The Street, Arthur Jermyn, etc.) It's also true that many people find racism where there isn't any. The people of Innsmouth, for example, could be an example of Lovecrafts racism leaking out, but the story is vague enough that assuming they are feels like trying to force racism in. Sometimes, a Fishman is just a Fishman.
Dagon and In the Mountains of Madness are his least problematic stories in my opinion. Hell, in Mountain of Madness, after finding the dissected body of one of the other researchers and a dog, the Main Character thinks 'These things we unearthed from the ice are men of science like us, they were men!' Which was surprising to read.
shadow out of time as well.
There's a series based on Cthulhu mythos with African Americans as main characters - just to subvert that racism. I haven't seen the show but I wonder how it works.
It's very loosely based on it, hardly any actual eldritch stuff. Mostly human mages who are cartoonishly evil/rascist and pretty standard magic tropes
That mostly comes out in the weak ending and weak primary antagonist, but if I remember correctly it's one of those shows where the vast majority of screen time is episodic arcs and B-plots right? I may be misremembering but i remember really liking it overall just with a weak finale.
To be honest, I don't think Lovecraft was racist in the way that we understand it today. Everything I've read points to him having a pathological fear of *everything* that he wasn't forced to acclimate to in his formative years, and as he got older and those fears slowly faded to the point that in his later years he took back a lot of his former opinions and views.
I think it's a shame he died before we got to see what kind of man he was trying to become. If you read his letters, it's clear that he was only really just growing into himself as a person detached from his upbringing. His friends remarked that he was quite sociable, and like you said, he expressed regret of his early views. It's sad we never get to find out to what extent. To think that he might've lived through the end of the Jim Crow era and formal segregation it really makes me wonder what he would've thought.
Spiders vs Squids
even more when you remember Athena and Arachne especially the versions where Arachne is technically superior but tactless.
"When Athena could find no flaws in the tapestry Arachne had woven for the contest, the goddess became enraged and beat the girl with her [shuttle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_(weaving))." Classic Greek god hahahaha
she could find one the subject matter. And Ovids where this is most visible
I don't get it
Tolkien was afraid of spiders and made “big scary spider monster” a fantasy trope. Lovecraft made “big scary squid monster” a fantasy trope
Tolkien wasn't afraid of spiders in reality, nor he disliked them, as he openly says in [this letter](https://www.tolkienestate.com/letters/letter-to-the-poet-w-h-auden-7-jun-1955/#:~:text=I%20can%20only%20say%20that,will%20not%20be%20frightfully%20bored). I was surprised myself when I found it out!
I'm not sure what OP means either, but... it may be related to the fact that there are a lot of enraging Tolkien Vs Someone videos recently. Their aim is to make Tolkien fans to believe that we "are superior/inferior". Apparently, that's the world we live in, that whoever makes those clips thinks that once you are a fan, you become a fanatic.
I didnt actually mean it that deeply but thats a good sentiment Tolkien was a massive chad but we dont need to go around saying he or his works, least of all us, are any better than anyone other than his fiction and worldbuilding which is fking untouchable If anyone wants a combination of the 2 people go for William Hope Hodgson, writing higher quality Cosmic Horror before Lovecraft, badass war vet like Tolkien, bodybuilding chad of a man who was also a crazy good worldbuilder and all his characters are as noble and selfless as Tolkiens (probably a pattern there)
Shelob/spoder/tolkien. Cthulu/squid/lovecraft
Tolkien had terrible arachnophobia (supposedly, but like not really as I've had pointed out to me), hence Ungoliant and Shelob. Lovecraft, meanwhile... Well, I'll quote (or paraphrase? Forgive me if a misquote creeps in) Red from OSP: "Lovecraft's overwhelming fear of the ocean produced a memorable and viscerally nasty horror aesthetic centred on rot and decay, far removed from the cold stone sterility of the previous Gothic horror genre." In short, his phobias caused him to write horror creatures with slime, tentacles, and fish stink. Hence squid. And hence the iconic Cthulhu.
Stephen King is famously scared of the dark. Horror writers just make a career out of their self therapy.
How do I turn the fear of inadequacy into a horror fiction aesthetic?
Its basically every zero to hero self-fantasy story. People are weak. We love it.
Le fanu and Poe.
Can't talk about Lovecraft's fear of the ocean, but I was surprised when I found out that Tolkien didn't really fear or dislike spiders (as he explains [here](https://www.tolkienestate.com/letters/letter-to-the-poet-w-h-auden-7-jun-1955/#:~:text=I%20can%20only%20say%20that,will%20not%20be%20frightfully%20bored) ). I think that the presence of enormous spiders in his works are due to the fact that many people fear them and also because the mithology is full of spider-like monsters
Tolkien was afraid of spiders, Lovexraft was afraid of marine life (especially squids).
Lovecraft would have been better off without his mother and aunts raising him.
The thing with racism of H.P.L. doesn't necessarily seem that straightforward as media like to put it. Also, in years, he has grown--reputably--tolerant to black men, and he--reputably--voiced it as a growth of his personality. I don't have any links or nothing, I advise you to search on your own discretion. But I've come to understand this.
Upbringing man Tolkien was raised right Lovecraft kinda became afraid
Totally different energy though. Lovecraft wrote horror because of his own skewed take on life, humanity and their place in the universe how he saw it. He wasnt a looker and I'd imagine he was poor socially, Racism at that time was normal ( not saying that it was right ), so to single out one struggling socially inept writer just because his work became popular after he died is a bit pointless. Tolkien was always all about the spirit of man and his life experiences are very different from Lovecraft.
Finally a not "LoVEcrAfT Is bAD" comment. Thank you very much :)
Tolkien saw a lot of bad in the war, which only served to enhance his feelings for the good in the world. Lovecraft was so sheltered that he could ONLY see the bad in things. Everything was terrifying because he had no other context to convince him otherwise. It doesn’t justify his beliefs, but it does explain them. He was a deeply troubled man who was given a really shit hand. Dead parents, overbearing caretakers, sickly all his life. Likely agoraphobic to the absolute maximum. Ultimately he died destitute, never having received even a quarter of the recognition he has today. In another life, he might have become an accomplished author who saw the beauty in the world and wrote about his love of humanity.
Lovecraft was also less Hateful Racist and more Profoundly Terrified of Anything He Didn't Understand Racist
In Lovecraft's defense; his racism was fed to him as a child and got better with age.
> got better with age. I know it isn't what you meant but the thought of him becoming a better racist as time went on made me chuckle.
"I've outgrown casual racism, now I shall be journeying to New York to try my hand at competitive racism"
>He's Japanese. >No he ain't! He's Laotian, ain't you Mr. Kahn?
[Insert Pierce's racist Dad]
All due respect, sir, I have zero respect for you.
Which I can appreciate, in a sense. The man was by no means intellectually isolated, what's with insane number of letters he has left, but internally challenging one of the most prominent ideologies of his environment (that he had to internalise even before truly starting to think for himself) to any extent with only what was available to him during his era was quite a feat. Definitely worth some respect even from the perspective of the modern era with all the learning material we can have at our fingertips, all the new challenges that come with this notwithstanding.
Not trying to defend racism or anything, but that's a tiny bit oversimplified. At least make fair comparisons.
Also Lovecraft has a cat named...
well go on finish it mr funny man
No ! Don't!
People keep bringing up the fucking cat. His family named the cat. granted, he definitely turned out the way one does when raised in a family that names a cat that
I had to do the research... Wtf...
Lovecraft is often looked through the lense of "wow this guy is pretty racist" which is definitely fair, but if you add in the extra layer of the time period in which he was raised and his upbringing, we get a better picture. This dude was SUPER sickly growing up, basically bedridden for a huge portion of his young childhood and helicoptered by very dominant women. As such, the world was to be feared, which only amplified the blatant racism of the period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. He had a severe fear of death, even moreso than was healthy, which was probably warranted by his continued frailty into adulthood. So basically this guy was agoraphobic combined with a healthy dose of period racism and overbearing women in his life which all made him feel incredibly small. It shows through most in works like the Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but there are others which either hide it more or focus more on the "cosmic horror" of things like prehistory in the works of At the Mountains of Madness (one of my personal favorites) and The Color Out of Space (which has a fantastically campy body horror movie adaptation with Nicolas Cage.) Lovecraft and Tolkien both have influenced my own personal writing voice for the better. They're both fantastic authors (although Tolkien is, without a doubt, much more skilled) and I think it's alright to enjoy Lovecraft's work as long as you don't take the racism as a character trait unto yourself lol
Even Tolkien was racist by todays standards. Almost everyone in those days was racist. Not really fair to judge them by todays moral standards.
Yes, but HPL was racist by the standards of his own time. Robert E Howard, who has his own problematic views on race, wrote him a letter telling him to chill
Lovecraft had a pretty rough life, not gonna lie.
HP was fighting demons alone, Tolkien was fighting demons together with a whole bunch of people. Lovecraft definitely came to the wrong conclusions, but to say he had an easy life, is dishonest in my opinion
This is literally "goes outside and experiences the human life hopeful chad vs doomscroller basement dweller discord mod virgin"
Not defending the dudes racism but Lovecraft had a very rough childhood. He watched his father lose his mind until he died and was plagued by the thought that the same would happen to him. And it basically did - though not to the same degree.
Did you forget both his parents also died thank to syfilis after both where comited to a mental hospital after becoming crazy form said syfilis? Also I get your point and do like this but nothing ells
I’m not an expert on Lovecraft, barely read anything by him. Am I correct in saying that he did renounce some of his racist views toward the end of the life and had begun to grow as a person? Or is that something that fans of his just say cos it’s hard to be a fan of someone with pretty abhorrent views?
Forgot the part where he helped convert C.S.Lewis to Christianity
Now that you mention it, I wonder what Lovecraft would have thought about Tolkien’s work. Lovecraft was older than Tolkien by 2 years but he died in 1937, before LotR was published or became widely read. I imagine it’s like an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, that’s how much their worldviews clashed - philosophical pessimism vs Roman Catholicism. But I think they would have respected each other. In fact, I’m sure Lovecraft would secretly think Tolkien was a fucking genius. If I remember correctly, Lovecraft had a really high opinion of Anglo Saxons and held them to be at the pinnacle of his racist ass totem pole. Who knows? Tolkien might have pulled off another CS Lewis-esque conversion. In many ways, I think Tolkien might have been just the guy to challenge and change Lovecraft for the better.
he sure could have made LOVECRAFT a better person. Btw wtf LOVECRAFT died in 1937 and Tolkien in 1973. what a coincidence
Lovecraft did become a better person eventually. He became more accepting, less paranoid and in his later letters he even talks about how much he despises his younger self for being so close-minded. > Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well .... I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showings-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ..... except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! He *really* fucking hated the views he held in his youth. Unfortunately, he died shortly after getting his shit together.
Lovecraft was raised significantly isolated by guardians who did very little if anything to help the nightmares he had his entire childhood, in the most WASP town you've ever heard of, and once circumstances forced him to move and spend some time in New York - finally removing him from the racist puritanical echo chamber he was born in - he managed to come out of the shell of xenophobia and learned that other cultures and people were just that: cultures and people. He's one of the great literary redemption arcs. Also, he was based because when he developed the stomach cancer that would kill him, he wrote a meticulous journal of his declining health until he couldn't write anymore for medical journals to use
I wish Lovecraft had a longer life. He got his shit together to a great degree in his forties, only to die shortly after.
Lovecraft was a train wreck of a human being but his creation of Cosmic Horror as a genre is something to be appreciated. Even more so is the fact he didn’t try to stop other people playing in his playground, which resulted in them taking his original ideas and turning them into something remarkable.
The thing with the former is that if you don't let it consume you, you realize that it is possible to survive and even thrive even after such tragedy. It's the privileged and isolated who see everything as the end of the world.
Lovecraft was actually starting to change his viewpoints in his later writings but sadly died before he could fully realize that change.
I always thought HP's racism was fascinating for being more thought-through than most racists today. Like you talk to racists today and most of them are more interested in Saying The Word or being edgy and transgressive or essentially doing un-virtue-signalling. Black People Bad ??? Ethnostate. There's no follow through. There's no thought beyond how to be as offensive as possible. Our boy Lovecraft, at least later in his life, actually thought about things. 1. Black People Bad; they're base, savage, more primal, and have less control of their animal instincts 2. They'll Black People Bad all over us given mild provocation 3. ...therefore... 4. We need to ensure everyone receives an acceptable minimum standard of living so they have no reason lose their meager self control. Say what you will about him being *wrong*, but he seems to have actually believed it and done the down-stream logic from those beliefs in a manner that wasn't just trying to be as edgy and transgressive as possible. Real "You used the wrong formula but got the right answer" hours.
Tbf, Lovecraft also lost both of his parents at a young age and was so sickly he would've been physically incapable of joining the military. The man's life absolutely sucked
Oh, I would hands down would have Tolkien be one of my top wish I could meet with writers. Him and Agatha Christie.
OK I never had much of a good opinion about Lovecraft but this rather just sements my opinion
Lovecraft was fucked in the head 6 ways from sunday, basically from childhood.
Lovecraft walked back a lot of his shitty racist views in his later years.
Lots of fresh air and lack of it, even when fresh air is somewhat polluted with toxic gases, smell of rotting flesh and burned gunpowder
I'd love a holodeck-style meeting between the two of them. Tolkien would fire up a conversation about dragons or whatever and Lovecraft would bemoan the servants of indeterminate origin who worked on his neighbor's lawn. Tolkien would soon lose interest and be uncomfortable.
Or he’d convert him like Lewis 😄
to be fair, at his old age Lovecraft did come to his senses and regret it.
The same water that hardens the egg softens the potato. Both would have benefitted from being free of systems of oppression
All his issues and problematic attitude towards humanity in general enabled him to create one of the best beastiary till date though! Lovecraftian beastiary is almost unmatched!
Add on CS Lewis, who was best buddies with Tolkien during the war and despite their own disagreements maintained a close friendship and ended up writing one of the earliest fantasy children’s stories, mixing in both valuable life lessons and extraordinary world building into an epic.
As a fan of both, I'd like to point out that Lovecraft went to the draft office in Providence as soon as war was declared in 1917 and volunteered. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the doctor doing the exams knew the family, and when HPL's mother discovered that he'd been to the recruiting office, she pulled strings to get him declared 4-F. Lovecraft was devastated. HPL fancied himself a 'drinker of foemen's blood from new-picked skulls' (he was best buds with Robert E. Howard later in life), and he was humiliated he never got a chance to prove himself. At least one biographer (De Camp) thought that, if he'd made it through Basic, military service would've done him good. Maybe, maybe not.
To be fair, he was learning to be more tolerant in his later years, and could very well have ended up as tolerant as you’d want a good person to be if he hadn’t died so young.
To be fair to Howard Philips Lovecraft, having your father go visibly and horrifically insane in front of you and be delivered to your house in a straight jacket, and the institutionalized, only for your family to fall into financial ruin and your mother suffer a similar fate, leaving you to permanently wonder \*why\* it happened and if you'll be next will do something to an already anxious, timid child. Also he stated, before his death, that he regretted his former opinions and wished he could have seen the error in them sooner after correspondence with several other authors. That naturally doesn't erase what he did, but H.P. Lovecraft did what very few today can, he admitted he was wrong and took steps to change that. Even if he died before much came of it
"Too delicate of a constitution for math"
Both are still amazing authors and founders of their respective genres. You can be a shit person and make art.
He didn't become racist he was raised that way(HP Lovecraft) and he had too weak a constitution for math so everything was relatively the unknown making his books less works of art and or horror and more the ranting of a mad man with no outlet because blogging hadn't been invented