Problematic fave: HP Lovecraft
If there are three things that most fans of sci-fi/fantasy/horror know about HP Lovecraft's work it is that 1) his short stories basically single-handedly created the genre of cosmic horror that ultimately spawned the 'new weird' aesthetic that is still popping up across many books, videogames, and movies, 2) he was massively racist/xenophobic even for his time, and 3) one cannot read his stories and be unaware of fact #2. "Separating the art from the artist", always an iffy endeavor, is impossible here1. So why do I, and so many others who vehemently disagree with Lovecraft's view of the world, keep coming back to his stories? I think there are several reasons.
First, the stories themselves are intriguing and haunting, and while fear of the unknown is central to most of them, a lot of the xenophobia towards humans feels almost pasted on. For instance, in "The rats in the walls", there is a black cat called "N**r Man". While that is unpleasant, it is also so unnecessary (the cat could have been called "Inky" or "Tom" or literally anything else2 ) that one could imagine adapting the story without that detail and losing nothing. Similarly, in the "The shadow over Innsmouth", the story would still work if the creepy fish people were just creepy fish people, without any Polynesian connection. A lot of people find slimy/fishy/octopus-like things with too many teeth or eyes; the concept of one's body changing in unexpected ways; and the idea of powerful forces that could squash humans like bugs lurking in space/the deep sea/another dimension deeply unsettling, so that aspect of the horror still works quite well.
Second, while there is a lot of fear of outsiders in evidence, Lovecraft himself clearly felt like an outsider too. He wasn't very comfortable in most of society, might possibly have been asexual, and experienced a lot of loneliness and tragedy. So many of the stories also evoke what it is like to be an outsider, and that is something a lot of people who find themselves on the margins for one reason or another can relate to3. In two stories in particular, the aforementioned "The shadow over Innsmouth" and "The outsider", a character turns out to be something that most people would find horrifying - yet, once they recognize what they are, they make peace with it. Other tales are about people who feel out of step with the world and find refuge in fantasy. "The silver key" begins: When Randolph Carter was thirty, he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Carter is persuaded, for a while, to believe in the logical and mundane. But it is killing his spirit, and he finally disappears, with the narrative concluding: I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumored in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad...
And, of course, Lovecraft is long dead. So there isn't the same moral quandry involved in buying and reading his books that there might be for a living author with abhorrent views.
For some of these stories, I feel my response to the story, my reason for enjoying it, is probably very different from what Lovecraft intended. For instance, the idea that the universe doesn't care about humanity isn't particularly horrifying to me - it is just my familiar base assumption about how reality works. And some of the alien beings and cultures Lovecraft creates would be truly fascinating to experience, even if there were some risk involved in doing so. The most notable example is in "The shadow out of time". In this tale, the professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee undergoes a body-swap with an alien being that inhabited earth tens of millions of years in the past. While in the past, and in the cone-shaped body of his host, he is asked to write an account of human civilization, as he understands it, and is free to browse their library of other accounts of different civilizations and to take guided tours of their world. A time-travel student exchange program? Sign me up4! True, he learns of some other scary species living dormant deep under the earth, but "the great race" have learned enough history that we can be sure that those things don't emerge at all during humanity's time on earth, and so aren't really a threat we need to worry about. Similarly, in "At the mountains of madness", researchers in Antarctica uncover an ancient alien civilization. But nothing about these aliens suggests they would be automatically hostile or unknowable: they had cities, written language, art, and domestic animals, just like us. True, the revived ones do kill some of the scientists - but we would do the same if we woke up to find weird alien beings dissecting one of our compatriots! "The whisperer in darkness" is more genuinely terrifying because of the ambiguity about whether the person speaking is actually who they purport to be. They have been placed, or have placed themselves, in a situation where they are very much at the mercy of others and so whether they have truly come to an understanding with the alien beings is unclear. Encountering a wholly alien civilization, with all there would be to learn from one another, is an idea that is simultaneously attractive and scary - but certainly not mind-meltingly horrifying, as Lovecraft's somewhat over-wrought language usually suggests.
1. As Overly Sarcastic Productions has memorably put it in introducing their quick humorous summary of several HP Lovecraft tales: "It would be inaccurate to describe Howard Phillip Lovecraft as a man with issues. It's more like he was a bundle of issues shambling around in a roughly bipedal approximation of a man."
2. Except, of course, that the name
is a tribute to Lovecraft's own cat.
For f**k's sake, man! Can you imagine calling that out every time you have to
feed your pet?
3. For more on this angle, check out Hbomberguy's YouTube video covering (among other things) why Lovecraft can appeal to queer readers.
4. Provided, of course, I could give my loved ones a heads-up that "I" would be acting a bit weird over the next year or so due to the alien piloting my body. The only actually terrible thing that happens in this story is that "Dr. Peaslee" ends up alienating (ha!) everyone but his son during the possession.
Overall conclusion: I hesitate to recommend Lovecraft broadly. Those racism and classism landmines are unavoidable, and if you have to deal with discrimination on a regular basis that sort of thing can be way too stressful or offensive to tackle in recreational reading. And that is more than OK! There are lots of other things to read! Fortunately, many of the works inspired by Lovecraft, some of which I hope to cover here in the future, have tried to correct that aspect. But if you feel like braving the swamp, there is historical interest and some potential artistic inspiration to be had in the originals - or at the very least it makes reading the many, many stories that reference or satirize Lovecraft more fun. The ones I think are most worth checking out for these purposes are:
- "The shadow out of time" (time-travel alien body swap)
- "The shadow over Innsmouth" (fishy "old ones" influence a New England town)
- "At the mountains of madness" (Antarctic alien civilization discovered)
- "The colour out of space" (weird meteorite contaminates a valley)
- "The whisperer in darkness" (are the alien creatures hostile or misunderstood?)
