Unfortunately a lot of those personal views made their way into his work. For example, consider this passage from “Reanimator”:
The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
Later, after the lead character [spoiler!] reanimates the corpse of said subject, he seems at least as put off by the creature’s ethnicity than by the fact that it is now a murderous flesh-eating zombie.
It’s still possible to enjoy Lovecraft’s work, but it’s not always possible to separate that work from the racism of its creator. I had a similarly complicated relationship with the “Dr. Fu-Manchu” books. He’s the prototypical genius supervillain; Dr. No and Lex Luthor and Moriarty all wrapped into one. Unfortunately he’s also the embodiment of every ugly, racist anti-Asian stereotype the early 20th Century had to offer.
