I made it a policy starting when I was in college to never read non technical interviews or the like. Even so every now and then I accidentally find out that some creator has personal beliefs that I find abhorrent and it just ends up interfering with the experience of their work for me.
On the flip side of this, I completely firewall off the names I use for my own creative works in various media because by some views I’m an asshole as well. I dont want anyone to like/dislike my work for my opinions, let em like it or not for what it is/what they had for lunch that day/if they had a fight with their lover/whatever.
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.
I don’t read characters as paper dolls of the author unless told otherwise. A racist character can be repugnant for that quality alone or perhaps for others or even redeemed by others.
As for villains even as a kid in the 70s I could imagine bad guys of any ethnicity.
There is a difference between an author who creates a racist narrator for storytelling reasons and an author who consistently portrays all non-white characters as hideous subhuman brutes.
