I was one of those people who knew nothing about his racism (I never read his stories.)
Then I watched Lovecraft Country. I didn’t catch on at first, but after some googling, I was suprised (but not that suprised…) how this side of Lovecraft is conspicuously neglected in popular culture.
Anyway, I then read Lovecraft Country as well. A great story (if your into the genre) focusing on a mix of Lovecraft inspired horror and racism in America.
I would recomend Lovecraft Country over anything Lovercraft wrote…
Maybe it’s just who I’m reading, but all the stories in the genre/tradition I read are at least touching on that, even when the story isn’t centered on those narratives. (Or, at the other extreme e.g. the Ruthanna Emrys stories that are quite faithful sequels to Shadow Over Innsmouth, but recognize that the only actual horror in the original story is that the US government [tries to] commit genocide, and the fictional racism becomes a jumping off point for narratives about real racism, sexism, homophobia, cultural appropriation and theft of indigenous knowledge and artifacts, etc.)
Oh yeah, all sorts of things were going on - the big ones, for Lovecraft (besides the physics) being that the Earth (and Universe) were radically older than previous estimations (and much more complicated and filled with extinction events), and anthropologists exploring previously inaccessible corners of the globe bringing back knowledge and bits of global culture that, in small ways, were influencing and de-centering Western European culture, which made racists nervous. (E.g. elements of African, Oceanic and Asian art influencing Euro-American contemporary art, Black US culture entering the white mainstream with Jazz, etc.)
The subsequent century has made it all quite quaint - I mean, everything’s a lot weirder and more complicated than people thought a century ago. Lovecraft had a problem with his grandmother being Welsh? How would he have dealt with being part Neanderthal? Not to mention - extinction events? We’ll give you some extinction events - literally. That humans can wipe out their species all on their own makes Cthulhu et al rather superfluous.
Yah, it’s important to keep in mind that Lovecraft, for all of his nostalgia for an 18th century that never really existed, was an atheist and keenly interested in the scientific advances of his time. I don’t think there’s much personal horror in his descriptions of a vast, inhuman universe that doesn’t care for us, but might destroy us without ever noticing we existed.
What is personal is all the, well, proto-body horror about horrible secrets and alien taint in our ancestry and ourselves, and of suddenly descending into madness or despair upon discovering it.
This is the theme of a lot of HPL’s stories: The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Rats in the Walls, Arthur Jermyn, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Pickman’s Model has it going on, too, with the hints about Pickman’s inhumanity; and you could argue that The Shadow Out of Time with its Yithian possession reaching out from the deep past, and The Thing on the Doorstep with the body-hopping sorcerer possessing first his daughter, then her husband, have the same thing going on. Heck, The Color Out of Space has the whole inescapable decay and degeneration through the taint of the Color going on.
It all makes sense when you know Lovecraft’s father went mad and died in the hospital, probably of neurosyphilis, and his mother ended in a mental asylum herself.
