Yet, his influence is felt in Stephen King, Stranger Things, and so many new and classic tales. I first encountered Lovecraftian horror in video games like Diablo and Starcraft and again when I joined a campaign in Dungeons and Dragons. Besides, he’s a foundational figure in speculative fiction, and those of us who love a good “What if…” must eventually wrestle with that literature’s racist past.

Studying his oeuvre is not financially supporting prejudice. On the other hand, Lovecraft is dead and his works are in the public domain. Even compared to other bigots, he reads as narrow-minded and mean-spirited. But in Lovecraft’s world, some people really are better than others, and communicating with strangers could lead to the end of civilization. These authors failed to live up to their own ideals. As for the Harry Potter franchise, it was clearly intended to be an allegory for bigotry, with muggles, mudbloods, and pure families standing in for classist and racist institutions. Card’s Ender’s Game is about failures of cross-species communication, and in the sequels Ender strives endlessly to understand other perspectives. But their literature is kinder than their real lives. Rowling have sullied their reputations by scare-mongering about Muslims and non-binary people, respectively.

Today, once-admirable writers like Orson Scott Card and J.K. His characters encounter beings with unfathomable power, and while they mostly live to tell the tale, they suffer through an awful epiphany - that their thoughts don’t matter, their desires don’t matter, and their entire existence is temporary and fragile … a soap bubble ready to burst. Lovecraft is the horror of insignificance. As it turned out, “insomnia” and “overwork” are two of the chief complaints of Lovecraft’s characters when they are hiding a terrible secret. Whether he knew the truth or not, he later told friends that his father perished of insomnia and overwork. The episode had a profound effect on Lovecraft. Today, we would call it late-stage syphilis. He died five years later of “general paresis,” or general paralysis of the insane.

Lovecraft’s behavior had become so chaotic that he was committed to Butler Hospital in the family’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. Howard Phillips Lovecraft came into this world on August 20th, 1890, the only child of a rich mother and a father who would soon be acting strange.

Lovecraft Story from Worst to Best appeared first on Consequence of Sound.

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