But some contemporary writers are now going further by writing Lovecraftian horror that directly acknowledges and repudiates Lovecraft’s ugly bigotries. Most of the horror writers channeling Lovecraft’s style or subject matter haven’t larded their prose with slurs or calls to race war. In his view, the fanciful tale of mystic horror is also a call to genocide. “There was some peculiarly abominable quality about which made their destruction seem almost a duty,” Lovecraft writes. And when he and his shipmates encounter Cthulhu’s non-white human followers, they butcher them in a fury, which Lovecraft enthusiastically endorses. In Lovecraft’s classic 1926 story The Call of Cthulhu, for example, the Elder Gods from outside space and time are remembered and venerated by “Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans” - by non-white people, in other words.īy contrast, Lovecraft’s protagonist is Gustaf Johansen, a white Norwegian sailor.
The vast, terrible cosmic horrors he wrote about are always connected to his fear that the pure, upstanding white race is being corrupted and overrun with foul emanations from the less eugenically pure. Those protests aren’t convincing, though. Joshi, have argued that Lovecraft’s offensive views were only central to a few of his lesser works, like the bigoted poem with a title that starts “On the Creation Of” and ends with a racist slur.
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The new Amazon eight-episode fantasy series Carnival Row is one of the first indications that this strand of antiracist Lovecraft fiction is traveling out of genre fiction and into more mainstream entertainment. These creators are turning Lovecraft inside out, exposing his wet, ugly innards for antiracist purposes. More recently, though, several writers have engaged Lovecraft’s racism more directly. In the past, authors like August Derleth and Stephen King have mostly tried to ignore the prejudice, concentrating instead on Lovecraft’s vision of a grotesque universe bent on humanity’s destruction and the joys of his clotted, tentacular, Cyclopean prose.
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Lovecraft’s fans and heirs have long struggled with the question of how to separate his particular vision of cosmic horror from the visceral loathing of non-white people he expressed in his work. He’s also one of the most overtly, profoundly racist. Lovecraft is one of the most imaginative, singular, brilliant, and influential horror writers of all time. Warning: broad spoilers ahead for season 1 of Carnival Row.
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