H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft

1890–1937

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown

"Supernatural Horror in Literature"

• Transitional figure: between Gothic and modern horror.

• Deeply ambivalent about modernity: fascination with knowledge versus fear of degeneration.
• Early 20th-century anxieties: urbanization, immigration, scientific progress, cosmic insignificance.
• Racism as both personal ideology and narrative motor.
• Enduring influence on pop culture (film, games, horror aesthetics)

Cosmic Horror

• “Cosmicism”: the idea that human beings are insignificant in the vast, indifferent universe.
• Knowledge as danger: forbidden texts (Necronomicon), scientists uncovering terrible truths.
• Rejection of anthropocentrism — universe as cold and unknowable.
• Fear of the Other—both cosmic and racial.

Style & Atmosphere

• Dense, archaic prose: antiquarian diction, elaborate description.
• Preference for suggestion over direct depiction.
• Fragmented narratives, unreliable narrators.
• Evocation through sound: e.g., “cacophonous,” “blasphemous,” “eldritch.”
• Spatial imagination: ancient ruins, subterranean cities, alien geometries.

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

• Lovecraft’s racism is central to his horror.
• Urban decay, immigration, and miscegenation as metaphors for degeneration.
• Fear of the city as a racialized, foreign space.
• Monsters as projections of racial and cultural anxiety.

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

• Reflects xenophobia: “swarthy, foreign faces,” “Babylonian degeneracy.”
• The city as labyrinth: claustrophobia, moral and racial decay.
• Immigrants as both literally and symbolically “inhuman.”
• Paranoid Gothic urbanism — the horror of the melting pot.
• Narrative of containment: white order vs. racialized chaos.
• Fear of modernity displaced into racial fear.

Lovecraft came of age in an America yet to cohere as a society, much less as an emergent global superpower, and still beset by a wide plethora of terrors and anxieties. [...] It is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world

Alan Moore

A video on "The Horror at Red Hook"

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

• Reimagines Red Hook from a Black perspective
• Inversion of point of view: the “monstrous” becomes human, the “civilized” detective becomes monstrous.
• Racism is made explicit rather than sublimated.
• Cosmic horror reframed as social horror — systemic racism as the true abyss.
• Blend of realism and the supernatural: Harlem Renaissance meets Cthulhu Mythos.

H.P. Lovecraft Versus Victor LaValle

A (rather long) interview with LaValle