H. P. Lovecraft Loved My Home Town. The Rest of the World, Not So Much.
In the early years of the 20th century, unless you were a follower of pulp magazines that trafficked in fantasy, horror, and early sci-fi, Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s fiction was written and largely ignored. His work only gained steam after he died in 1937, as his disciples published and elaborated on work and ideas he began. Filmmakers followed, rarely adapting Lovecraft directly but liberally utilizing his themes in their work.
Lovecraft the person lived a tumultuous life under the thumb of a mentally ill mother, marrying once (unhappily) and moving from his native Providence to Brooklyn, New York, which he hated. Lovecraft had friends, writers with whom he shared great correspondences, but for the most part his life was one of grievance and pain; he was convinced of his work’s worth but never saw it appreciated as it would be in later years.
A few words on Lovecraft’s work. It’s generally regarded as the earliest example of “cosmic” horror, tackling themes such as nature’s indifference to man and the unknowability of what lies beyond our world. In Lovecraft’s fiction, malevolent forces care little for our wellbeing, and mammoth, many-tentacled creatures from other worlds with names like Cthulhu, Yog-Soggoth, and Shub-Niggurath live below us on Earth. The very notion that our world contains…
