Lovecraft, when writing about Poe, said, “Poe . . . perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove—good and evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing—with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathiser, or vendor of opinion.”6 It is, shall we say, an interesting point of view, one that demands a detachment of an artist’s work from the artist themselves.
And yet, no person lives in a vacuum, devoid of influence from those who come before them and capable of severing their own politics from their work. Nay, the creative impulse is motivated by an innate desire to place our stamp upon all we produce. It is the expression of this impulse that provides us with the experience of pleasure, joy, and a sense of completion, whether or not what we produce is completed.
As such, inspired work, true art, careens and crashes into the collective conscious on strong undercurrents of the artist’s personality. There is some inherent recognition in this, hence the moral dilemma of consuming work by artists of problematic ideologies. What does it mean to consume and enjoy such works? Perhaps the value begins in identifying the problematic in the works, if by doing so, we prevent ourselves from embodying it.
For this introductory piece on the subject, let us begin with a look at H. P. Lovecraft.
A rather famous author once wrote,
They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption. . . . They—or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed—seem’d to ooze, seep, and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses. . . . The individual grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye . . . a yellow and leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point.12
If you have touched upon classic horror from the 1920s and ‘30s, this style may strike you as very familiar. These are the words of none other than the illustrious H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is widely known for such enduring works as The Call of Cthulhu, and At the Mountains of Madness, in which he brought to our consciousness the terror and rancor of the Great Old Ones and their brood. In Mountains, he describes a race of fiends in service to the Great Old Ones as
. . . something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow . . . It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light . . .3
While the quotations above certainly provide a derelict and alarming perception of some cosmic horror ready to consume any person’s sanity who has the misfortune to glance upon it, the harrowing detail lies in the singular difference between said quotations. For while the latter has already been identified in reference to some dreamed up mythological nightmare, the former has not been identified with regard to its target.
Now, Lovecraft is appreciated for his great many works and the deep impressions they have carved in the evolution of fantasy and horror. But what often gets swept under the rug when discussing Lovecraft is his outright “full-fledged racist neurosis.”4
No person is perfect—we are all, in our own way, mad—but madness itself has numerous layerings and subtleties, of which we may easily point out three:
some bury their madness, forcing themselves to conform to the status quo—this, of course, is naught but repression and results in the development of a particular set of neuroses and repercussions;
others embrace their madness, moving comfortably in it, and damn the status quo! While this is psychologically liberating in many ways, the pressure applied by societal norms and the effort required to withstand it create their own psychic tensions.
There are, of course, all the many degrees of difference between them, however, for purposes of brevity, we will leave these two in sum; and,
there are those who step beyond the bounds of humanist decency and distort their perceptions with a madness that is at once grotesque and monstrous. These same will coax, push, jostle, and throw others beyond the bounds of healthy madness given the opportunity, thus perpetuating their own monstrous and terrible imaginations.
It is this final group in which we find Lovecraft; someone who was not merely content to be a racist in the sense of “being a product of his time,” but rather one who had need to extend the barbarous nature of such ideology to the extreme. This is evident in his depiction of the “immigrant crowds in New York and Providence”4 of which the first quotation is an example.
This underlies the inquiry of what kind of person Lovecraft was; what kind of man, indeed, could harbor such hatred and loathing for whole groups of people based entirely on the color of their skin or ethnic origins? Let us return to this question later, and for the moment turn our attention to one Jane Wilbred.
In 1850, Jane Wilbred was a workhouse child who was “farmed out” to a Mr. George Sloane and his wife. She served the Sloanes for two years, during which she was starved and beaten. When a barrister living in the same building learned of the child, he managed to gain her release with the help of another lawyer. They sought immediate medical counsel, and the doctor “ . . reported that she was ‘a mere skeleton covered only with skin’, that she was too weak to speak, and that she would inevitably have died within a few days had she not been rescued.”5 The magistrates were called in, and the resulting investigation drew up evidence of extreme sadism: Jane was expected to subsist on a basin of broth, her clothes and bedding were never cleaned, and she was allowed to use the toilet only once a day, her excrement being fed back to her if she defecated at any other time.
Now, I needn’t have traveled back nearly as far as the 1800s to bring examples of monstrous behavior to this conversation. One can look across the Atlantic at the horrifying events happening between two prominent nationalities in unending conflict with one another; their atrocities making headlines daily. And even then, one need not turn their gaze so far over the globe to recognize cruelty. Organizations within the boundaries of the United States working in official capacity are raising the bar of what it means to treat a human inhumanely.
The main idea is this: there is madness, and then there is monstrous, and the distinction need not be subtle. What the Sloanes, warlords, and pseudo-gestapo have in common is the ease in which they dehumanize and villainize their fellow man, and it is precisely this aspect that turns a human from being human at all; they are, instead, the embodiment of the monstrous they project. They are naught but monsters in human guise.
Continued below the break.
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If a person of impeccable integrity—with good intentions and a history to match—can be raised to the level of a saint, can we not reduce one of low integrity—with ill will and a history to match—to that of a lower and more base status than human? It is not enough to divide the population of this world between saints and sinners, for the term sinners imposes perfection upon those considered saints and does far too much with regard to encompassing the rest of us. Let us flip this designation to identify those at the extreme evil end of the spectrum and we are left with only monsters and madmen, with no clear designation for those who transcend their madness.
Nay, saints are sinners too; we simply define them in terms of uncompromising integrity. Let us then label those on the other end of spectrum and define them as completely lacking in empathy and compassion. This is the monstrous, and it is here we find the putrid evil of man in recursive growth.
And now we return to Lovecraft. We echo the earlier question raised: what kind of man—or person, rather—could harbor such hatred and loathing for whole groups of people based entirely on the color of their skin or ethnic origins? We answer thus: no human at all, but rather a monster.
In The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, in his essay on Poe, Lovecraft, and racism, suggests “Lovecraft’s much-discussed racism must be considered as complicated by his philosophical ‘cosmicism,’ which insists that the human race in general is of no consequence in the larger scheme of things” and that “racial categories are not fixed and immutable, that white men are not the universal developmental telos, that Poe’s and Lovecraft’s characters have to scrabble so much and work so hard to assert and reassert their superiority and supposed civility.”4 He argues that the work is powerful, not in spite of these problematic concepts, but rather because of them, and goes on to ask what it means, as a reader, to enjoy such works.
The main idea is this: there is madness, and then there is monstrous, and the distinction need not be subtle.
The idea that racial prejudice is minimized due in large part to the idea that “the human race in general is of no consequence in the larger scheme of things” is absurd. Whether or not there are gods, demons, Great Old Ones, or shoggoths present in our universe, our lived experience is present with such vile ideology as xenophobia provides. The cosmos is grand, but we live not among the stars but rather amidst our peers.
Nay, this argument, in all of its alleged grandeur, is purely dismissive. Instead, I offer another approach to this idea of “great because of”:
We have Lovecraft to thank for his works because he was the very monster he wrote about. The very descriptions he laid at the feet of those he loathed, he embodied, and it is this monstrous being wrapped up in human skin that has brought to life terrors beyond imagining. Lovecraft wrote about Cthulhu bringing madness to the masses upon his awakening, and what is this but an allegory of the monstrous ideology that brings a disgusting and twisted form of madness to all who accept and partake when it enters the collective?
We read classic literature for the benefit of understanding where we are coming from, where we may perchance go, and to take heed of the warnings present in every era’s messages. Lovecraft’s work is no different. His twisted cities and cosmic horrors are nothing less than the monstrous released upon the human, and a warning to take heed lest those cosmic horrors overtake and ingrain themselves within you.
Well, that was dark. Monsters proliferate right alongside us and inform music and literature as much as the rest of us mad people. It is vital important to recognize this, understand this, and make the effort to not simply refrain from being influenced by it, but actively train yourself to become immune to it. As Volume II unfolds and classic tales of terror are shared, more of this style of content will be published alongside it, though not often in long form. Thank you for reading; it is my hope you will continue this journey with us here at the Calamity in exposing or celebrating the artists while appreciating the works which have brought horror into its modern inception.
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1 Moreland, Sean, editor. “The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation. Lehigh University Press, 2017.
2 H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5 vols., ed. S. T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–1976), 1:333–34.
3 Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness. Standard Ebooks, 2025.
4 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Tekeli-li!.” The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation, edited by Sean Moreland, Lehigh University Press, 2017.
5 Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. HarperPress, 2011.
6 Lovecraft, H. P. Selected Letters. Arkham House, 1965-76.