Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an “adequately excellent lover,” it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.
He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list…. The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.
129Yeah, horror writers usually scare easily, that's where their ideas come from.
For example, Stephan King is afraid of cars among other things, that's where Christine and Maximum Overdrive comes from. (Ironically, he also almost died being struck by a car. I doubt that alleviated his fear.)
51non-Euclidean geometry
real.
28Ah well. non-euclidean geometry was kind of their quantum physics: a super fancy and mysterious scientific thing that intrigued everyone but only few understood.
6
There were things that didn't scare him?
9Possibly his cat.
3
If you exclude the racism and sexism (and probably homophobia, I assume), dude and I share a pretty good number of things that frighten us.
9Lovecraft is Monk confirmed
6
Plot twist: the story is literally just about a black man minding his own business.
53Xenophobic racist mama's boy. But he wrote some great stories.
44pretty sure he hated his mom because she was bonkers abusive towards him
27It's so interesting how so many characters of his just go spend some time in asylums as though it's a completely normal thing for people to do because of how messed up his upbringing was.
30
Don't look up the name of his cat.
33It was removedman, I'll save y'all a click.
Edit: Lemmy removed the first part of his name. Lovecraft didn't like black people, so You can figure out what it was.
56
It's interesting to compare Lovecraft to his friend Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the barbarian). My impression is that Howard believed in and was fascinated by the stereotype of Africans as savages which was common at that time, but he still had them on the side of the good guys in multiple stories. His writing is certainly not PC by modern standards, but he seems like he was an open-minded guy.
29I've read his works. Some stories aged better than others. I sometimes had to remind myself that they were written almost a century ago.
13His predecessor would've been H. Rider Haggard who, while generally considered an archracist because of how he developed the savage stereotype, had African heros as well and pretty deep respect for zulu culture. Haggard even wrote a book with a white villain and black protagonists. He generally was extremely misogynistic though.
You can also see haggard's influence on burrough's Mars books.
7he seems like he was an open-minded guy.
Well that's certainly one of the takes of all time. He's widely acknowledged to have been racist even for his time
5Being a normal racist is for normie writers who don't write bestsellers, obviously have to have quirks and odds about you so you're just as interesting as the books you write!
/S
2Just emphasising this. Lovecraft was virulently racist, way more so than what was considered 'normal' during his time. To put Lovecraft and 'open minded' in the same sentence is pure ignorance, unless the latter words are directly preceded by "absolutely not".
1
Or a black person doing --- yeah nevermind
15His nightmares were the ones in which his mother refused his advances.
13I started reading his works and while not badly written I find them uninspired and boring so far, in fact I stopped reading and felt no real desire to come back to it. OMG horrors beyond human imagination! It just gets repetitive after a while. Am I just ignorant?
11>uninspired
>lives in an age where horror culture has been greatly inspired by his worksUninspired is definitely not the right word.
22That would be inspiring though, not inspired
5I strongly feel that the extending of and remixes of og lovecraft offer more than the creator's work itself. @laser is right, it's really... a product of it's time.
2
Quite possibly they're just not your thing. Agree the writing is not the best but for me it's the world building and abstract nature of his horror that draw me in which at the time he wrote them were unique and I'd argue continue to be unique as so many people draw from his stories as a source of influence.
13I wish his books came in an edition with the originals and lightly edited versions of the originals that don't have the casual racism.
6
Maybe you're just not enough of a white supremacist to get it.
0
What's up with Lovecraft? I mean besides his cat's name, bc as far as i heard, it were his parents who named it. I really wanna know
9His dad developed syphilitic halucinations when HP was four years old. He died of untreated syphilis in an insitution when HP was eight.
His mother was a wreck in general and psychologically abusive in his childhood. He grew close to his grandfather, but he died and the family assets were dissolved, leaving HP and his abusive unstable mother living in a small studio apartment, basically, meaning he couldn't get away from it. She also had a breakdown and died in an institution after only two years after being commited.
34Not sure why he's singled out especially. He was born in 1890. You could throw a rock at that point and hit a sexist, racist, everything-ist.
I'm sure in a 100 years they'll say the same about us.
5Overly Sarcastic Productions did a great little piece on him and his work a while back.
4
My single favorite Howard line is when he talks about "...degenerate Eskimos."
9When I get to hell I'm gonna talk em into putting HP Lovecraft & Ed Wood in a cage match and see who comes out of it the weirdest.
8
