Notes on H. P. Lovecraft

This post has had various pieces removed, because a) it wasn't really very well done, and b) the inside of H. P. Lovecraft's head is a very creepy place.

No, I don't mean the blind mad gods and the infinite uncaring incomprehensible universe and the succession of tomatoes in the mirror. It's been eighty-odd years. We're used to that.

The thing about Lovecraft is that he was very much a believer in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, and racial purity as a virtue. His descriptions of ‘degenerate’ monstrous races actually echoed his personal sentiments concerning the ‘lesser’ (read: non-white) branches of Homo sapiens sapiens. Lovecraft's frequent allusions to ‘miscegenation’ and ‘mongrels’ in describing half-human offspring also parallel, in similar form, his personal beliefs concerning the mixing of the races. Two of his aforementioned tomatoes were half-human, and horrified to learn it.

Fortunately, Lovecraft's publishers would never have printed such things; we know about the depth and breadth of his racism mostly from his personal letters. Thus the Cthulhu Mythos as used today doesn't really have any connection to Lovecraft's view of his fellow man. Still, I'm pretty sure a lot of people have put -2 and -2 together, and fast-forwarded to something closer to the present day to write stories in which, say, Dagonism is consistently the sixth or seventh most common religion identified on the U.S. Census, and perhaps in which we have a cease-fire agreement with the Mi-Go and a few scattered K'n-yan expatriates as residents, and in which Lovecraft is not remembered as a writer of horror, but as an incendiary propagandist, if at all.

Which, admittedly, the interleaved italicized fragments in original post could have been. The problem is, they could also have been from some guy on the Internet in our world — and I am some guy on the Internet in our world. Just not that guy.

If I can rewrite it to remove that misreading, I'll repost it. If not, well, I won't.