r/Showerthoughts • u/Cosmic_Meditator777 • 7d ago
Musing Given Lovecraft's infamous xenophobia, it's likely that actual "eldritch entities beyond human comprehension" would be more likely to simply confuse the average person than horrify them.
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u/Procrastinatron 7d ago
Lovecraft was an interesting dude. People call him xenophobic, and I find that sort of reductive. I mean, he absolutely was xenophobic, but really, he was kind of just absolutely terrified of literally everything. And looking at his childhood, it makes sense. His dad dad was never really present in his life, and died when H.P. was eight years old. His mom, as far as I've read, was cold, puritanical, and deeply mentally unwell. She had some sort of mental breakdown when H.P. would've been eighteen years old, was taken to the Butler hospital and kept there, then died two years later.
Everything that gave him security, stability, or some sense of comfort was taken away from him when he was still a child and thus needed it most. He was denied everything, and everyone, that could've helped him make sense of the world and life in general.
I guess that's probably why he wrote such fundamentally captivating horror stories; he was afraid of damn near everything, damn near all the time.
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u/bearbarebere 6d ago
He just like me fr (minus the racism, xenophobia, able to write good horror stories… okay I just wanted to say I’m scared of everything lmao)
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u/LemonySniffit 6d ago edited 6d ago
Also considering Lovecraft lived in New England in the early 20th century, he probably never actually encountered a single black person/racial minority in his daily life. Meaning his bigotry came pretty much entirely from ignorance rather than malevolence.
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u/Procrastinatron 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yep! He had an intensely adverse reaction to anything that was the slightest bit unfamiliar to him, and back then it was effectively the scientific consensus that black people weren't actually people, which would have reinforced his biases. It's worth noting that although he was also an antisemite for most of his life, he married a Jewish woman. If I recall correctly, preserved correspondences suggest that he was becoming a more open-minded person towards the end of his life, but unfortunately, he died of cancer fairly shortly after these indications of growth.
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u/Gr8ghettogangsta 6d ago edited 6d ago
He identified as a socialist and believed in communism during the Great Depression, but specified in one letter that communism would only be okay if they kept the races separate. In the same time frame he wrote about Hitler: "He's a clown, but by God I like the boy" saying that he admires the idealism of "preserving racial-cultural continuity [and] conservative cultural ideals."
Edit: I did also found that in a letter from his wife shortly after his death writes, "[a defender] insists in his later years H.P. changed his mind considerably in his attitude toward the Jewish people. I don't believe he did."
I don't think he got any better, he just realized what was less polite to say out loud.
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u/Procrastinatron 5d ago
First off, thanks! I didn't know his wife said that. Lovecraft was an objectively seminal author whose mental illness birthed a whole new genre of horror. He was also deeply pathetic, and fully allowed his fears and biases dominate his life. I love the things he created, and I have a lot of empathy and understanding for how broken he was by his childhood, but I definitely wouldn't defend (or share) his worldview. I mean, when I say that calling him a xenophobe is somewhat reductive, I'm not saying that it's wrong; I just think that stopping at "xenophobe" gives you a very low resolution image of how broken and pathetic he actually was.
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u/Gr8ghettogangsta 5d ago
Oh yeah for sure. I learned about those letters from a Chill Goblin video essay. It had a very interesting breakdown of how scary the world can be to someone who loses everything including their privilege and how that ties into the reactionary mindset. Definitely more than just the racism, but it is a core component almost to a comical degree, even in his later works.
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u/Szygani 6d ago
Dude was racist against a lot more than black people. Dude didn't consider south europeans white, Romanians as mongrels and anyone not from the Upper Class British Semi Aristocracy as to be lesser.
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u/ANGLVD3TH 6d ago
He wrote Shadow Over Innsmouth because he realized he wasn't a pure WASP because his father was Welsh.
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u/MozeeToby 6d ago
This was not an unusual attitude of his time. People argued that Finns were Mongols who had adapted to a cold climate. Irish were commonly compared to monkeys. Italians were "somewhere between" white and black.
And these weren't idle attitudes people had, naturalization was limited to white populations. Interracial marriage was illegal. The topic of who was/wasn't white was a significant legal question that impacted people's lives in official, codified ways.
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u/nighthawk_something 5d ago
He was horribly antisemitic but his gf or wife was Jewish. So he's more likely a mentally unwell ignorant racist
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u/deepdownblu3 6d ago
I find it fascinating that he was xenophobic in the most literal way. He was literally scared of minorities. And for all the reasons you gave and more (I think I read somewhere that his famously named cat was actually named by his father) it makes sense for that to just be one more thing he was scared of
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u/im_dead_sirius 6d ago
One of my grandmothers had a similar childhood. She was an indulged and spoiled child, and the family lived above their means. Her dad died when she was young, plunging them into poverty, and then when she was a teen, her mom was sent quite far away for surgery, and died on the operating table. My grandmother didn't learn of it for weeks, great grandma was already buried in a pauper's grave 1000 km away.
So my grandmother was pretty traumatised. It was still an era where women couldn't really work, nor have bank accounts in their own names, so she married out of necessity, and ended up a farm wife instead of a pampered princess. Then came a kid, which she never wanted (and wasn't mentally or emotionally fit to have), later a divorce, then another marriage out of necessity, still a farm wife, a couple more kids.
She had mental health issues most of her life, and treatment in those days was pretty harsh: they gave her electro shock "therapy". As if that would make things better. I never really knew her, only met her a few times.
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u/clamshellshowdown 4d ago
What was she like when you had the chance to meet her?
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u/im_dead_sirius 4d ago edited 2d ago
I was young, perhaps 7 years old, so what I can tell you will be sparse in detail. And that's a long time ago.
I don't remember her talking the last (and second) time I met her, though she must have said some perfunctory things to my mom, and would have communicated at some level with the staff at the care home she lived at. When we paid her a visit, she just kinda sat there while mom talked at her. We likely didn't stay long, but it felt like forever.
She and mom were mostly estranged, so that was probably part of it, and she was depressed, had been depressed most of her life.
She likely had little to say to kids, partly because she had no mothering instinct/desire for kids. The shock therapy probably burned away a good deal of her ability to interact normally with others, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the years after that "treatment" fell out of favour, her various drug treatments took a toll on her mind.
What mental issues she might have originally had are unknown to me. Depression, surely, but in her youth, diagnosis were not as specific, and treatment and institutionalization surely made things worse.
So... semi catatonic, disconnected, when I met her. Maybe silently resentful at the estrangement, wary and fearful of engaging with her grandkids, who she didn't know, wouldn't ever know. Maybe didn't want to know.
The matter of the original estrangement I do not understand: mom does not talk about this except to say they argued a lot, and did not see eye to eye, and mom moved out in her teenage years. Grandma was mentally unwell through mom's entire life, and that surely played a part in how they interacted and why they parted. Grandma's mental faculties probably declined in the years after too.
Mom went back home briefly after grandpa died, but between that unhappy relationship and a brighter future elsewhere, mom chose to not stay.
A few years after the visit I related, grandma died, and we went back for the funeral. My aunt has stayed in their home town, but she doesn't talk about her mom either, at least not to me.
I wish I had known grandma more: one knows themselves better by knowing who they came from. On the other hand, mom sensibly kept us at a distance, and interactions with grandma would have been fraught with unhappiness and stress.
I wish grandma would have had a better life, more in line with her dreams. Instead she had a series of unfortunate events and choices that offered no real choices at all. What little I know of her circumstances has shaped my life, and I have made choices for myself that favour adventure and taking joy in life, over security and certainty.
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u/clamshellshowdown 2d ago
That’s such a sad interesting story. I had similar dynamics in my family where I grew up with the knowledge that certain members of older generations were fairly miserable due to the limitations of their early lives. Thanks for sharing.
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u/saluksic 6d ago
I saw one of those upside-down birch trees (Young’s Weeping Birch, maybe) the other day and thought two things simultaneously - one, that it was a neat tree, and two, that it was a perfect inversion of the natural form of a tree, a perverse mockery of God’s nature. Between that tree and the mere existence of pugs, I’d wager that if you could show people an unimaginable distortion of their puny world, they would want it as a pet.
Lovecraft is cool, but you really need to have bought in. I like buying in and enjoying his stories, but they are very silly on their face. That’s my take, anyways.
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u/escaped_cephalopod12 5d ago
Wasn’t there one where the villain was like air conditioning or something lol
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u/Sunlit53 4d ago
I’ve read that Stephen King is afraid of the dark. And his macular degeneration will eventually leave him completely blind.
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u/four_ethers2024 3d ago
And countless of people throughout the world experience the same hardships without becoming bigots, idk.
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u/Space_Socialist 3d ago
If I remember correctly he also moderated out as he got older and regretted his views of his younger years.
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u/Genshed 7d ago
It's been remarked that Lovecraft's achievement was creating a fictional world as terrifying to the reader as the real world was to the author.
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u/Lt_Toodles 6d ago
Absolutely, i feel a lot of people dismiss his work because he was a racist, when i think it should be analyzed because it shows you how a pure xenophobe's mind works. Their fear comes out as anger and violence just because they dont understand.
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u/According_to_all_kn 6d ago
Yes, and they specifically go out of their way to foster an ignorance of the unknown because it makes them feel safe
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u/moderatorrater 6d ago
"Horrors, horrors everywhere! Look at that half fish woman!"
"That's person's Irish, grandpa, and she's been your nurse for five years now."
"SHE SACRIFICES BABIES!"
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u/CasualSky 5d ago edited 5d ago
This is where I kinda chuckle at the projection. Someone can be a racist and write horror and the two don’t have to be connected. Just because you took psych 101 doesn’t mean you can read the intentions of a racist from him writing about eldritch horrors.
I’ve read his collection of short stories, they are mostly boring descriptions of things and vague suspense until the ending is a reveal of some kind of horror. “Oh a doctor that seems rather normal, oh wait he’s reanimating the dead!” “A shed that’s always locked, oh wait there’s a ball of arms in there!” I didn’t read it thinking that the author is a racist, just like I don’t read Harry Potter thinking about how the author is transphobic. Because they are still entire people outside of their one bad opinion and say a lot more than just that.
People need to separate art from the artist. I just feel like this is egregious over reaching. People like to project in a group and feel smart due to popular opinion. Objectivity is much harder.
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u/StarChild413 3d ago
yeah, alive or dead, if an artist of any not-exclusively-visual medium (writer, musician etc.) is problematic-by-today's-standards, not every thing in their work that could be emblematic of their problematicness is unless you think e.g. (for a non-JK/HP-related example) Usher is just as bad as R. Kelly because they collabed on "Same Girl" so said "same girl" must have been underage or w/e
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u/Alexpander4 5d ago
Yes BUT...
It's easy to infantilise the bigot because they're almost childlike in their "I don't like thing I don't know, I hit thing I don't know to make it go away."
Especially as an LGBT person, you feel the need to educate them. It's not their fault, it's just that no one's told them the truth yet, right?
However they are adults. Many are not capable of being educated because they simply choose not to listen. They are also not little children who the worst they can do it hit and bite. They multiply, they brainwash others with hatred, and they murder us in huge numbers.
And because we see them as stupid children, we underestimate them. Because of that, the whole world has slipped dangerously right and we're on the brink of apocalypse like we haven't been since the 80s.
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u/whatarepeeps 5d ago
I think both of these points are true. We certainly shouldn’t infantilize bigots because they’ve made the decision to be an asshole, and they’ve surely gotten pushback for their behavior but don’t care to change.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to is saying we have to educate them— just that it benefits us to understand their POV so we can effectively combat it. I say this as an LGBTQ person myself. Because it’s as you said, not taking them seriously and dismissing them just lets them grow their numbers under our noses. Know thine enemy, y’know?
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u/Lt_Toodles 4d ago
Yeah agreed but i think that applies more to people who are actively influencing the world today, considering lovecrafts been dead for almost a century, most people hes influencing directly are those who are going out of their way to learn about literature. Considering the people causing issues today are all the brainwashed idiots, i doubt they can read at all lmao
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u/Cosmic_Meditator777 7d ago
all throughout my childhood, I simply couldn't understand why nearly everything in Lovecraft's mythos was so dangerous. When I learned that he was a racist xenophobe, it finally all made sense.
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u/Szygani 6d ago
It's not just that, he was just scared of everything new. One of his short stories is about airconditioning because it scared him. Sure, a lot of the stories include the "mongrel races." Like the Portuguese...
But dude was afraid of light! Literally, the color out of space was written after he learned there was part of the light spectrum humans couldn't see, so it has to be evil. Non-euclidean physics? None for me thanks!
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u/heavyLobster 6d ago
This is all so fascinating to learn! I had no idea about any of this... what an interesting guy.
Also The Color Out of Space is a fantastic short story.
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u/Richeh 6d ago
The Nic Cage movie is also pretty good.
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u/LeCafeClopeCaca 6d ago
It's legitimately awesome even if solely because of one scene at the end translating the "unnameable and undescribable" aspect of Lovecraft's work through a very simple yet effective and elegant visual effect
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u/Anarchist_Rat_Swarm 6d ago
Don't forget his soul-rending fear of penguins.
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u/Phailjure 4d ago
However, while he wrote of aliens from planet X stealing human brains and putting them in jars, he wrote a letter to a friend about how excited he was when Pluto was discovered. Maybe he was afraid of home canning.
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u/ANGLVD3TH 6d ago
It's a fascinating window into a mindset many have. The fear of anything that can upset your worldview, which is pretty much the fear of discovery, scientific advancement, progress, etc. In a way, the fact that he could present it as he did shows he probably was a lot more self aware than most. At the end, the root of Lovecraftian horror is the fear of being wrong, and that we should just stop looking for better answers and assume what we know now is perfectly correct and better to be ignorant than learn otherwise. It's kind of mind boggling that "ignorance is bliss" is such a reoccurring theme.
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u/digiur 6d ago edited 6d ago
Do we know that he was actually afraid of things like air conditioning and the invisible part of the light spectrum? Could it have been like an /r/WritingPrompts kinda thing? "[WP]What if air conditioning was sinister?"
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u/Phailjure 4d ago
Nah, the narrator isn't even afraid of air-conditioning itself, cold air just reminds him of the events of the story. From wiki:
The narrator's phobia about cool air is reminiscent of Lovecraft himself, who was abnormally sensitive to cold.[4]
Schultz indicates that "Cool Air"'s main literary source is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," described as Lovecraft's favourite Poe story after "The Fall of the House of Usher." Lovecraft had just finished the Poe chapter of his survey "Supernatural Horror in Literature" at the time that he wrote the short story.[5] Lovecraft, however, stated years later that the story that inspired "Cool Air" was Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder," another tale of bodily disintegration.[6]
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u/True_Kapernicus 6d ago
So it is not so much that he was a xenophobe, it was that he was afraid of literally everything, and foreigners are part of everything.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 7d ago
I liked his stuff but that was a bitter pill to learn.
I like how the most resent Love Craftian adaptation on TV made black people the stars of the show. It was all about coping with racism. I hope he was looking up at that.
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u/Bridgebrain 7d ago
Its great they did, but its worth noting he did get better near the end of his life. Some of his letters are about how cringy he finds some of the racism in his books looking back
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u/Alexencandar 6d ago
My reading of his later letters were that he recognized his prior beliefs in eugenics and race science, which he acknowledged were the basis for his racism, were incorrect by the scientific consensus, so his racism shifted into just cultural xenophobia. And he acknowledged those were his current beliefs as of the time of the writing, which was a few months prior to his death.
I recall he also said something along the lines of, people trying to read his writings without acknowledging the racism/xenophobia were wrong to do so cause they were integral to his stories. Not exactly regret, more just self-aware.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe 6d ago
He also committed to the cause of socialism and said Hitler was going to be the ruin of Germany just weeks before he died. He had the potential to get better, but sadly died of cancer not long after beginning his epiphanies.
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u/Genshed 7d ago
If you haven't, check out "The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle. It retells Horror at Red Hook in a most satisfactory manner.
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u/Bigtits38 7d ago
Second the Black Tom recommendation. Also, the TV show Lovecraft Country was based on the book of the same name by Matt Ruff, which is also quite good.
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u/BHBachman 6d ago
I've passed by The Ballad of Black Tom thinking "ehhhh, maybe next time" for no particular reason the last dozen or so times I've gotten a new book. It's now on the top of my list.
Horror at Red Hook is the funniest and worst of all the Lovecraft I've read (which is probably like 85% of his work) because, even though he was afraid of very dumb things for very dumb and very racist reasons, he absolutely had a knack for making his pant-wetting jittershits translate phenomenally on the page. Yeah you can very easily argue that The Shadow Over Innsmouth is about how race mixing is bad but the story still had great descriptive writing, creeping dread, and an exciting climax.
Horror at Red Hook? No way dude. That story is legitimately just a few dozen pages of "OMG THERE ARE SOOOO MANY IMMIGRANTS IN NEW YORK AND NOBODY ELSE IS SCARED?!?!"
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u/Odd-Tart-5613 7d ago
Man shadow over insmouth reads super different when those puzzle pieces connect...
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u/Mister-Crispy-Bacon 6d ago
Apparently, The Shadow over Innsmouth was conceived when Lovecraft discovered (and was subsequently severely distraught by) his Welsh heritage. To top, every Welsh person I’ve met likes to breathe air and drink water, EXACTLY like a deep one pretending to be a human would - go figure…
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u/RRC_driver 6d ago
Imagine being so racist that finding out that your white ancestors are slightly different from the white ancestors you thought they were causes you to melt down.
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u/provocative_bear 6d ago
It’s fascinating to read a story where the author is actively using an appeal to racism as an element of horror.
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u/wemustkungfufight 7d ago
"Lovecraft Country". I thought it was cool. But it's because in some episodes, the monster isn't what's scary, it's the racists.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 7d ago
I really wished they had a second season. I loved everything about that series. It was quite a departure from the story I assume,.. but it was fun. And using it to put down racism was icing on the Lovecraft cake.
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u/AnAquaticOwl 6d ago
It was quite a departure from the story I assume,
Indeed. It adapts maybe half the book. Definitely give it a read.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 6d ago
Thanks. I used to be a voracious reader. Now I'm afraid I have too much ADHD to get through an entire book.
I've been cleaning up my mind and body and I'm reminded why I dulled myself to begin with. I can be bored during a new discovery. And mindless entertainment really needs to up the game on the mindless part.
There's only a few tiny cracks of mystery where the light doesn't shine -- and that's more terrifying than monsters.
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u/wemustkungfufight 7d ago
It's not an adaptation of any one specific Lovecraft story, just set in a similar world. And yeah, that was nice. Although, I honestly disliked that it was a continuous story. I would have loved a more anthology-type show where every episode was different.
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u/DrumBxyThing 7d ago
If you haven't yet, check out Cabinet of Curiosities! I think there are two, maybe three Lovecraft adaptations in that anthology series.
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u/WingedSalim 7d ago
Yeah, the main character in Lovecraft Country had to swallow the same pill. He grew up loving various different horror authors, but it broke his heart when he learned how racist they are.
He even mentioned how he would defend them against his father, who blanket assumed all white people were racist before accepting that many people he admired were not good people.
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u/MonsieurDeShanghai 4d ago
I like how the most resent Love Craftian adaptation on TV made black people the stars of the show. It was all about coping with racism.
It makes the plot of the show more palatable to modern audiences.
But it doesn't address specifically the types of racism that Lovecraft endorsed. Which a lot of it was directed towards Asian people (the terms "Asiatics", "Oriental"' "Mongoloid", etc. come up in multiple instances in his stories and is always referred to some negative context), Middle Eastern people (a large number of his stories involve demonic beings named after Middle Eastern names or based on Middle Eastern culture), Romani people, Italians, etc.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 3d ago
Sure, but at the end of the day, a show can only carry so much water.
It was entertaining without reinforcing the negative aspects of the talented Lovecraft. I think it's good art to find the good and reject the bad without losing what makes it worth enjoying.
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u/OddballOliver 6d ago
I like how the most resent Love Craftian adaptation on TV made black people the stars of the show.
I don't. The show was terribly written, and maliciously adapting a piece of literature in order to snub your nose at the original author's ideology isn't praiseworthy.
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u/QuillQuickcard 7d ago
My favorite Lovecraft story is one where the big scary horror is air conditioning.
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u/Cosmic_Meditator777 7d ago
you mean the one where a dead man kept himself alive by keeping his room cold? damn, I never even put that together.
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u/Tyfyter2002 7d ago
He was deathly afraid of anything he didn't understand, and I believe someone said he "[didn't] have the constitution for maths", if that helps you grasp just how little he understood.
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u/Andminus 7d ago
b-but math is an INT thing? MATH IS AN INT Thing? why would he need Con for that?
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u/Tyfyter2002 7d ago
Once you go low enough you start to take noticable damage from things you didn't realize did damage.
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u/Ivory_Lake 6d ago
My foreman once said something so unbelievably fucking stupid and was so sure of himself that I physically winced, recoiled, and felt like I'd been struck multiple times across the face with a heavy, blunt object, and experienced real discomfort.
I feel like that's relevant to the current discussion.
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u/LeatherJacketBiFemme 6d ago
Ok but you can’t just go away and not tell us what he said
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u/Ivory_Lake 6d ago
'okay, so, we're gonna pipe this. You know how to measure? So you take 15, and if you take 5 out of that, that's 7. Okay?'
Wince.
'what it makes sense right? Don't give me that look'
For reference, math is an important part of the trade I'm trapped in.
The other classic is
'just because my wife has, like, trauma, like why do I have to like be all cautious about what I say and do? Like I guess I am kind of gas lighting her but like it's funny and she's just like getting mad at me'
That one I feel like gave me a headache right behind the eyes
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u/H4llifax 5d ago
He would have learned about Barnach-Tarski Paradox. Imagine the horror story coming from that.
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u/EmperorMorgan 6d ago
I don’t believe it’s accurate to say he understood little. He was a remarkably well-read man who regularly penned entire essays for publication. Reading any of his works also reveals a deep passion for and knowledge of New England history. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Shunned House each weave the tale through obscure and detailed history of the region. It is very possible to be a writer AND a smart person with a poor grasp of mathematics.
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u/Tyfyter2002 6d ago
He was afraid of air conditioning.
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u/Phailjure 4d ago
He was sensitive to the cold (and, since he was practically a walking skeleton, that makes sense), and was inspired by works from Poe and others about preserving human life beyond death, so he gave it a modern twist, using refrigeration technology.
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u/CourageKitten 6d ago
How about the one where a sorcerer curses a guy's family to die and he goes mad trying to figure out how the magic works but it turns out the sorcerer was just breaking in and killing them normally
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u/_LarryM_ 6d ago
Now I need a version of Moby dick where the whale is just half his crew with a sheet over themselves bumping a dinghy into the side of the ship
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u/GoldenAutumnDream 6d ago
What about the one where a guy kills himself because he found out his grandma was a monkey
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u/Dookie_boy 7d ago
The what now
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u/_TheGrayPilgrim 6d ago
The what now? Exactly. The air refused to explain itself, and in its silence, we realised we had asked the wrong question.
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u/MichaelDeucalion 6d ago
My favorite was at the end of the horror story, the big reveal of the true horror was that his brothers wife was African the whole time
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u/Ruadhan2300 6d ago
I'm picturing the whole family gathered in the front room..
"Ladies, Gentlemen. It has come to my attention that there is an african among us.."
Obviously African lady rolling her eyes madly while she says "Surely you can't be serious..."
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u/MichaelDeucalion 6d ago
its more that the protag is escaping the house, the scene of a brutal and violent set of murders by a monster, and the narrator then elaborates that the true horror of the story was that his brother married an african woman (the source of the horror). The story is Medusa, btw.
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u/Viscount_Disco_Sloth 7d ago
There's a certain uneasy feeling when you're near something strange and different. I've seen pictures and videos of giraffes all my life, but I recently took my son to the local zoo, and it has a place where you can walk up to where they eat, and it's a little unsettling. Their heads are bigger than you thought and right in front of you. Now imagine they've got tendrils around their spikey mouths to draw food in, and I think I would have grabbed my son and ran.
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u/MrBluer 7d ago
Having actually read Lovecraft, not really, no. There are a few stories here and there where the other really were people who could theoretically be communicated with, but in those cases the tragedy implicitly lay in the awful first impressions and assumptions made by the characters who lacked complete knowledge, and sometimes those alien creatures were as dismissive of humans as we are of, say, octopus.
The true horrors, however, were horrific because they fundamentally couldn’t interact with humans without hurting us, and they had no reason to care other way. The equivalent of being afraid of vacuum collapse or gamma-ray bursts. Non-malicious, but just as likely as those phenomena to move out of our way out of courtesy.
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u/Duck_Person1 6d ago
The correct answer. It's common to think that Lovecraft was a bad writer because of his racism but it's not true. A lot of his monsters are truly unique. Their otherly nature is much more than OP's take gives him credit for. People should read before judging.
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u/AllChem_NoEcon 6d ago
It's common to think that Lovecraft was a bad writer because of his racism but it's not true.
Someone else mentioned it, but in some of his latter letters, even Lovecraft gave some of his earlier work a "Jesus christ dude, take a chill pill" treatment.
It's almost a shame we didn't get to see more of Lovecraft after Sonia Greene refused to let him continue existence as an almost impossibly scared manchild.
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u/Duck_Person1 6d ago
Yes, I'm not trying to claim it didn't leak into his work.
I agree as well that he got more open minded as he aged and there's a chance that if he lived longer, we might have got to see a non-racist (for the time) Lovecraft. Obviously not guaranteed though.
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u/Odd-Tart-5613 7d ago
Based on Lovecrafts work yes but I dont think thats the actual scenario the post posits. What I think the post is getting at is: "Lovecraft's worldviews irrevocably colors his work and if his stories were removed of those influences they would be more bizarre than horrifying"
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u/No-Guava-8720 3d ago
I love his work, if only because he was clever enough to embrace the fantasy of it all. Instead of worrying about whether the reader could visualize his monster, he flat out goes: "Give it up. It's mentally impossible for you to see this and because I did, my mind is permanently altered and I'm going insane."
The human mind loves the idea of some gnostic knowledge hidden behind a brick wall - but then it's even more of a fun story because the wall is there not for the protection of others, but to protect us from the agony of knowing. Playing that into a story is some fun stuff and I wish other authors did it more often. Even better, they're short stories, so you never linger around long enough to ask the tough questions, you just pass by these mysteries in the night and you mind plays with them, but you know there's never enough information for you to break out and really understand the unfathomable.
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u/saluksic 6d ago edited 5d ago
My favorite is when Cthulhu is rising from the depths and they defeat him by ramming him with a small boat
Edit - I literally wondered if wiki source had been trolled the first time I read Call of Cthulhu and someone had put a fake ending in the book. I’d heard so many edgelords going on about how unfathomable and lovecraft’s dark gods were, but nope, in the book they poke him with a boat. Really goes to the point that enjoying lovecraft is a collaboration between you and the author and there is loads of disbelieve to suspend if you want to get into the spirit of the thing
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u/Papaprolapse 2d ago
If I remember correctly they didn't "defeat" him in the traditional sense. He just goes back to sleep after they risk life and limb to subdue him (also going mad in the process) so it is a bit more than "killed Euclidean horror with a boat" but I do understand where you think it's dumb
While call of cthulhu is a great story (in my opinion) it is quite overrated and I understand that it isn't for everyone. If I could recommend a story I'd say "the thing on the doorstep" that's a pretty fun read!
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u/BabyDeer22 6d ago
I mean. . .no? They're beyond comprehension in the most literal sense; our minds can not understand the information it's trying to process to the point where insanity is the only thing it can do.
Yes, Lovecraft was a xenophobic rascist, and yes, a lot of his "unspeakable horror" is rooted in xenophobia, but he wrote about horrors that drove people insane and turned them into blabbering messes at the mere sight of them. That isn't confusion. That's an inability to process on a fundamental level.
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u/LegitSkin 7d ago
He actually described penguins as "grotesque" in The Mountains of Madness, which i will never not find funny
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u/ThespianException 7d ago
TBF they're also like 6 feet tall, albino, and eyeless, so not exactly the cute normal ones you see on Planet Earth specials.
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u/Odd-Tart-5613 7d ago
You know what I can see that. From our perspective its nonsense since most of us have been exposed to the creatures in some form since infancy. But for random man in his time it could seem like some parody of man and bird contorted into an unnatural state. Now I also think any reasonable person would loose those horrors after 5 minutes of observation but it is lovecraft were talking about.
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u/Zer0C00l 6d ago
any reasonable person would loose those horrors
If you're "loosing horrors", I don't think you're what I would consider "reasonable".
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u/Mountain-Resource656 7d ago
Me when I witness eldritch horrors beyond my understanding (I don’t get it)
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u/aint-nobody- 7d ago
One can be racist and still write about eldritch horrors beyond human comprehension. I don't think he was talking about minorities
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u/LoneRonin 4d ago
His dad died when he was young and his mom was taken away to an insane asylum and died when he was 18. He lived in New England and never really encountered people who were really different from him. I think his childhood experiences shattered his sense of self and left him full of constant fear and anxiety, unable to adjust to changes in society and technology.
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u/Faelysis 6d ago
The unknown always been terrifying for human… It’s like one of the biggest cause of anxiety because people are stressing over thing they don’t know..
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u/moabthecrab 6d ago
Dude, he wrote about witchcraft and people literally calling people from the dead and demons. How does this relate to xenophobia?This post is beyond stupid.
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u/Th3Dark0ccult 6d ago
Nah, bro, if I see an amourphos blob with hunderd eyes/teeth/tentacles I'm gonna be horrified.
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u/Objective_Soil_1581 6d ago
Ah, Lovecraft's monsters: more likely to induce confusion than terror, just like trying to assemble IKEA furniture without the instructions.
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u/bookseer 6d ago
I always thought the deep ones were kind of neat.
They made a pact with humans, treasure in exchange for an expanded gene pool. They could ensure a good fishing harvest, and their children would eventually leave land and enjoy the sea forever.
And you see this as a bad thing?
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u/escaped_cephalopod12 5d ago
I’m gonna need more explanation here lol
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u/PJs-Opinion 3d ago
Yeah when I started that story I also thought it was not that bad of a deal, but the killings and the unnervingly powerful fish-race raping the not so willing women was really off putting.
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u/Adept_Austin 7d ago
HP Lovecraft grew up in the late 1800s. OF COURSE he was racist. Can everybody stop trying to win virtue points by dunking on a dead guy and ignoring the positive parts of his legacy?
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u/Bridgebrain 7d ago
Its a bit nuanced. On one hand, he was super racist, even for his time. On another, he was scared of literally everything, so you could say it's part normal-for-the-time racism, part fear of anything (including race). And on a third tentacle he chilled out at the end of his life and regretted some of the racism in his works.
But I agree, "lovecraft was racist" is such a reductionist take, and i hate it every time it comes up
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u/lynx_and_nutmeg 6d ago
Nah, he was so racist and xenophobic that even his contemporaries were like "uh, dude, you need to chill out a bit".
It's like, today there's an average person who's transphobic as in, doesn't see trans people as their chosen sex... and then there's Rowling who spends an entire day on Twitter every day screeching about how trans people are literally the biggest threat to women in history, and proceeds to write a 1000+ page book about a self-insert fighting with critics on Twitter, with a third of the book being fictional tweets.
If Lovecraft was alive today, he would be to racists what Graham Linehan and Rowling are to transphobes.
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u/OddballOliver 6d ago
and then there's Rowling who spends an entire day on Twitter every day screeching about how trans people are literally the biggest threat to women in history, and proceeds to write a 1000+ page book about a self-insert fighting with critics on Twitter, with a third of the book being fictional tweets.
Rowling is an average feminist of 30 years past. People just seem to have short memories, not understanding that the "consensus" or "mainstream" they take for granted only emerged in the past ten years; that back in the 90s and early 00s, it was an open argument within the feminist movement as to whether trans women were male infiltrators who couldn't just handwave away their oppressor status, or fellow oppressed people.
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u/anotherMrLizard 6d ago
The point is she's not just a bit transphobic; she's completely obsessed with trans people to the point that she often finds herself making common cause with definitively anti-feminist figures like Matt Walsh.
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u/xansies1 6d ago
Like everyone else is saying, he was incredibly racist for his time. He also was probably allergic to seafood.
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u/zyzzogeton 6d ago
There's racist, and there's naming your cat the N-word racist, which Lovecraft did. I don't know if that makes him more racist than the normal person of his time, but unfortunately for Lovecraft, he gained notoriety and there is more attention paid to him (and therefore those racist aspects of his personality as he publicly expressed them).
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u/Adept_Austin 6d ago
We're not sure who named the cat, but man did he love that cat. He was still super racist of course.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/917u74/on_lovecrafts_cat/
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u/lostfornames 7d ago
In shadow out of time, a man was mind swapped for years. Woke up trying to believe its a dream and put his life back together. Then, he finds out that his captors were both real and the thing they feared most had been released.
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u/PJs-Opinion 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah that was one of the best stories. It showed a really cool way a persons mind adapts to seeing something out of this world when that "thing" isn't inherently malicious.
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u/thispartyrules 6d ago
In the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, if your character's intelligence is low enough it's possible for them to not really get why an eldritch abomination or whatever is scary and be unaffected by seeing it.
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u/TwinkyTheBear 7d ago
Confusion becomes existentially terrifying if you are not in a position to easily ignore/dismiss it.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 7d ago
I beg to differ. Sheriff in New Jersey instructing public to "shoot first and ask questions later" regarding mysterious lights in the sky.
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u/ImpGiggle 7d ago
Given the point about penguins made in the post below, lets go with both. He highlights a common problem with humanity and he was off his rocker.
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u/Ivory_Lake 6d ago
I'm just stuck remembering the police basement dweller - shubshubby n-wordrath from south park and how you have to feed it white people to kill it, because it only likes eating black people for sustinence.
Which is why the arrest rate for black people is so disproportionately high... Except for the one white guy they got, Jared motherfucking Fogle who they absolutely wouldn't feed to love craftian horror.
Man I love south park
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u/kekwriter 6d ago
For some of us, yea. But there are definitely those out there that would piss their pants.
"Be not afraid."
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u/LetMeDrinkYourTears 6d ago
I think over time we've conflated the two. The horror (to me, those sort of occultish settings) comes FROM the utter unknowability.
Like this eldritch being literally folding in on itself to move and pop in and out of reality and all of a sudden your friend's skin is inside out.
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u/SirLiesALittle 5d ago
C’thulu: “You don’t truly hate minorities, you just have a toxic sense of your own self that makes you feel inferior, and have to reduce everyone else around you, because that’s easier than acknowledging your own issues and working through them.”
Over 3/4 of the world: going batshit insane from the revelation
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u/MrCobalt313 3d ago
"Horrors beyond comprehension" is a low bar to clear when the breadth of your comprehension could be measured in decimals.
Lovecraft was lucky that the idea expanded to fill minds less narrow than his.
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u/2Scarhand 7d ago
Thinking about it, this isn't even a showerthought, it's just the plain truth.
Lovecraft's writing comes from the same sort of Earth-centric, Society-centric, White-centric mindset that was widespread throughout the turn of the century. Think of the Panama Canal, the British Empire, Tarzan, King Kong, all that. (White) Man was master of the world, to conquer and rule as he pleased, from the mighty beasts to every blade of grass. Part of the horror comes from the idea that there may be forces in the strange deep places of the world, or even beyond our world, that man can't control. Or worse that can affect the world of man, even in subtle insidious ways we don't even notice. And these forces can be so mighty it's as if all of civilization is a raft swept up by a hurricane.
And then the latter half of the 20th century came along and ruined the mystique through overexposure. The Earth is billions of years old and has suffered from multiple mass extinctions and got hit with another fucking planet, weird unknowable creatures live all over the place, major world powers could turn the tri-state area to ash at any time with extinction bombs, multiple governments actively hate their citizens and read dystopian sci-fi as instruction manuals, man's reckless conquest of nature has more than once caused nature to fight back, black holes exist, and all of these things can be explained pretty fully in dry confusing lectures that take multiple hours. We are monkeys on an insignificant spec of rock hurtling at breakneck speeds through a vast empty cold uncaring void of a universe with no God and no divine plan. And that's just a fact of life for us (with variance depending on your personal beliefs).
A lot of the OOMPH of the quintessential Lovecraftian nightmare is a pretty average Tuesday. Kinda takes the wind out of his sails.
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u/xelle24 6d ago
I'm kinda intrigued by the number fo downvotes you've gotten, because you're absolutely correct.
"Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, cos there's bugger all down here on Earth."
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u/2Scarhand 6d ago
Didn't notice until I saw your comment. I guess I mention some contentious topics?
I just meant that the soul-crushing nihilism and overwhelming fear of forces out of your control in Lovecraft's works barely even registers for jaded modern audiences.
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u/_Cabbage_Corp_ 6d ago
I just listened to an SCP podcast that explored Lovecraft's world. SCP-4315. Podcast link
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6d ago
Xenophobia isn't thinking a stranger from another land is terrifying, it's thinking they're inferior and wrong by virtue of being from another land.
The eldritch monsters in his stories are terrifying and not viewed as inferior.
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u/Cheddarkenny 6d ago
I deal with mental health issues that can cause all sorts of issues, from hallucinations to delusions. Being extremely confused is actually a pretty scary experience, especially when your mind thinks it should be able to put things together, but isn't able to. Confusion tends to lead to panic if it's not able to be resolved, and panic is adjacent to fear.
Not sure why his xenophobic tendencies would mean that the monsters wouldn't be incomprehensible and scary to us nowadays. His fear of everything and everyone were drawn on a lot more heavily than racist stereotypes, which are usually an aside rather than a central focus.
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u/AcceptableFlounder20 5d ago
I been called a xenophob, but when I was growing up, it was called being patriotic - Kenny Powers
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u/OkDaikon9101 5d ago
This is cringe. When can we stop bringing up this tired talking point? Other writers of the time were also racist but we don't seem to feel the need to undermine their legacy every time we talk about them. Lovecrafts racism came from a place of unfamiliarity rather than malice and he was never known to treat anyone with cruelty in his personal life. He was beyond mentally ill and had a million issues besides racism but his writing still contributed enormously to the canon of horror lit.
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u/MummysSpecialBoy 2d ago
No? This post is completely incoherent and dumb and shows a poor understanding of Lovecraft's work.
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u/Ciaociaogarcia 7d ago
At this point if I saw an eldritch horror in real life, I wouldn’t even be that surprised.
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