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What to make of H.P. Lovecraft's work? Is his work worth teaching? If so, how should it be taught?

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What to make of H.P. Lovecraft's work? Is his work worth teaching? If so, how should it be taught?

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First things first: Was Lovecraft racist?

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First things first: Was Lovecraft racist?

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This one's easy: Yes! How racist, you ask?

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This one's easy: Yes! How racist, you ask?

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So racist that it's difficult to distinguish between his beliefs and Hitler's!

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<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/K5R45.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect! It was Hitler this time.\n\nWhat a drama queen.\n[[Next.|Question9]]

<<silently>>\n<<set $points = 0>>\n<<endsilently>>\nHP Lovecraft has been growing in popularity in recent years, and I've been seeing fans obess over his work in growing number, going so far as to idolize the man, owning busts of him and plastering quotes from his personal writings everywhere. He's become a very fashionable person to hold in high regard, and that often seems to be done without full knowledge of his body of work. Yes, he wrote some incredibly influential books, but he also wrote a lot of very heinous things as well. \n\nYou know who else said a lot of heinous things about minorities?\n\nThat's right.\n\n<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/JkuKR.jpg"></center></html>\n//Hitler.//\n\nYou'll be shown a series of quotes, and you should do your best to figure out if the person speaking is Adolf Hitler, or HP Lovecraft. Points will be tallied and will determine your ending!\n\n//This game contains really hateful quotes and quoted racial slurs. If this isn't a thing you feel like reading, I would suggest not playing this!//\n\nClick that shit, yo.\n\n[[Start The Game|Game]]!

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Novfx.jpg"></center></html>\nIncorrect! Wrong shitlord! \n\n[[Next|Question2]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/InifL.jpg"></center></html>Correct! It was Lovecraft!\n\n[[Next.|Question3]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/0vzTY.jpg"></center></html>\nIncorrect! It was Hitler who said it that time!\n\n(but he was probably THINKING it.)\n\n[[Next.|Question4]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src ="http://i.imgur.com/rLhzG.gif"></center></html>Correct! It was Lovecraft! \n\nWhat a load of crap.\n\n[[Next.|Question5]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/rf7rl.gif"></center></html>\nCorrect!\n\nI don't think he gets "science"\n\n\n[[Next.|Question6]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/FRZ8g.gif"></center></html>\nCorrect! It was Lovecraft.\n\nAgain.\n\n[[Next.|Question7]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/F8X74.gif"></center></html>\nCorrect! Yet again, it was HP Lovecraft.\n\nHe probably had to write about alien worlds because good god did he not understand ours.\n\n[[Next.|Question8]]

"The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:\n(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;\n(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.\nTo bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator. And as a sin this act is rewarded."\n\nWho wrote this awful piece of crap?\n\n[[Adolf Hitler|Hitler1]]\n[[H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft1]]

Who's this douchebag?\n\n"Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races - though the color line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically."\n\n[[Adolph Hitlurr|Hitler5]]\n[[H. Pee Lovekraft|Lovecraft5]]

Who is being kind of emo here?\n\n"'Equality' is a joke - but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality."\n\n[[Adolphin Hitler|Hitler4]]\n[[H.P. Hovercraft|Lovecraft4]]\n

Are you kinda depressed yet? These are awful.\n\n"It is a fact, however, that sentimentalists exaggerate the woes of the average negro. Millions of them would be perfectly content with servile status if good physical treatment and amusement could be assured them, and they may yet form a well-managed agricultural peasantry."\n\nWhich jerkstore spewed this bile?\n\n[[Adololf Hitler|Hitler7]]\n[[H.P. WorldOfWarcraft|Lovecraft7]]

"However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, and so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type."\n\nWow. What a prick. \n\nBut which prick is the real question!\n\n[[Adolf Buttler|Hitler6]]\n[[H.P. Loveboat|Lovecraft6]]

Which one of the two weird lookin dudes had this to say about his descent in to being a person with horrible ideas about race?\n\n"I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought."\n\n[[A-dawg Hitler|Hitler3]]\n[[H.P. "Hit Point" Lovecraft|Lovecraft3]]

Which jerk wrote this awful string of words?\n\n"Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, and always in the direction of the lower primates... Equally inferior and perhaps even more so is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro. In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it white, Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take and that is to prevent admixture as completely and determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour line and the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line."\n\n[[Adolf Hitler|Hitler2]]\n[[H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft2]]

"Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved."\n\nWho gave us this gift of stupidity?\n\n[[Adolf Shitler|Hitler9]]\n[[H.P. Lovecrap|Lovecraft9]]

"Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish."\n\nWaaah waaah waaah. Who does this blubbering belong to?\n\n[[Adong Hitler|Hitler8]]\n[[Howie Lovebug|Lovecraft8]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/lTapn.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect! It was Hitler again.\n\nNo wonder he couldn't cut it in art school. Heavy handed much?\n\n[[Next.|Question13]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/6M0oc.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect!\n\nI don't think ANYTHING could've made life endurable around him.\n\n[[Next.|Question14]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/t0eEd.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect! The douche in question was Lovecraft.\n\nNot just racist, but kind of a dick to everyone.\n\n[[Next.|Question11]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Fq4q7.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect! It was Hitler.\n\nSeriously. Wikipedia. It's not that hard.\n[[Next.|Question12]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/BsrfP.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect!\n\nI'm not really sure he's in any position to be calling other people vastly inferior but SURE WHATEVER GUY.\n\nPrick.\n[[Next.|Question15]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/k8dkg.gif"></center></html>\nCorrect!\n\nThis.\n\nThis is the poem that made me want to make a game.\n\nReading this after hearing someone who fancies themselves a forward thinking progressive person bought a bust of this man because she loved his work so much.\n\nShe was horrified when I sent her to some of his other work.\n\nAnd then this game idea was born.\n\n[[Take me home.|GameOverManGameOver]]

"When, long ago, the gods created Earth\nIn Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.\nThe beasts for lesser parts were next designed;\nYet were they too remote from humankind.\nTo fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,\nTh'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.\nA beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,\nFilled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger."\n\nA real live human being wrote this.\n\nAn adult human thought "golly gee, I know what would make a great poem! I'll just rush on home and put pen to paper and ah! That's the stuff! Brilliant."\n\nAnd then he jerked off to himself whilst farting.\n\nWhich repugnant man with a broken brain wrote this tripe?\n\n[[Adolf Hitler|Hitler15]]\n[[H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft15]]

"The Black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists... But, it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the Negro were the White man's equal."\n\nI literally had to stop what I was doing and just rub my eyes for a second after re-reading that quote for formatting errors.\n\nPick your shitmagician:\n\n[["Adolf Hitler? I barely knew her!"|Hitler14]]\n[["Make H.P. Lovecraft, not War."|Lovecraft14]]\n

"The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion."\n\nHahaha wow, it's like he didn't even wikipedia that one. What maroon said that gem?\n\n[[Adork Hitler|Hitler11]]\n[[H.P. Hatecraft|Lovecraft11]]\n\n

"The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely."\n\nClever. Who said it?\n\n[[Adong Hitler|Hitler10]]\n[[R.L. Stein-Er, I mean H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft10]]

Who turned his head skyward and vomited this nonsense in to the atmosphere?\n\n"The only thing that makes life endurable where Blacks abound is the Jim Crow principle, and I wish they'd apply it in New York both to Niggers and to the more Asiatic types of puffy, ratfaced Jews!"\n\n[[Ahole Hitler|Hitler13]]\n[[H.Prick Lovecraft|Lovecraft13]]

Which poor tortured artist this shitty prose belong to?\n\n"At times of the bitterest distress, fury against him finally breaks out, and the plundered and ruined masses begin to defend themselves against the scourge of God."\n\n[[Aderp Hitlerp|Hitler12]]\n[[Herp Perp Lovederp|Lovecraft12]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/F8X74.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect! It was Lovecraft.\n\nThis guy. This fucking guy.\n[[Next.|Question10]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>>\n<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/K5R45.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect!\n\nWhat a drama queen.\n[[Next.|Question9]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/F8X74.gif"></center></html>\nIncorrect! Yet again, it was HP Lovecraft.\n\nHe probably had to write about alien worlds because good god did he not understand ours.\n\n[[Next.|Question8]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/FRZ8g.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect. It was Lovecraft.\n\nAgain.\n[[Next.|Question7]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/rf7rl.gif"></center></html>\nIncorrect! It was Lovecraft this time!\n\nI don't think he gets "science"\n\n[[Next.|Question6]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/rLhzG.gif"></center></html>Incorrect! It was Lovecraft this time. What a jerk.\n\n[[Next.|Question5]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/0vzTY.jpg"></center></html>Correct! It was Hitler! What a dick!\n\n[[Next.|Question4]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/InifL.jpg"></center></html>\nIncorrect! It was Lovecraft!\n\n[[Next.|Question3]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Novfx.jpg"></center></html>\nYou guessed right! It was Hitler!\n\nWhat a shitlord.\n\n[[Next|Question2]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/F8X74.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect!\n\nThis guy. This fucking guy.\n[[Next.|Question10]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/6M0oc.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect! It was Lovecraft!\n\nI don't think ANYTHING could've made life endurable around him.\n\n[[Next.|Question14]]\n

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/lTapn.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect!\n\nNo wonder he couldn't cut it in art school. Heavy handed much?\n[[Next.|Question13]]

<<set $points = $points + 1>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Fq4q7.gif"></center></html>\n\nCorrect!\n\nSeriously. Wikipedia. It's not that hard.\n[[Next.|Question12]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/t0eEd.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect. The douche in question was Lovecraft.\n\nNot just racist, but kind of a dick to everyone.\n\n[[Next.|Question11]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/k8dkg.gif"></center></html>\nIncorrect. Actually fucking incorrect. Can you believe that shit?\n\nThis.\n\nThis is the poem that made me want to make a game.\n\nReading this after hearing someone who fancies themselves a forward thinking progressive person bought a bust of this man because she loved his work so much.\n\nShe was horrified when I sent her to some of his other work.\n\nAnd then this game idea was born.\n\n[[End.|GameOverManGameOver]]

<html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/BsrfP.gif"></center></html>\n\nIncorrect! It was Lovecraft!\n\nI'm not really sure he's in any position to be calling other people vastly inferior but SURE WHATEVER GUY.\n\nPrick.\n\n[[Next.|Question15]]

Phew. That was a total barrage of awful words, wasn't it? I am so very sorry about that.\n\nLet's see how you did!\n<<if $points gte 6>><html><center><img src="http://www.familylobby.com/common/tt9111892fltt.gif"></center></html><<else>><html><center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/wIN5T.jpg"></center></html><<endif>>\n<<if $points lte 5>>0-5 points! Dang. Either you underestimated Lovecraft or overestimated Hitler. I'm not quite sure which is better.<<endif>><<if $points eq 6>>6-10 points! This is an average score for someone who is unfamiliar with exactly how awful Lovecraft's attitudes were. Good job!<<endif>><<if $points eq 7>>6-10 points! This is an average score for someone who is unfamiliar with exactly how awful Lovecraft's attitudes were. Good job!<<endif>><<if $points eq 8>>6-10 points! This is an average score for someone who is unfamiliar with exactly how awful Lovecraft's attitudes were. Good job!<<endif>><<if $points eq 9>>6-10 points! This is an average score for someone who is unfamiliar with exactly how awful Lovecraft's attitudes were. Good job!<<endif>><<if $points eq 10>>6-10 points! This is an average score for someone who is unfamiliar with exactly how awful Lovecraft's attitudes were. Good job!<<endif>><<if $points eq 11>>11-14 points! Well done! Almost perfect in fact. Seems like one or two of the questions tripped you up, but hey - it's not your fault Lovecraft was such a racist prick. Either you knew that going in to the game, or guessed very well. Congrats either way!<<endif>><<if $points eq 12>>11-14 points! Well done! Almost perfect in fact. Seems like one or two of the questions tripped you up, but hey - it's not your fault Lovecraft was such a racist prick. Either you knew that going in to the game, or guessed very well. Congrats either way!<<endif>><<if $points eq 13>>11-14 points! Well done! Almost perfect in fact. Seems like one or two of the questions tripped you up, but hey - it's not your fault Lovecraft was such a racist prick. Either you knew that going in to the game, or guessed very well. Congrats either way!<<endif>><<if $points eq 14>>11-14 points! Well done! Almost perfect in fact. Seems like one or two of the questions tripped you up, but hey - it's not your fault Lovecraft was such a racist prick. Either you knew that going in to the game, or guessed very well. Congrats either way!<<endif>><<if $points eq 15>>15 POINTS! You got every single one of them right! Well done - assuming you didn't use google.<<endif>>\n\nThanks so much for playing. This game was made as part of the 0 Hour Game Jam, a one-hour jam that took place during the hour that we set our clocks back. \n\nFeel free to check out my other weird projects at www.beesgo.biz. I hope you enjoyed this!

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n\nIncorrect! It was Hitler this time.\n\nWhat a drama queen.\n[[Next.|Question9]] >\n >\n >\nHP Lovecraft has been growing in popularity in recent years, and I've been seeing fans obess over his work in growing number, going so far as to idolize the man, owning busts of him and plastering quotes from his personal writings everywhere.

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Jesus H. Christ! That's really racist. But was his work itself racist?

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Jesus H. Christ! That's really racist. But was his work itself racist?

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"Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a ‘poetic trance’."

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Lovecraft's racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, with comments from China Miéville.

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Could you give me some specific examples of what that means?

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Could you give me some specific examples of what that means?

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Easily. Look no further than, "The Horror at Red Hook."

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Easily. Look no further than, "The Horror at Red Hook."

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"In all of his collected works, this may be the one where his racist opinions are made the most explicit. A relatively straightforward detective story, 'The Horror of Red Hook' unfolds in Lovecraft’s typical fashion; the deeper evil is slowly brought to light in scenes of intermixing immigrants whose neighborhood is revealed in the final act to be the literal gateway to hell. Strong anti-immigration sentiments and gaudy displays of sympathy for racist policing appear throughout, with references to immigrants that range from 'monsters' to 'contagions.' We see blacks and immigrants, the bringers of chaos in American law and order, subjected to a scientific scrutiny that perceives them as a danger to the master race."

-- Wes House

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Crikey! That's an extremely racist story. Are all his stories like that?

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Crikey! That's an extremely racist story. Are all his stories like that?

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He wrote stories that don't feature race as overtly, but in which it appears in moments.

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He wrote stories that don't feature race as overtly, but in which it appears in moments.

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"The Call of Cthulhu" is, for the most part, a story about the discovery of an ancient and malevolent god living beneath the sea. But the narrator still uses language describing Black people, along with various non-White and immigrant groups, as "degraded and ignorant."

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Lovecraft's fear and loathing flow in many directions:

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Lovecraft's fear and loathing flow in many directions:

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"Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some 'glorious fulfilment' which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous 'Dream Landscape' in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions."

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Still others of his stories don't seem to explicitly touch on the subject of race at all. See, "At the Mountains of Madness."

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Still others of his stories don't seem to explicitly touch on the subject of race at all. See, "At the Mountains of Madness."

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"H. P. Lovecraft’s most effective novel begins as a tale of exploration at the cutting edge of science. Airplanes and drilling devices are shipped to Antarctica in 1930, just as the mapping of the continent begins in earnest. But this 'awful place,' more ancient than any other continent, is not so easily opened up to materialist exploitation. Soon enough, an entirely new history of the world is in evidence, one that undermines all previously held views of science and nature, a vision that contains vast alien cities buried beneath the ice and the awesome and awful survivors of its heyday."

-- John Shir

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So maybe many, but not all, of his stories invoke a racist worldview? Well, it might not be that simple...

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So maybe many, but not all, of his stories invoke a racist worldview? Well, it might not be that simple...

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"Knowing the primacy of existential dread within Lovecraft’s stories, is it then possible to separate his racism from his creative output? In the end, is Lovecraft’s nihilism ultimately colorblind, 'All Lives Don’t Matter in the Vast Cosmos-at-Large'? Not quite. As Jed Mayer argues in The Age of Lovecraft, the 'mingling of horror and recognition that accompanies the encounter with the nonhuman other is one that is vitally shaped by Lovecraft’s racism.' The admixture of his maniacal bigotry and hysterical racism ignite stories of nihilism often based on the master-race ideology. In the same anthology, China Miéville writes that 'the anti-humanism one finds so bracing in him is an anti humanism predicated on murderous race hatred.' This provides all the more reason to place Lovecraft’s racism at the forefront of examinations of his oeuvre."

-- Wes House

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror, brought madness and existential dread to new heights. He ruptured the imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in the early 20th century. His mythologies seep into the works of Ridley Scott, Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, Joss Whedon, and countless others, and his stories are rigorously dissected in academic schools ranging from speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy to posthumanism and human-animal studies. Video games are indebted to his cosmic universe and the grotesque monsters that within it abound. And cruder, yet ingenious, Lovecraftian appearances have been resurrected in popular culture, ranging from South Park and heavy metal to pornography and sex toys. But he is also a man whose virulent racism and bigotry induced in him a "poetic trance," as Michel Houellebecq once phrased it.

So long as modern stories of white genocide, superpredators, and the alleged master race find fertile ground on American soil, the contemporary relevance of Lovecraft will extend beyond what some fans care to admit. His bigotry and race-inflected narratives can't be wished away, cherry-picked, or swept under the rug in favor of his more widely known literary techniques and accomplishments-especially as hell-bent right-wing insurgents proudly claim him as a true elaborator of reactionary horrors. His stories and politics are still breathing, even the most defiled and rotten among them.

Making no efforts to conceal his bigoted theories, Lovecraft took to pen and publication with the most grotesque appraisals of those he deemed inferior. His letters overflow with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of an underground Jewry pitting the economic, social, and literary worlds of New York City against "the Aryan race." He warned of "the Jew [who] must be muzzled" because "[he] insidiously degrades [and] Orientalizes [the] robust Aryan civilization." His sympathies with rising fascism were equally transparent. "[Hitler's] vision . . . is romantic and immature," he stated after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. "I know he's a clown but god I like the boy!"

And his contempt for blacks ran even deeper. In his 1912 poem entitled "On the Creation of Niggers," the gods, having just designed Man and Beast, create blacks in semi-human form to populate the space in between. Regarding the domestic terrorism of white minorities in the predominantly black Alabama and Mississippi, he excused them for "resorting to extra-legal measures such as lynching and intimidation [because] the legal machinery does not sufficiently protect them." He lamented these sullen tensions as unfortunate, but nevertheless says that "anything is better than the mongrelisation which would mean the hopeless deterioration of a great nation." Miscegenation permeates his letters and stories as his most corporeal fear; he insists that only "pain and disaster [could] come from the mingling of black and white."

His prejudice, like that of many figures who've achieved the status of cultural icon, is often treated with apologia, disregard, or as a personal flaw within an otherwise great man. Never was this clearer than in the debate in 2010 surrounding the World Fantasy Award, a prestigious literary prize for fantastical fiction molded in the caricatured bust of Lovecraft himself, which a number of writers came to petition. Established in 1975 in Lovecraft's home city of Providence, Rhode Island, the "Howard" award was intended to "give a visible, potentially usable, sign of appreciation to writers working in the area of fantastic literature, an area too often distinguished by low financial remuneration and indifference." Like most awards named after an artist, it was intended to acknowledge Lovecraft's precedent in the field of fantastical fiction.

But as his racism and xenophobia became more widely known and discussed, it became obvious how flippant and egregious it was to potentially award black nominees with the face of a man who once proclaimed that "the Negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races." As Nnedi Okorafor, the first black person to ever win a WFA for Best Novel, put her internal conflict, "A statuette of this racist man's head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man's head is one of my greatest honors as a writer." The award was remodeled in 2016, but not without the kicking and screaming of Lovecraft's pious defenders. Prominent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who has made insightful contributions to the study of weird fiction, refuted the arguments for changing the award stating that 1) the award "acknowledges Lovecraft's literary greatness . . . [which] says nothing about the person or character" and 2) "it suggests that Lovecraft's racism is so heinous a character flaw that it negates the entirety of his literary achievement."

The first comment is particularly strange, considering the award is the mold of an actual person rather than a literary reference. If the goal is to highlight the genius of the author, why not make the statuette reflective of his universe rather than of the literal face of the man himself? After all, Lovecraft was the creator of an influential cosmos replete with landscapes of unfathomable monsters and profound alien architectures. There is no drought in the search for Lovecraftian imagery to pay homage to his legacy and precedent in the field of weird fiction.

But Joshi's second point is more telling, as it pits Lovecraft's racism against his literature. He tries to save the latter by separating it from the former. But the need to "save" a man dubbed the "horror story's dark and baroque prince" by Stephen King is itself questionable. His legacy is firmly planted. His cosmology sprawls from popular culture to niche corners of scholasticism. Complaints of a potentially tarnished reputation are more concerned with bolstering the illusion of Lovecraft as a sacrosanct figure. Even further, to divorce his racism from his literary creations would be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound writer. And from a criticism standpoint, what's lost is any meaningful grappling with the connection between Lovecraft's racism and the cosmic anti-humanism that defined his horror.
"To divorce his racism from his literary creations would be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound writer."
In 1927, Lovecraft's oft-quoted take on cosmic horror appeared in Weird Tales: "Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large." One must "forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, [have] any existence at all." Crucial to all of his stories is the question of the outside, which breaks in from unknown dimensions and upsets his character's perception of space, time, and history.

Traditionally, horror stories concern a monstrous perversion of the status quo, with characters seeking its resolution or restoration by extraordinary, and sometimes desperate, means. Even if all goes to hell, the protagonist's attempts were nonetheless depicted as both noble and practical. But Lovecraft's stories went further, accomplishing what Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater), calls " catastrophic integration, " where the outside breaks into "an interior that is retrospectively revealed to be a delusive envelope, a sham." That is: the main character will encounter unknown entities, dreamscapes, dimensions, and underworlds that shatter all previously held notions of science, history, and humanity. Characters would discover cities with "no architecture known to man or to human imagination" which contain "monstrous perversions of geometrical laws attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie." Lovecraft's monsters were even more perplexing than his cities, displaying physiologies that defied all known biological principles, "outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man." Rather than a return to the status quo, in Lovecraft's conclusions the universe is revealed to be impossibly bleak and beyond possible human understanding. There is no hero in these tales. There are but two options his characters are thus faced with: go mad or run.

Knowing the primacy of existential dread within Lovecraft's stories, is it then possible to separate his racism from his creative output? In the end, is Lovecraft's nihilism ultimately colorblind, "All Lives Don't Matter in the Vast Cosmos-at-Large"? Not quite. As Jed Mayer argues in The Age of Lovecraft, the "mingling of horror and recognition that accompanies the encounter with the nonhuman other is one that is vitally shaped by Lovecraft's racism." The admixture of his maniacal bigotry and hysterical racism ignite stories of nihilism often based on the master-race ideology. In the same anthology, China Miéville writes that "the anti-humanism one finds so bracing in him is an anti humanism predicated on murderous race hatred." This provides all the more reason to place Lovecraft's racism at the forefront of examinations of his oeuvre.

*

One of Lovecraft's notable tales concerns a troubled detective who comes across a "hordes of prowlers" with "sin-spitted faces . . . [who] mix their venom and perpetrate obscene terrors." They are of "some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern" beyond human understanding, but still retain a "singular suspicion of order [that] lurks beneath their squalid disorder." With "babels of sound and filth," they scream into the night air to answer the nearby "lapping oily waves at its grimy piers." They live within a "maze of hybrid squalor near an ancient waterfront," a space "leporous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds." One could be forgiven for mistaking this space as an evil abyss populated by beasts from the mythical Necromonicon. However, this vignette is from his short story, "The Horror at Red Hook." And the accursed space is not some maleficent mountain of the The Great Old Ones, but the Brooklyn neighborhood right off the pier. The brutish monsters, conduits for a deeper evil, are the "Syrians, Spanish, Italian and Negro[s]" of New York City.

In all of his collected works, this may be the one where his racist opinions are made the most explicit. A relatively straightforward detective story, "The Horror of Red Hook" unfolds in Lovecraft's typical fashion; the deeper evil is slowly brought to light in scenes of intermixing immigrants whose neighborhood is revealed in the final act to be the literal gateway to hell. Strong anti-immigration sentiments and gaudy displays of sympathy for racist policing appear throughout, with references to immigrants that range from "monsters" to "contagions." We see blacks and immigrants, the bringers of chaos in American law and order, subjected to a scientific scrutiny that perceives them as a danger to the master race.

The story was instigated by Lovecraft's tenure in Brooklyn from 1924 to 1926, a time of shifting demographics, greatly affected by the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the Midwest and the North. In one letter, Lovecraft describes living in Brooklyn as being "imprisoned in a nightmare." And upon leaving, he swore that "not even the threat of damnation could induce me to dwell in the accursed place again." His wife Sonia recounted that "whenever he would meet crowds of people-in the subway, or at the noon hours, at the sidewalks of Broadway or crowds, whoever he happened to find them, and these were usually the workers of the minority races-he would become livid with anger and rage."

It should come as no surprise that a racist imagination possess an uncanny ability to concoct the most outlandish and fiendish representations of minorities and immigrants; preexisting social hierarchies and political forces give those depictions life and validity. Darren Wilson's horror-ridden tale of the death of Mike Brown, delivered to a grand jury on September 16, 2014, shows one strain of the continuous thread of black youth enlivened in the racist imaginary as a monstrosity to be met with force. It's the tale a child, if child he may be called, whose presence and demeanor were so dangerous that the only solution was a bullet to the brain. "I've never seen anybody look that, for lack of a better word, crazy," Wilson testified. "That's the only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked." In Wilson's story, even the spraying of firepower can't stop Brown, who begins to feed on the violence. Wilson claims that "at this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shot." Therefore, in a desperate move, the grand jury is told, the fatal silver bullet was fired and "when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped."
"This isn't to suggest that Darren Wilson is a specifically Lovecraftian storyteller, but to show how the weight of fantastic imagery can and has been violently deployed against people of color."
Yet another racist campfire tale from an unreliable narrator. It's so cliché it should be criminal. Yet Darren Wilson is alive and Mike Brown is dead. In a just world, referring to an 18-year-old as a bullet-thirsty maniacal demon beyond human understanding would not only be insufficient in any court of law-it would qualify as perjury or pure insanity. But the main goal of Wilson's monster-laden narrative wasn't to state any verifiable facts. It was to conjure fear. For this, his story didn't need to be true. No story of any cop killing a black man, child, woman, or trans person needs to be true. But like any convincing piece of fantastic fiction it must at least engage with some level of world-building, pulling from an already established mythos that defines how the world works.

Lucky for Wilson, stories of the "Negro Beast", the "Big Black Brute", and the "Superpredator" already proliferate in the white supremacist, capitalist mythos and prove useful for reactionaries in enforcing and imagining political ends. Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Shereese Francis, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Edwards are but a few of the countless whose skin, presence, demeanor, and even mental illness provoked a fear that is entirely "plausible" within the stories we are told and re-told about race. Right-wing and liberal commentary on "black on black crime" and "the poverty of black culture" reads like a mere refinement of Lovecraft's racist intonations about "patterns of primitive half-ape savagery" and "shocking and primordial tradition." The essential message of black depravity and lowliness remains firmly intact in both.

This isn't to suggest that Darren Wilson is a specifically Lovecraftian storyteller, but to show how the weight of fantastic imagery can and has been violently deployed against people of color. Lovecraft was a writer who breathed life into the reactionary anxieties and racist horrors of shifting social and global paradigms, including those of "race relations," war, revolution, and class struggle. He was not only the "modern pope of horror" but also its grand wizard.

Lovecraft didn't write himself out of his mythical universe, nor did he separate that universe from the real world unfolding before him. He was both an active product of his time as well as an elaborator of specific historical fears about "the decline of the West." While he succeeded in shocking the mind out of the mundane and shattering conceptions of rationality and reason that were trying desperately to hold in the early 20th century, he couldn't face the horrors that bled into his own psyche.

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We Can't Ignore H.P. Lovecraft's White Supremacy

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror, brought madness and existential dread to new heights. He ruptured the imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in ...

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Do the racist structures and overtones of his work make him categorically unworthy of study?

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Do the racist structures and overtones of his work make him categorically unworthy of study?

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In another part of the previously mentioned blog post, Nnedi Okorafor writes:

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In another part of the previously mentioned blog post, Nnedi Okorafor writes:

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"Do I want 'The Howard' (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. Lovecraft’s full name is 'Howard Phillips Lovecraft') replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it’s about that time. Maybe not. What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let’s deal with that... as opposed to never mention it or explain it away. If Lovecraft’s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist."

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Lovecraft's racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, with comments from China Miéville.

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"I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him! For grades!"

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Although she was scribbling changes to her acceptance speech up to shortly before the ceremony, when she was named winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novel Sofia Samatar didn't refer to her notes and could only approximate what she said when it came time to blog about it.

She knows what people are interested in, of course. What was it like to be a writer of color and be given an award in the image of H.P. Lovecraft, whose correspondence is riddled with racist statements,after a season when many have called for the design to be changed?

2. The Elephant in the Room I think I used those words. I think I said "I can't sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award." I said it was awkward to accept the award as a writer of color. (See this post by Nnedi Okorafor, the 2011 winner, if you are confused about why.) I also thanked the board for taking the issue seriously, because at the beginning of the ceremony, Gordon van Gelder stood up and made an announcement to that effect: "The board is taking the issue very seriously, but there is no decision yet." I just wanted them to know that here I was in a terribly awkward position, unable to be 100% thrilled, as I should be, by winning this award, and that many other people would feel the same, and so they were right to think about changing it.

After the con Samatar shared her explicit views about the issue:

a) Nobody's post about winning an award should turn into a post about controversy! Everyone should be able to announce their awards with unadulterated joy! And unless the statue is changed, there will be a lot more posts like this. Can we not?

b) I don't think the statue should be an image of any person.

c) I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him! For grades! This is not about reading an author but about using that person's image to represent an international award honoring the work of the imagination.

d) I discovered, with a horror I'm sure Lovecraft would share, that we look a lot alike.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the link.]

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Sofia Samatar on Winning the World Fantasy Award

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Although she was scribbling changes to her acceptance speech up to shortly before the ceremony, when she was named winner of the World Fantasy Award for Novel Sofia Samatar didn't refer to her note...

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Okay, so his work is steeped in racism and there are some legitimate reasons for studying it. But is it worth studying in secondary school?

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Okay, so his work is steeped in racism and there are some legitimate reasons for studying it. But is it worth studying in secondary school?

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Well, as Okorafor said, it's important to face the ugly parts of literary history. As Adele says, "there are no definitively 'safe' activities."

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Well, as Okorafor said, it's important to face the ugly parts of literary history. As Adele says, "there are no definitively 'safe' activities."

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We want to teach secondary schoolers in an honest way, which involves teaching about some seriously ugly things.

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EJ_Volume_110_Issue_3_CONSIDERING _em_FENCES__em__ WHO CAN STEP INTO WHOSE SHOES_.v2

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Still, as we've discussed in this class, secondary school can be a uniquely uncomfortable (and possibly unsafe) place for students of color.

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Still, as we've discussed in this class, secondary school can be a uniquely uncomfortable (and possibly unsafe) place for students of color.

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So, while we can't shy away from upsetting subject matter, it's important to keep in mind that students of color may find this sort of material more viscerally upsetting than white students.

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As a starting point for considering the educational relevance of his work, Wes House points to similar features in the storytelling of Lovecraft and the contemporary "racist imagination."

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As a starting point for considering the educational relevance of his work, Wes House points to similar features in the storytelling of Lovecraft and the contemporary "racist imagination."

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"It should come as no surprise that a racist imagination possess an uncanny ability to concoct the most outlandish and fiendish representations of minorities and immigrants; preexisting social hierarchies and political forces give those depictions life and validity. Darren Wilson’s horror-ridden tale of the death of Mike Brown, delivered to a grand jury on September 16, 2014, shows one strain of the continuous thread of black youth enlivened in the racist imaginary as a monstrosity to be met with force. It’s the tale a child, if child he may be called, whose presence and demeanor were so dangerous that the only solution was a bullet to the brain.  'I’ve never seen anybody look that, for lack of a better word, crazy,' Wilson testified. 'That’s the only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.' In Wilson’s story, even the spraying of firepower can’t stop Brown, who begins to feed on the violence. Wilson claims that 'at this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shot.'  Therefore, in a desperate move, the grand jury is told, the fatal silver bullet was fired and 'when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.'"

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror, brought madness and existential dread to new heights. He ruptured the imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in the early 20th century. His mythologies seep into the works of Ridley Scott, Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, Joss Whedon, and countless others, and his stories are rigorously dissected in academic schools ranging from speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy to posthumanism and human-animal studies. Video games are indebted to his cosmic universe and the grotesque monsters that within it abound. And cruder, yet ingenious, Lovecraftian appearances have been resurrected in popular culture, ranging from South Park and heavy metal to pornography and sex toys. But he is also a man whose virulent racism and bigotry induced in him a "poetic trance," as Michel Houellebecq once phrased it.

So long as modern stories of white genocide, superpredators, and the alleged master race find fertile ground on American soil, the contemporary relevance of Lovecraft will extend beyond what some fans care to admit. His bigotry and race-inflected narratives can't be wished away, cherry-picked, or swept under the rug in favor of his more widely known literary techniques and accomplishments-especially as hell-bent right-wing insurgents proudly claim him as a true elaborator of reactionary horrors. His stories and politics are still breathing, even the most defiled and rotten among them.

Making no efforts to conceal his bigoted theories, Lovecraft took to pen and publication with the most grotesque appraisals of those he deemed inferior. His letters overflow with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of an underground Jewry pitting the economic, social, and literary worlds of New York City against "the Aryan race." He warned of "the Jew [who] must be muzzled" because "[he] insidiously degrades [and] Orientalizes [the] robust Aryan civilization." His sympathies with rising fascism were equally transparent. "[Hitler's] vision . . . is romantic and immature," he stated after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. "I know he's a clown but god I like the boy!"

And his contempt for blacks ran even deeper. In his 1912 poem entitled "On the Creation of Niggers," the gods, having just designed Man and Beast, create blacks in semi-human form to populate the space in between. Regarding the domestic terrorism of white minorities in the predominantly black Alabama and Mississippi, he excused them for "resorting to extra-legal measures such as lynching and intimidation [because] the legal machinery does not sufficiently protect them." He lamented these sullen tensions as unfortunate, but nevertheless says that "anything is better than the mongrelisation which would mean the hopeless deterioration of a great nation." Miscegenation permeates his letters and stories as his most corporeal fear; he insists that only "pain and disaster [could] come from the mingling of black and white."

His prejudice, like that of many figures who've achieved the status of cultural icon, is often treated with apologia, disregard, or as a personal flaw within an otherwise great man. Never was this clearer than in the debate in 2010 surrounding the World Fantasy Award, a prestigious literary prize for fantastical fiction molded in the caricatured bust of Lovecraft himself, which a number of writers came to petition. Established in 1975 in Lovecraft's home city of Providence, Rhode Island, the "Howard" award was intended to "give a visible, potentially usable, sign of appreciation to writers working in the area of fantastic literature, an area too often distinguished by low financial remuneration and indifference." Like most awards named after an artist, it was intended to acknowledge Lovecraft's precedent in the field of fantastical fiction.

But as his racism and xenophobia became more widely known and discussed, it became obvious how flippant and egregious it was to potentially award black nominees with the face of a man who once proclaimed that "the Negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races." As Nnedi Okorafor, the first black person to ever win a WFA for Best Novel, put her internal conflict, "A statuette of this racist man's head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man's head is one of my greatest honors as a writer." The award was remodeled in 2016, but not without the kicking and screaming of Lovecraft's pious defenders. Prominent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who has made insightful contributions to the study of weird fiction, refuted the arguments for changing the award stating that 1) the award "acknowledges Lovecraft's literary greatness . . . [which] says nothing about the person or character" and 2) "it suggests that Lovecraft's racism is so heinous a character flaw that it negates the entirety of his literary achievement."

The first comment is particularly strange, considering the award is the mold of an actual person rather than a literary reference. If the goal is to highlight the genius of the author, why not make the statuette reflective of his universe rather than of the literal face of the man himself? After all, Lovecraft was the creator of an influential cosmos replete with landscapes of unfathomable monsters and profound alien architectures. There is no drought in the search for Lovecraftian imagery to pay homage to his legacy and precedent in the field of weird fiction.

But Joshi's second point is more telling, as it pits Lovecraft's racism against his literature. He tries to save the latter by separating it from the former. But the need to "save" a man dubbed the "horror story's dark and baroque prince" by Stephen King is itself questionable. His legacy is firmly planted. His cosmology sprawls from popular culture to niche corners of scholasticism. Complaints of a potentially tarnished reputation are more concerned with bolstering the illusion of Lovecraft as a sacrosanct figure. Even further, to divorce his racism from his literary creations would be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound writer. And from a criticism standpoint, what's lost is any meaningful grappling with the connection between Lovecraft's racism and the cosmic anti-humanism that defined his horror.
"To divorce his racism from his literary creations would be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound writer."
In 1927, Lovecraft's oft-quoted take on cosmic horror appeared in Weird Tales: "Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large." One must "forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, [have] any existence at all." Crucial to all of his stories is the question of the outside, which breaks in from unknown dimensions and upsets his character's perception of space, time, and history.

Traditionally, horror stories concern a monstrous perversion of the status quo, with characters seeking its resolution or restoration by extraordinary, and sometimes desperate, means. Even if all goes to hell, the protagonist's attempts were nonetheless depicted as both noble and practical. But Lovecraft's stories went further, accomplishing what Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater), calls " catastrophic integration, " where the outside breaks into "an interior that is retrospectively revealed to be a delusive envelope, a sham." That is: the main character will encounter unknown entities, dreamscapes, dimensions, and underworlds that shatter all previously held notions of science, history, and humanity. Characters would discover cities with "no architecture known to man or to human imagination" which contain "monstrous perversions of geometrical laws attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie." Lovecraft's monsters were even more perplexing than his cities, displaying physiologies that defied all known biological principles, "outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man." Rather than a return to the status quo, in Lovecraft's conclusions the universe is revealed to be impossibly bleak and beyond possible human understanding. There is no hero in these tales. There are but two options his characters are thus faced with: go mad or run.

Knowing the primacy of existential dread within Lovecraft's stories, is it then possible to separate his racism from his creative output? In the end, is Lovecraft's nihilism ultimately colorblind, "All Lives Don't Matter in the Vast Cosmos-at-Large"? Not quite. As Jed Mayer argues in The Age of Lovecraft, the "mingling of horror and recognition that accompanies the encounter with the nonhuman other is one that is vitally shaped by Lovecraft's racism." The admixture of his maniacal bigotry and hysterical racism ignite stories of nihilism often based on the master-race ideology. In the same anthology, China Miéville writes that "the anti-humanism one finds so bracing in him is an anti humanism predicated on murderous race hatred." This provides all the more reason to place Lovecraft's racism at the forefront of examinations of his oeuvre.

*

One of Lovecraft's notable tales concerns a troubled detective who comes across a "hordes of prowlers" with "sin-spitted faces . . . [who] mix their venom and perpetrate obscene terrors." They are of "some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern" beyond human understanding, but still retain a "singular suspicion of order [that] lurks beneath their squalid disorder." With "babels of sound and filth," they scream into the night air to answer the nearby "lapping oily waves at its grimy piers." They live within a "maze of hybrid squalor near an ancient waterfront," a space "leporous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds." One could be forgiven for mistaking this space as an evil abyss populated by beasts from the mythical Necromonicon. However, this vignette is from his short story, "The Horror at Red Hook." And the accursed space is not some maleficent mountain of the The Great Old Ones, but the Brooklyn neighborhood right off the pier. The brutish monsters, conduits for a deeper evil, are the "Syrians, Spanish, Italian and Negro[s]" of New York City.

In all of his collected works, this may be the one where his racist opinions are made the most explicit. A relatively straightforward detective story, "The Horror of Red Hook" unfolds in Lovecraft's typical fashion; the deeper evil is slowly brought to light in scenes of intermixing immigrants whose neighborhood is revealed in the final act to be the literal gateway to hell. Strong anti-immigration sentiments and gaudy displays of sympathy for racist policing appear throughout, with references to immigrants that range from "monsters" to "contagions." We see blacks and immigrants, the bringers of chaos in American law and order, subjected to a scientific scrutiny that perceives them as a danger to the master race.

The story was instigated by Lovecraft's tenure in Brooklyn from 1924 to 1926, a time of shifting demographics, greatly affected by the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the Midwest and the North. In one letter, Lovecraft describes living in Brooklyn as being "imprisoned in a nightmare." And upon leaving, he swore that "not even the threat of damnation could induce me to dwell in the accursed place again." His wife Sonia recounted that "whenever he would meet crowds of people-in the subway, or at the noon hours, at the sidewalks of Broadway or crowds, whoever he happened to find them, and these were usually the workers of the minority races-he would become livid with anger and rage."

It should come as no surprise that a racist imagination possess an uncanny ability to concoct the most outlandish and fiendish representations of minorities and immigrants; preexisting social hierarchies and political forces give those depictions life and validity. Darren Wilson's horror-ridden tale of the death of Mike Brown, delivered to a grand jury on September 16, 2014, shows one strain of the continuous thread of black youth enlivened in the racist imaginary as a monstrosity to be met with force. It's the tale a child, if child he may be called, whose presence and demeanor were so dangerous that the only solution was a bullet to the brain. "I've never seen anybody look that, for lack of a better word, crazy," Wilson testified. "That's the only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked." In Wilson's story, even the spraying of firepower can't stop Brown, who begins to feed on the violence. Wilson claims that "at this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shot." Therefore, in a desperate move, the grand jury is told, the fatal silver bullet was fired and "when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped."
"This isn't to suggest that Darren Wilson is a specifically Lovecraftian storyteller, but to show how the weight of fantastic imagery can and has been violently deployed against people of color."
Yet another racist campfire tale from an unreliable narrator. It's so cliché it should be criminal. Yet Darren Wilson is alive and Mike Brown is dead. In a just world, referring to an 18-year-old as a bullet-thirsty maniacal demon beyond human understanding would not only be insufficient in any court of law-it would qualify as perjury or pure insanity. But the main goal of Wilson's monster-laden narrative wasn't to state any verifiable facts. It was to conjure fear. For this, his story didn't need to be true. No story of any cop killing a black man, child, woman, or trans person needs to be true. But like any convincing piece of fantastic fiction it must at least engage with some level of world-building, pulling from an already established mythos that defines how the world works.

Lucky for Wilson, stories of the "Negro Beast", the "Big Black Brute", and the "Superpredator" already proliferate in the white supremacist, capitalist mythos and prove useful for reactionaries in enforcing and imagining political ends. Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Shereese Francis, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Edwards are but a few of the countless whose skin, presence, demeanor, and even mental illness provoked a fear that is entirely "plausible" within the stories we are told and re-told about race. Right-wing and liberal commentary on "black on black crime" and "the poverty of black culture" reads like a mere refinement of Lovecraft's racist intonations about "patterns of primitive half-ape savagery" and "shocking and primordial tradition." The essential message of black depravity and lowliness remains firmly intact in both.

This isn't to suggest that Darren Wilson is a specifically Lovecraftian storyteller, but to show how the weight of fantastic imagery can and has been violently deployed against people of color. Lovecraft was a writer who breathed life into the reactionary anxieties and racist horrors of shifting social and global paradigms, including those of "race relations," war, revolution, and class struggle. He was not only the "modern pope of horror" but also its grand wizard.

Lovecraft didn't write himself out of his mythical universe, nor did he separate that universe from the real world unfolding before him. He was both an active product of his time as well as an elaborator of specific historical fears about "the decline of the West." While he succeeded in shocking the mind out of the mundane and shattering conceptions of rationality and reason that were trying desperately to hold in the early 20th century, he couldn't face the horrors that bled into his own psyche.

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We Can't Ignore H.P. Lovecraft's White Supremacy

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror, brought madness and existential dread to new heights. He ruptured the imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in ...

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Aja Romano interviewed Victor Lavalle on the capacity for Lovecraft's work to reveal, "the fears that animate the landscape of white America."

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Aja Romano interviewed Victor Lavalle on the capacity for Lovecraft's work to reveal, "the fears that animate the landscape of white America."

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In many ways, as LaValle pointed out to me, sampling Lovecraft is also an important introduction to the fears that animate the landscape of white America. Whereas European writers often frame their supernatural horror as a kind of wrong turn into a strange place, the American version of that strangeness is usually much more aggressive. “The American versions of that are usually like, they’re out to destroy us. They’re out to get us. We have to fight,” LaValle explained. “Certainly one of the central ideas of America is like, we have to push back — we have to clear what’s here to make it civilized place.”

“It’s no surprise,” he continued, “that particularly so many white Americans would be driven somewhat insane by the need to be the light of civilization, but also, unfortunately they’re just human beings. So they’re filled with flaws ... [and] you see the ways that they throw that onto the groups they fear. This [other] group is criminal. This [other] group is thieves. This [other] group is oversexed. It’s all things that they fear in themselves.”

The solution, then, is to spread awareness of Lovecraft’s legacy alongside the work itself. LaValle told me that with a cultural influence that’s so fully saturated, the alternative is to educate and build off what’s already there, to try to create something new while still acknowledging what we love about what’s old.

“What that means is talking about things, shedding light on things, and beginning to teach the genre as a whole as a way to talk about things that are wrong or broken or outdated. And being able to say, ‘We can talk this thing through and then keep the best of it and identify the worst of it.’”

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His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction. He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror, from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro. His monsters - and the men who encounter their cosmic evil - have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R. Giger to the otherworldly tentacle monsters of Stranger Things to True Detective's Rust Cohle. There's a prehistoric sea cucumber named after his most famous creation, Cthulhu.

Yet H.P. Lovecraft and his works of literary horror are long overdue for a cultural reckoning - because Lovecraft may have been one of the 20th century's most influential writers, but he was also one of its most gallingly racist.

Lovecraft leaves no room for a debate about separating the artist from their art. He injected many of his most famous and beloved stories with overt racist metaphors and frequent blunt literal racism. For the past decade or so, as the extent of his racism has become more widely known and acknowledged, horror and fantasy writers whose landscapes are saturated with Lovecraft's influence have been trying to figure out what to do about him. Matt Ruff's 2016 novel Lovecraft Countrywas one of the first attempts at an answer. By centering Black characters who were often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft's stories, the book allows for a new layer of meaning to map onto Lovecraft's old fears.

With HBO's adaptation of Lovecraft Country into a 10-episode drama, that broader, overdue cultural reckoning may have finally arrived. The series, helmed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists and horror nerds at the center of a proper Lovecraftian mystery. The story teems with all the typical Lovecraftian tropes: creepy New England villages, dark mansions with esoteric secrets, and tentacle monsters shipped direct from the cosmic void; but it's also full of very realistic horror, in the form of the racist police violence and white supremacy our heroes must confront at every turn.

Necessarily, Lovecraft Country's approach to Lovecraft's legacy is simultaneously one of shrewd affection and resigned repugnance. For the problem with Lovecraft is that Lovecraft is everywhere. His influence is so ubiquitous within horror and fantasy that you simply can't ignore it - nor is it always easy or simple to subvert it.

What we can do is explain it. With Lovecraft, it's helpful to understand both how and why his stories were so influential, and why there's been so much hand-wringing over how to think about and discuss them since.

Lovecraft grew up haunted by madness and death

H.P. Lovecraft was a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose works were a key part of the subgenre of horror that would come to be known as "Weird fiction." Born in Providence in 1890, Lovecraft grew up with an agonizing fear of both death and mental collapse. When he was 3 years old, his father had a psychological breakdown, probably related to syphilis,and Lovecraft moved in with his mother's wealthy family.

His father's confinement in an asylum and his maternal grandmother's death - which occurred not long after Lovecraft moved into the matriarchal family manse - were looming events of his childhood, and Lovecraft became obsessed with the fear that he, too, might experience a psychological breakdown. As a teen he suffered severe social anxiety and agoraphobia, and poured himself into voracious reading and studying, especially horror fiction and astronomy.

Although Lovecraft was extremely well-read, between his family's financial decline in his boyhood and what seem to have been his own episodes of mental illness, he never graduated high school. By the time his mother also began to experience signs of psychological breakdown - perhaps also because of syphilis - Lovecraft was in his late 20s, and his fear of mental illness, his raging xenophobia, and his fixation on the cosmos as a reflection for all the dread he felt were well established through his writing.

(It's not clear where Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia originated, though his upbringing may naturally have had a lot to do with it. Even his biographer and ardent supporter S.T. Joshi notes that Lovecraft's love of science wouldn't have supported his views, since "the brute fact is that by 1930 every 'scientific' justification for racism had been demolished." What is clear is that by the early 1930s, Lovecraft was passionately espousing his racist viewpoints in letters to friends, defending white lynch mobs, and trumpeting Hitler with praise that may seem eerily familiar these days: "I know he's a clown but god I like the boy!")

By that time, he'd also established himself as a writer by contributing to the magazine medium commonly referred to as pulp fiction.

Pulp fiction made up the first wave of the geek magazine medium that would later become known as zines. Still popular in geek culture today, zines are a combination of fictional anthology and community bulletin, mailed or emailed to contributors and subscribers.

Prevalent throughout the early 20th century, pulp fiction titles were mass market, often distributed for free or a relatively low fee. They were full of stories and discussions of the day, and functioned as a kind of niche writing circle. Subsequently, within the speculative fiction community - horror, science fiction, and fantasy writing - they fostered most of the now-seminal literature of the first half of the century; Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Perry Mason were all characters who appeared first, and often only, in pulp fiction series. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis edited a pulp, and nearly every 20th-century genre author you've ever heard of appeared in one at some point.

Lovecraft grew to become hugely involved in this community both as a writer and as an opinionated reader. One of the most popular pulps of the day was the popular Weird Tales, which ran from the '20s to the '50s and published hugely important genre authors like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and many more. It also published many of Lovecraft's own works - nearly all short stories - and helped him gain a following. The sprawling vast horror subgenre that Lovecraft codified and popularized ultimately became known as "Weird" fiction (the W is capitalized to indicate that it's a genre) partly because of the pulp's influence.

As a writer, Lovecraft was extremely generous. He frequently mentored and encouraged other writers, and fostered among his devoted cult of acolytes a "share and share alike" mentality that turned his stories into a kind of giant sandbox where everyone was invited to play. He freely gave every writer around him permission to write fanfiction of his works, be they remixes of his stories or new stories with crossover elements. Countless other horror writers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have set their own stories within the fictional universe Lovecraft created, often referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos or simply "the Mythos."

This act - allowing people to share his ideas and his story elements - probably did more than anything else to help spread Lovecraft's stories and his particular view of horror: what we call "Lovecraftian" today. But Lovecraft never reaped any broader acclaim for his work in his lifetime. He died penniless and unknown in 1937, at the age of 46, just before World War II.

Yet among his fans, Lovecraft had fostered such a loyal cult following of horror aficionados that his influence spread slowly and steadily throughout the remainder of the century. Legions of horror and fantasy writers who came after Lovecraft spread his influence further - until today his influence is essentially ubiquitous within the horror landscape.

Lovecraft had very specific visions of very vast cosmic horror

Lovecraft is often credited with creating Weird fiction, and he did coin the term, but he emphatically didn't invent the genre. He was writing within a broader tradition of supernatural fantasy that had been growing and evolving since the first works of gothic horror were published in the late 1700s. In particular, Lovecraft was working under the influence of a subset of Victorian and Edwardian authors, both British and American, who dabbled in the idea of nature as a source of existential dread. These writers, like Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and Arthur Machen, would all come to be hugely influential in the development of Weird fiction and specifically Lovecraft's view of horror.

All of these writers tended to play with the idea that unnatural or supernatural elements, perhaps even entire worlds, lurked just outside civilization, often adjacent or right next door to it; their unassuming (white male) characters often stumbled into or encountered these worlds and supernatural forces by accident. Lovecraft, working within the tradition in fiction of borrowing from and remixing other stories, often directly borrowed story elements from many of his fellow writers. Several recurring images run throughout their collective works, such as Bierce's fictional city of Carcosa and Chambers's " the Yellow King," both signifiers of encounters with other worlds and the unholy, unknowable monster who rules them.

What Lovecraft contributed to this general vibe was a deeply lush writing style, a throwback to the stylization of gothic horror and fantasy of the 19th century. He became known for gravely serious, detail-rich descriptions of untold "eldritch" horrors, often blended with existential wonder. These descriptions nearly always included his fictional characters confronting the idea of a cold, different, and perhaps even actively hostile cosmic universe.

Lovecraft's confrontations usually involve his characters experiencing brief brushes with terrifying otherworldly phenomena. They're rarely described in detail, but Lovecraft usually provides just enough description to make you feel, along with the characters, as though you've glimpsed the edge of a vast and overwhelming universe full of darkness and terror. One defining example is his most famous story, " The Call of Cthulhu," in which the narrator writes, "I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror."

Cthulhu - pronounced "kuh-THOO-loo" or sometimes "CUT-uh-loo" or "CLUE-loo" - is Lovecraft's most famous monster, introduced in its aforementioned namesake tale. Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu with many different names, including "the Dread One," "Tsathoggua," and "Him Who is not to be Named."

Cthulhu, a giant tentacle monster on a bulbous winged body, is far from a daunting figure these days - look at all these snuggly Cthulhu plushies I found on Etsy! - but to Lovecraft, he was the pinnacle of a race of monsters that Lovecraft called "Elder Gods" or "Great Old Ones." Other gods in this vein included creatures Lovecraft dubbed yog-sothoth, "night-gaunts," and various cryptically named demons. Even while slumbering ominously as he waits to awake and take over the world, Cthulhu has the ability to infiltrate your mind and drive you mad through a constant powerful summons to join him in his lair of darkness. Consequently, in many of Lovecraft's stories, Cthulhu actually does have a cult of followers who are devoted to helping him rise.

There's also an element of an incredible voyage inherent in these stories, which borrows from the influence of other pulpy 19th-century writers like Jules Verne. Often, Lovecraft's characters are doomed travelers or explorers who make dark treks across the Earth - or even just across New England - to find a lost city, or to find and read a forbidden book.

The Arctic was a popular destination, since in the Mythos, many of Lovecraft's monsters slumber in a lost city at the bottom of the world called R'lyeh. But Lovecraft also placed monsters throughout America - like in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky - and very frequently in fictional towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

In fact, Lovecraft's fictional universe was most often directly in his own backyard. His most famous fictional New England settings include the small, mysterious town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where one of his most famous characters, "Reanimator" Herbert West, lived and worked. Then there's Dunwich, home to the " Dunwich Horror " and the fictional Miskatonic University, where one of Lovecraft's most famous inventions, the Necronomicon or book of the dead, supposedly resides.

Nearly all of these encounters with cosmic terror end up with Lovecraft's narrators going mad, fearing that they will go mad, or - worst of all - realizing that they themselves are somehow directly related to the monster they're afraid of, or slowly becoming the monster themselves. "The monster is me" is a staple of horror fiction these days, and Lovecraft unfailingly used it to turn his fears inward. In Lovecraftian fiction, the safe option for the narrator is ultimately madness - because to him, the far worse alternative is recognizing that you are the thing you hate.

And this is where Lovecraft's writing turns both brilliant and inescapably racist. Because much of this metaphor is built not just around Lovecraft's dread of the universe, but his fear of race-mixing.

Lovecraft's racism left a long shadow over the genre he popularized

One of the problems with Lovecraft is that his work and influence was everywhere before most people knew he was anywhere. Despite the spread of his ideas among genre fans and writers, Lovecraft himself didn't become more widely known outside of a cult following until the late 1980s and '90s. Consequently, the popular culture he so thoroughly left his mark on was slow to really parse where that influence came from - or address the fact that the man at the center of it was an extreme racist.

And let's make no bones about it. Lovecraft was an avid, loud, horrific racist - suffice it to say you'll probably fail this "Hitler or Lovecraft?" quiz - and on top of his frequent racist rants in letters and discussions with friends, his racist fears infuse and inform nearly all of his work. Famous Lovecraft short stories like " The Shadow over Innsmouth" (about a seaport town of murderous cultists who are secretly mating with terrifying fish people) and " The Horror of Red Hook" (a story full of textual xenophobia and horror at New York's immigration influx and the "primitive half-ape savagery" of nonwhite New Yorkers) may be beloved and hugely influential, but they're also built on overt racist metaphors. Often these metaphors involve his deep fear of miscegenation (race-mixing), hereditary evil, and his concern that he himself might have an impure bloodline, which all takes his "monster is me" trope in a terrible direction.

Throughout the decades, many of his fans have attempted to argue that actually, Lovecraft wasn't that racist, and that he would have eventually turned away from his beliefs if he'd only lived longer. This is a terrible argument; Lovecraft's form of racism was already profoundly more extreme than the "typical" racism of his time, and the assumption that he was growing more tolerant in his beliefs is based on wishful thinking. And as the genre has begun to diversify its scope over the past decade or so, more people have realized that.

This debate about how racist Lovecraft actually was, and what to do about it, has played out directly among the community of the World Fantasy Award - which traditionally, from its founding in 1975, awarded a bust of Lovecraft's head as its trophy. In 2011, the Black writer Nnedi Okorafor won the annual honor, and only realized Lovecraft's legacy after a horrified friend pointed out to her that the man whose head sat upon her mantle was a lifelong, virulent racist.

When Okorafor wrote a blog post about how conflicted she felt that "a statuette of this racist man's head is one of my greatest honors as a writer," including in it Lovecraft's most overtly racist piece of writing, she drew inescapable new attention to a subject that had largely been buried and forgotten.

In 2014, writer Daniel José Older began a petition to change the World Fantasy Awardto a bust of Black writer Octavia Butler. That same year, Black writer Sofia Samatar won the honor, and said in her acceptance speech, "I can't sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award." The following year, in 2015, the awards finally retired Lovecraft's image - which caused controversy both because many people felt the move was years overdue and because some were furious at what they saw as the erasure of Lovecraft's legacy.

The conversations have been ongoing among horror fans ever since.Speaking at the " Shadow Over Lovecraft" discussion on Lovecraft's racism, held in New York in 2019 by the Miskatonic Institute (a recurring panel series named for Lovecraft's fictional university), Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff discussed the ways Lovecraft's fear of the other, even though it was rooted in racism, was also relatable on a basic level.

"In giving vent to his bigotry, he taps into a larger fear that I think we all have of people who are different from us and mean us no good," he said. "It's one of the reasons you can take his stories and repurpose them. ... He may not have realized the universalism of some of what he was writing about, but I can take that away from his work."

In other words, there's something timeless and universally appealing about much of Lovecraft's fiction that keeps even reluctant readers coming back to him. That doesn't mean one has to overindulge; "not reading Lovecraft's letters is a form of self-care," writer Ruthanna Emrys quipped on the same panel.

Still, there's an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft's niche community of genre writers - still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO's Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author's racist legacy - but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape.

"He's so woven in, I think for horror as a whole, it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm," Black horror writer Victor LaValle, who often writes Lovecraftian fiction, told me. "And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm."

In many ways, as LaValle pointed out to me, sampling Lovecraft is also an important introduction to the fears that animate the landscape of white America. Whereas European writers often frame their supernatural horror as a kind of wrong turn into a strange place, the American version of that strangeness is usually much more aggressive. "The American versions of that are usually like, they're out to destroy us. They're out to get us. We have to fight," LaValle explained. "Certainly one of the central ideas of America is like, we have to push back - we have to clear what's here to make it civilized place."

"It's no surprise," he continued, "that particularly so many white Americans would be driven somewhat insane by the need to be the light of civilization, but also, unfortunately they're just human beings. So they're filled with flaws ... [and] you see the ways that they throw that onto the groups they fear. This [other] group is criminal. This [other] group is thieves. This [other] group is oversexed. It's all things that they fear in themselves."

The solution, then, is to spread awareness of Lovecraft's legacy alongside the work itself. LaValle told me that with a cultural influence that's so fully saturated, the alternative is to educate and build off what's already there, to try to create something new while still acknowledging what we love about what's old.

"What that means is talking about things, shedding light on things, and beginning to teach the genre as a whole as a way to talk about things that are wrong or broken or outdated. And being able to say, 'We can talk this thing through and then keep the best of it and identify the worst of it.'"

He also stressed capitalizing on Lovecraft's love of fanfiction of his own stories to overwrite that legacy into newer, more progressive visions of horror. For instance, his award-winning Lovecraftian horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom largely revolves around the underlying premise that much of Lovecraft's horror is predicated on ridiculous white privilege. That horrific realization that all Lovecraft's characters undergo that the universe doesn't revolve around them? That's not a problem any Black character would ever have.

"If you're Black," he said, "you don't think the universe as a whole thinks you are wonderful because all you have to do, if you're a Black American, all you have to do is walk through America, and this country teaches you. ... The idea that you would be driven mad because you found out that the universe doesn't think you're special is a joke to me as a Black American."

LaValle, published The Ballad of Black Tom on the same day as Ruff's Lovecraft Country in 2016. Like Lovecraft Country, LaValle's novel is also being developed into a TV series, but by AMC instead of HBO. He points to stories like and HBO's as a sign that modern Black creators are successfully subverting many of the racist tropes that fuel genre media. And genre, he said, is "the pleasant, pleasant casing that makes the medicine go down."

Perhaps that means the universality of Lovecraft's themes can also serve as the fundamental appeal that allows modern horror writers to subvert and ultimately transform his tropes into smart, aware commentaries on the very kind of racism he evinced.

And that's perhaps the biggest Lovecraftian twist of all: the unknown cosmic terror, transformed into something as familiar and tawdry as everyday racism - and then vanquished with the light of understanding in favor of newer, better stories.

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His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction. He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror, from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro. His monsters - and the men who encounter their cosmic evil - have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R.

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That seems potentially useful to teach about.

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That seems potentially useful to teach about.

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Shedding light on the, "fears that animate white America." Perhaps, in bringing these fears into consciousness, you can give students the opportunity to recognize, understand, dissect, and question them.

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However, while I feel reasonably certain that his work need not be entirely off-limits, I'm also quite certain that it isn't appropriate for every situation.

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However, while I feel reasonably certain that his work need not be entirely off-limits, I'm also quite certain that it isn't appropriate for every situation.

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Perhaps his work would be useful to teach in an elective course along the lines of, "Speculative Fiction and Social Change." I'm not sure if there's a strong reason to bring his work into a general 9th grade literature and composition course.

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The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

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The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

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His award-winning Lovecraftian horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom largely revolves around the underlying premise that much of Lovecraft’s horror is predicated on ridiculous white privilege. That horrific realization that all Lovecraft’s characters undergo that the universe doesn’t revolve around them? That’s not a problem any Black character would ever have.

“If you’re Black,” he said, “you don’t think the universe as a whole thinks you are wonderful because all you have to do, if you’re a Black American, all you have to do is walk through America, and this country teaches you. ... The idea that you would be driven mad because you found out that the universe doesn’t think you’re special is a joke to me as a Black American.”

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“Wagnerism” is also both the title and the all-absorbing subject matter of Alex Ross’s new book, a work of enormous intellectual range and subtle artistic judgment that pokes and probes the nerve endings of Western cultural and social norms as they are mirrored in more than a century of reaction to Wagner’s works. The book has its own “Wagnerian” heft and ambitiousness of intent, being nothing less than a history of ideas that spans an arc from Nietzsche and George Eliot to Philip K. Dick, “Apocalypse Now” and neo-Nazi skinheads.

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From George Eliot to Neo-Nazi Skinheads: The Chaotic Cult of Richard Wagner (Published 2020)

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Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism” is “a book about a musician’s influence on non-musicians — resonances and reverberations of one art form into others.” Reviewed by John Adams.

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Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?

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NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED/BEST BOOK OF SPRING BY: The New York Times (twice!), BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, TIME Magazine, Bustle, i-D, Nylon, Kirkus, The Millions, LitHub, Alta, Chicago Review of Books, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Part memoir, part treatise, and all treat . . . nimble, witty . . . Her exquisitely reasoned vindication of Lolita brought tears to my eyes . . . This is a book that looks boldly down the cliff of roiling waters below and jumps right in, splashes around playfully, isn't afraid to get wet. How refreshing." -The New York Times

"Excellent . . . A work of deep thought and self-scrutiny that honors the impossibility of the book's mission. Dederer comes to accept her love for the art that has shaped her by facing the monstrous, its potential in herself, and the ways it can exist alongside beauty and pathos. Go ahead, she tells us, love what you love. It excuses no one." -The New Yorker

"[A] vital, exhilarating book . . . Although Dederer has done her homework, her style is breezy and confessional . . . Monsters leaves us with Dederer's passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us." -The Washington Post

"She asks important questions . . . [and] skirts categorical answers. Subtle and adroit." -The Atlantic

"Dazzling . . . If you too love the work of Polanski-or Picasso, Hemingway, Allen, Davis, and so on-sticking with Dederer on her curlicued journey might be the best gift you can give yourself. The final chapter feels its way toward a conclusion that burns clean, though it hurts a little too.

"Dederer presents a lively, personal exploration of how one might think about the art of those who do bad things . . . Even when the subject matter tips into the uncomfortable and upsetting, it's such a pleasure to stretch out in a big, nuanced conversation about a topic that can be so easily flattened into wrong and right, good and bad; it's a pleasure to be asked to think."
"The field of criticism claims objective standards that remove the emotional response of the critic from its evaluation. Dederer begins to take apart these claims to objectivity by teasing out the connections between art and its creator and the connections between the critic and their own subjectivity . . . [Dederer] offers instead an embodied form of critique, one that acknowledges that a critic's emotions, physical responses and life experiences come to bear on the ways they judge the work of others."
-Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An extraordinary and ambitious study of the slippery problems of biography when it comes to consuming art . . . It's a book that's not afraid to say, 'I don't know,' written by an author who isn't afraid of her mind changing as she unpacks everything from Woody Allen's Manhattan to Vladimir Nobokov's Lolita to J.K. Rowling, full stop . . . The book's greatest feat is in its refusal to spit out any absolutes." -Nylon Magazine

"Dederer's approach radiates humanity-or, in other words, subjectivity . . . Throughout the book, Dederer mines the tension between how she thinks she should feel as a feminist, and how she actually feels as an artist; how she wants to feel as a mother, and how she truly experiences motherhood. She isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, approaching these issues with rigorous curiosity instead of intellectual authority-and this willingness to challenge her own contradictory thought process is a welcome antidote to the dominant discourse surrounding the work of problematic figures, the societal mandates around which vacillate with the politics of the time." -Document Journal

"[Dederer] just keeps getting better and smarter. In Monsters, she ties herself in intellectual and emotional knots, poking holes in her own arguments with gusto. In contrast to so many nonfiction books adapted from articles, Monsters doesn't stretch a singular thesis over several hundred pages. Quite the contrary, it's absolutely exhilarating to read the work of someone so willing to crumple up her own argument like a piece of paper, throw it away and start anew. She's constantly challenging her own assumptions, more than willing to find flaws in her own thinking." -The San Francisco Chronicle

"Conversational, clear and bold without being strident . . . Dederer showcases her critical acumen . . . In this age of moral policing, Ms. Dederer's instincts to approach such material with an open mind-and heart-are laudable." -The Wall Street Journal
"[ Monsters is] profoundly cathartic. The book feels simultaneously like having the deepest, artiest conversation with the smartest people you know and like having an intense shit-talking session with your closest friends."

"The book is tangled and fascinating, chasing down arguments and questions that can't always be easily resolved. Dederer's shrewd, vivid descriptions of movies and books suggest just how much they mean to her and how deeply any sacrifices on the altar of contemporary sexual ethics might cut."

"The rare polemic that's full of greedy love for the good stuff in this world, Monsters is an expansion of Dederer's instant classic Paris Review essay from 2017, 'What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men.' With a larger canvas, she lets both her cast of monsters and our culpability grow, and manages to one-up herself over and over again. Cooly pensive on an overheated subject, Dederer writes powerfully about art's ability to move us, teach us, and entrap us." -
"A hot and urgent monologue structured around a problem without a solution. Dederer says out loud the things that are flitting through her mind as she prowls around her snarling beasts, prodding and poking, inspecting their fangs . . . immersive and doubtlessly important." -The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"Smart, funny, and surprisingly forgiving . . . You can't read it without thinking of your own literary loves and hates-and wondering how to know the difference."

"The masterstroke of Dederer's book is that she doesn't seek to duck her ambivalence. She doesn't try to magic it away by finding an expert or thinking harder, although her book has crystalline intellectual force . . . Denounce Allen or Polanski all she wants, she realizes, their work still calls to her, and from that stubborn fact she has fashioned a book of depth and candor about what it is to be heartbroken by an artist whose work we also happen to love . . . So on point is Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma about the historical moment in which we currently find ourselves, you want to carry it around with you and whip it out at every bar or dinner party" -Avenue Magazine

"In a world that wants you to think less-that wants, in fact, to do your thinking for you, Monsters is that rare work, beyond a book, that reminds you of your sentience. It's wise and bold and full of the kind of gravitas that might even rub off." - Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

"An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life. This timely book inhabits both the marvelous and the monstrous with generosity and wit." - Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

"A blisteringly erudite and entertaining read. Dederer holds the moral ambiguity of her subject matter, landing her arguments with precision and flair. It's a book that deserves to be widely read and will provoke many conversations." - Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall

" Monsters is an incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time. It's thrillingly sharp, appropriately doubtful, and more fun than you would believe, given the pressing seriousness of the subject matter. Claire Dederer's mind is a wonder, her erudition too; I now want her to apply them to everything I'm interested in so I can think about them differently." -Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

"Slyly funny, emotionally honest, and full of raw passion, Claire Dederer's important book about what to do when artists you love do things you hate breaks new ground, making a complex cultural conversation feel brand new. Monsters elegantly takes on far more than 'cancel culture'-it offers new insights into love, ambition, and what it means to be an artist, a citizen, and a human being." - Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis
"A valuable meditation on some of the era's most urgent cultural questions . . . Emerging from Dederer's reflections is the plain truth that every personal response to art is inseparable not only from the artist's past but also the history of each member of its audience." -Library Journal

"[An] insightful exploration . . . Dederer's case studies include Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Miles Davis, whose work she considers brilliant and important. What's a fan to do? Dederer offers nuanced answers, challenging the assumption that boycotting is always the best response."

"Bringing erudition, emotion, and a down-to-earth style to this pressing problem, Dederer presents her finest work to date . . . Dederer's analysis includes both usual and unusual suspects, often with remarkably original angles." -Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

"What's a fan to do when they love the art, but hate the artist? asks book critic and essayist Dederer ( Love and Trouble) in this nuanced and incisive inquiry . . . There are no easy answers, but Dederer's candid appraisal of her own relationship with troubling artists and the lucidity with which she explores what it means to love their work open fresh ways of thinking about problematic artists. Contemplative and willing to tackle the hard questions head on, this pulls no punches." -Publishers Weekly [starred review]

"Despite the heavy subject matter, Monsters is neither rant nor sermon. Dederer is not only an incisive researcher and writer, she's also conversational, approachable and funny. The book seamlessly incorporates bits of memoir-Dederer's life in the Pacific Northwest, her experiences as a critic and a woman, her failures-that have informed her critical thinking. Yes, Monsters is a worthy addition to contemporary literary criticism, but more than that, it's a very enjoyable book about a thorny, elusive subject." -BookPage [starred review]

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Monsters by Claire Dederer: 9780525655114 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK * A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture,...