Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an “adequately excellent lover,” it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.
He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list…. The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.
Yeah, horror writers usually scare easily, that’s where their ideas come from.
For example, Stephan King is afraid of cars among other things, that’s where Christine and Maximum Overdrive comes from. (Ironically, he also almost died being struck by a car. I doubt that alleviated his fear.)
Misery was about his drug addiction. Drugs were the superfan. They’re always there to celebrate your victories and always there to rip you to shreds at a moment’s notice.
cars are a bafflingly rare fear honestly, they’re 3-ton vehicles that regularly whoosh past people at high speeds and have no actual mechanism to prevent being driven by drunk people other than them not wanting to risk being arrested
If you exclude the racism and sexism (and probably homophobia, I assume), dude and I share a pretty good number of things that frighten us.
The racism went so far that he had a panic attack when he found out his uncle was Welsh.
This isn’t run-of-the-mill skin deep racism, this is advanced racism.
Exactly! What with your Bernie Sanderses lurking around every hill and pine tree
Plot twist: the story is literally just about a black man minding his own business.
Xenophobic racist mama’s boy. But he wrote some great stories.
Don’t look up the name of his cat.
It was removedman, I’ll save y’all a click.
Edit: Lemmy removed the first part of his name. Lovecraft didn’t like black people, so You can figure out what it was.
Hmm. I didn’t know Lemmy censored anything. Interesting. Is that per instance or universal?
I kinda like removedman as a cat name. Note, I am not being censored for saying the name of Lovecrafts cat.
Apparently his parents named the cat.
Not that he… also… didn’t uhhh, not like black people…
From what I’ve read, it was beaten into him by his puritanical, histrionic mother who blamed his father’s syphilis and death on the blacks.
It’s interesting to compare Lovecraft to his friend Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the barbarian). My impression is that Howard believed in and was fascinated by the stereotype of Africans as savages which was common at that time, but he still had them on the side of the good guys in multiple stories. His writing is certainly not PC by modern standards, but he seems like he was an open-minded guy.
I’ve read his works. Some stories aged better than others. I sometimes had to remind myself that they were written almost a century ago.
If you liked Howard’s Conan stories, check out Robert Jordan’s. (Yes, the Wheel of Time guy.) IMO they’re really good and faithful to the spirit of the originals. The writing is very different from Wheel of Time. It does get quite dark in places.
His predecessor would’ve been H. Rider Haggard who, while generally considered an archracist because of how he developed the savage stereotype, had African heros as well and pretty deep respect for zulu culture. Haggard even wrote a book with a white villain and black protagonists. He generally was extremely misogynistic though.
You can also see haggard’s influence on burrough’s Mars books.
he seems like he was an open-minded guy.
Well that’s certainly one of the takes of all time. He’s widely acknowledged to have been racist even for his time
