I recently finished listening to the complete fiction of H.P. Lovecraft as an audiobook. It's a total of 51 hours and 40 minutes of content, but it is well worth the listen, especially if you're like me and you appreciate the occasional spooky or paranormal story.
The vast majority of Lovecraft's fiction is made up of forgettable, pulpy novels and horror stories, but there are certainly some gems mixed in there too. I don't want to review the man's entire body of work because that would end up being an entire book. Lovecraft was a prolific writer, and produced a lot of work despite his relatively short life.
So instead of reviewing all of his fiction, I wanted to talk about one of the major themes that ties all his books together: racism. Just kidding. There is a lot of that in his writing, but you can also find racial critiques of Lovecraft everywhere. I would add nothing to the discussion if I wrote about that. Instead, I'd like to focus on Lovecraft's horror itself.
The main element of horror in Lovecraft's writing is that the world is not ours. This idea seems quaint today given things like deep ecology, various environmental movements, and general postmodern cynicism about human life, but in his context, the idea would have been more shocking. Basically, Lovecraft took humanity out of the center of the universe and said that nothing revolves around us. Instead, the universe revolves around a sleeping, dreaming, and ultimately uncaring (and possibly evil) deity.
The horror of H.P. Lovecraft isn't so much the fact that there are monster out there in an strange and exotic world. That certainly is frightening to the characters involved. The real horror, however, is that the world itself doesn't actually belong to regular men and women. Instead, it was made by and for the monsters. According to Lovecraft, The old ones were here before us, and they will be here after us. As for humanity, we exist as little more than a cosmic joke or accident.
It's an incredibly dim view of humanity, but there is a little redemption here. I'm not convinced Lovecraft held that view. Instead, I think he presented it as horror because a world that doesn't care about human life is a terrifying place. He shows us what the world is like or can be like when we become overly cynical about ourselves. In other words, Lovecraft might have a lot to say in response to our current post-humanist philosophies.
Much of this view came from his historical context. Lovecraft would have been in his twenties during World War I. And he would have seen much of the blatant disregard for human life that was going on at the time. He died before World War II, but he must have been able to see where that particular issue was going. These things must have had an effect on his fiction and surely influenced it. There are a number of times where his protagonists are described as having fought in the great war, so it was clearly on his mind throughout a lot of his fiction. I don't think he was directly responding to the horror of World War I in his writing. However I do think that the disregard for human life that he would have heard about helped shape the way he wrote and helped create the horror in his writing.
Does this mean that Lovecraft was a perfect example of humanist thinking? No, of course not. See the note on his racism above. He was very much a man of his time and he had all the flaws and bad thinking that would have been around at the start of the 20th century. Still, if we think through the ideas, Lovecraft has an important message for us: a world where we stop caring about humanity is a world full of horror and darkness. It's an old message, but it's one that bears repeating again and again.
