His stories and politics are still breathing, even the most defiled and rotten among them. 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. 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. But he is also a man whose virulent racism and bigotry induced in him a “poetic trance,” as Michel Houellebecq once phrased it. And cruder, yet ingenious, Lovecraftian appearances have been resurrected in popular culture, ranging from South Park and heavy metal to pornography and sex toys.
Video games are indebted to his cosmic universe and the grotesque monsters that within it abound. 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. He ruptured the imagination in tandem with history itself becoming unimaginable in the early 20th century. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the mastermind of cosmic horror, brought madness and existential dread to new heights.
0 kommentar(er)
