Member-only story
Reading H.P. Lovecraft in 2018
The more one reads the horror master, the less his work can be considered apart from his racism — especially in the age of Trump.
Shortly before the New Year, I discovered two podcast feeds providing free audio recordings of H.P. Lovecraft stories. Like many writers of speculative fiction, I enjoy a good Lovecraftian tale, but I confess that I find his signature style, intentionally antiquated and oblique, difficult to read on the page. As a result, I hadn’t read the bulk of his work. Audio recordings are the perfect solution, and to my delight the two feeds (Mike Bennett’s Vault of Lovecraft and The Complete H.P. Lovecraft) employed readers who added drama and pacing that improved the experience.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Howard Phillip Lovecraft was an early 20th century author of science fiction horror. His idiosyncratic and distinctive style inspired generations of authors, and he’s often credited with creating a subgenre (generally called “Eldritch Horror” or “Weird Tales,” after the magazine that published much of his work) and a literary philosophy, cosmicism. His Cthulu Mythos, a pantheon of wholly alien deities dismissive or hostile toward humankind and built upon by contemporary authors after Lovecraft’s early death, formed the basis for hundreds of books, stories…
