In the energetic sphere of commentary and fandom that surrounds Lovecraft and his growing influence, the same approach is evident. “I would address the issue of Lovecraft’s racism first,” the horror writer Mary SanGiovanni said last year in an interview with Library Journal meant to offer a guide for librarians on Lovecraftian fiction. On occasion, the desire to address Lovecraft’s racism has led to disputes prefiguring many of today’s debates over cancel culture. In 2015, after a campaign led by the writers Daniel José Older and Nnedi Okorafor, the World Fantasy Convention stopped handing out a Lovecraft bust to its winning writers, replacing this with the representation of a tree in front of a full moon.
Yet confusion rather than clarity hangs over Lovecraft and the relation between his writing, his racism, the world he lived in, and the one we live in now. Was Lovecraft racist because he was an insular New Englander, limiting himself largely to Providence after a serious mental crisis provoked by encountering the immigrant population of New York? That is one interpretation, and not entirely without substance, given that Lovecraft channeled his troubled experience of New York into the story “The Horror at Red Hook.” Or was his racism an expression of the times Lovecraft lived in and not entirely germane to his fiction, as S.T. Joshi, biographer and one-man critical industry on Lovecraft, argued while protesting vehemently against the cancellation of the Lovecraft bust?
Both arguments sequester Lovecraft, either in time or in space, and yet everyone argues for Lovecraft’s continuing validity as a writer, his relevance so contemporary that it has, in recent years, burst beyond the subculture of horror and into the mainstream. Known today both as “weird fiction,” as Lovecraft called his own work, as well as “cosmic horror,” his writing is an unending source for films, from 2016’s The Void to a 2019 adaptation of The Color Out of Space. Lovecraft himself is to be the subject of a forthcoming project fronted by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—the duo behind the Game of Thrones show—who plan to adapt Hans Rodionoff’s graphic novel, Lovecraft. In music, video games, cartoons, plush toys, politics—the satirical website “Cthulhu for America” launched in 2015 and is still going—and in the school of philosophy known as “speculative realism,” Lovecraft is rampant. Still, the question remains: Are horror and racism so easily separated in our times, or are they far more deeply intertwined than the mainstreaming of Lovecraft can admit?