H.P. Lovecraft, Horror, and Monsters
by David J. Goodwin
With the arrival of autumn, the natural world begins to carry a mysterious and even menacing promise. Shadows grow darker and deeper. Dry leaves rustle with unsettling whispers. The scent of damp earth augurs the inevitable grave. The film separating the everyday from the unknown thins. When the night unfurls and the moon rises, one might imagine—daresay believe—that the dead walk the earth and that the supernatural does lurk in the darkness.
During this haunted season, booklovers draw up lists of scary stories to relish on chilly nights. One author likely appearing in many compilations is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, Lovecraft crafted a loosely connected series of short stories and novellas with titles such as “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.” All these tales are set primarily in his native New England and populated by malignant extraterrestrials and ancient creatures collectively foretelling the doom of mankind.
Although long consigned to the halls of genre fiction, Lovecraft’s literary oeuvre has nourished the works of generations of artists, including the music of heavy metal pioneers Metallica, the films of fabulist Guillermo del Toro, and the novels of MacArthur Fellow N. K. Jemisin. Lovecraft’s most famous creation—the tentacled, winged Cthulhu—can be spotted on t-shirts and coffee mugs and found in video games and comic books. Lovecraft seemingly is everywhere in the pop culture landscape.
In his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft defined fear as “[t]he oldest and strongest emotion.”[1] While Lovecraft’s characters might encounter fear in an isolated farmhouse in rural Vermont or in a decaying fishing village on the Massachusetts coast and while his contemporary readers might shudder when passing a crumbling Victorian mansion or a neglected cemetery, a very different source of terror existed for Lovecraft: his fellow human beings.
The changing population of his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, and many industrial cities throughout the United States physically revolted him and psychologically battered him. Diverse, pluralistic, and predominantly comprised of new Americans and their children, American urban regions resembled a violent, disgusting nightmare come to life for Lovecraft. For him, New York City came to vividly manifest this hellish, emerging geography.
Lovecraft lived in New York for two years between 1924 and 1926. Although remembered as “the merest vague dream” by Lovecraft himself, this period undeniably shaped him as both an author and an individual. Moreover, it starkly exposed the complexities of his character and personality and it hardened his deep racism and xenophobia.[2]
In March 1924, Lovecraft stepped off a train in Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, brimming with excitement and expectation. Like countless of writers, poets, and dramatists long before and long after him, he braved New York to chase after literary success. However, achieving this dream was a secondary factor in Lovecraft’s decision to leave Providence for Gotham. He came to New York to marry a woman, Sonia H. Greene. Dark-haired, attractive, and stylish, Greene was an experienced milliner in the city’s fashion industry.
Within a year after moving to New York, Lovecraft suffered through relentless setbacks. His wife’s small hat shop in Brooklyn failed, and she eventually left for Cincinnati, Ohio, for a sales position in a department store. Lovecraft fumbled to gain even the smallest foothold in Manhattan’s publishing world. Now living alone, he rented a small room in a dingy, cramped boarding house and mainly lived on canned food often eaten cold. Most troublingly, he was barely writing. These collective misfortunes increased his animus toward minorities and immigrants.
After a Fourth of July trip to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, he ranted about discovering its grounds filled with “flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering niggers.”[3] Several individuals of Middle Eastern descent lodged in his building, and Lovecraft cringed when he “glimpsed faces of sinister decadence in the hall.”[4] In a particular vitriolic letter to his aunt Lillian Clark penned several months before he fled back to Providence in 1926, he decried the high concentration of Jewish Americans in New York as “loathsome Asiatic hordes trail[ing] their dirty carcasses over streets where white men once moved.”[5] These sentiments seeped into his handful of stories written in New York, including “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He.”
What are readers and fans to make of H. P. Lovecraft? Is it possible to separate our appreciation for a song, a film, or a poem from its creator? Critic Claire Dederer attempts to explore this tension between the art and the artist in her recent book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. While considering the films of Roman Polanski and the music of Michael Jackson, Dederer defined a monster as “someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.”[6]
Although Lovecraft’s letters drip with hate and bile and although he infused many of his stories with his own racial and xenophobic fears and paranoias, his actions and relationships reveal a figure much trickier to categorize. While living in New York, Lovecraft belonged to a circle of fellow intellectuals and writers. This group included James F. Morton, a longtime activist engaged in the struggle for civil rights for Black Americans, and Samuel Loveman, a poet, first-generation Jewish-American, and gay man. Lovecraft considered both Morton and Loveman to be trusted friends and unwaveringly touted their individual talents as thinkers and men of letters.
Lovecraft’s own wife, Sonia H. Greene, might represent his most inscrutable contradiction. She was a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant, and Yiddish was her first language. According to Lovecraft’s racial ideology, Greene—whom he clearly respected and loved—belonged to a people of “alien blood” and “inherit[ed] alien ideals” antithetical to his conception of a true American.[7]
Was Lovecraft a monster? Knowing the uglier and more unsettling details of his biography, readers might ask themselves this while sampling his stories. Will they read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” one of Lovecraft’s most influential works, as a gripping horror tale depicting ancient cults, sea creatures, and madness? Or as a stark warning against miscegenation between “real Americans” and immigrants or other races? Will they lose themselves in his rich, wild fictional landscapes? Or will they find their pleasure disrupted by recalling Lovecraft’s vile comments about Blacks and Jews? Only individual readers themselves can answer these questions. Only they can decide if Lovecraft was a monster.
David J. Goodwin is an author and the Assistant Director at the Fordham University Center on Religion and Culture. His new book is Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham (Fordham University Press, 2023), a biography of the horror master’s years in New York City.
[1] H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature & Literary Essays, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Las Vegas, NV: Wildside Press, 2008), 15.
[2] Lovecraft to Morton, May 16, 1926, in Letters to James F. Morton, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York Hippocampus Press, 2011), 93.
[3] Lovecraft to Clark, July 6, 2023, Letters to Family and Family Friends, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, vol. 1, 1911-1925 (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2020), 310.
[4] H. P. Lovecraft to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 26, 1927, in Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2018), 440.
[5] Lovecraft to Clark, January 11, 1926, Letter to Family, 2:535.
[6] Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 43.
[7] Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, January 11, 1926, Letters to Family, 2:534.