I doubt that Lovecraft would have a problem with his paradoxical place in American letters; moreover, as a New Englander of "good Puritan stock," he'd probably be the first to understand why he's been dragged out of his pauper's grave and slapped into the pillory.

Miller lines up a good prosecutor's case for Lovecraft as an anomalous growth on the backside of literary culture, citing his ugliest excesses to lull the defense into despair, but the article never seriously broaches why Lovecraft matters as more than a guilty pleasure of morbid geeks.

At his best, Lovecraft and a dog couldn't scare a cat, but his stories (which also delved into fantasy and science fiction in pure and ingeniously hybridized specimens) are brilliantly vivid explorations of fear, of mingled repulsion and fascination for aspects of the natural world that continue to scare the stinkless clinkers out of churchgoing America. It is not the weak attempts to project his guilty fear of these subjects onto us, but the forensic fetishism with which he finds himself unable to look away, that makes him at least the equal of Kafka, James or any of the great neurotics.

The Cthulhu Mythos is a pulp metaphor for dread of a blindly evolving, endlessly copulating universe, and its miscegenated scions are so potent for some because they are not "from Outside" or unfathomable to us, but all too familiar. That they look like the things we find under rocks and in fishing nets and between our legs, and yet are exalted and privy to secrets we cannot bear to comprehend, speaks to the dread in all of us, that we are none of us special, and that none of this matters. And if he had an orgasm or two in the course of describing them, so much the better.

-- Cody Goodfellow

The last line of Laura Miller's sniffy piece about H.P. Lovecraft -- "No, I wouldn't call it wholesome at all" -- sums up exactly how off-base the article is. Sure, Lovecraft's "Cthulhu mythos" stories may be, at heart, adolescent fables of the world's horrors. However, without any sense of irony, Salon has printed article after article about the presumed genius of J.R.R. Tolkien. With equal justification, you might describe Tolkien as the author of childish monarchical fantasies, in which the forces of absolute good battle with absolute evil. Both Lovecraft and Tolkien deserve a great deal of praise, as imaginative men who started whole movements of modern popular culture. The moment you try to dress them in the trappings of "Lit-Ter-Rah-Choor," they look ridiculous. But of course, their fans don't read them as Major Lit, just as an imaginative lark -- as they'd gladly tell Miller.

-- Tom Grant

Ah, yes! H.P! He is a guilty pleasure. I was terrified by his stuff as a teenager, until I sat down and tried to draw the monsters (so ridiculous!).

Yes, it is the craziness of Lovecraft that really is the monster; somewhere inside he knew it was his own Victorian self that was wrong and he could not admit it.

-- Sarah Jumel

H.P. Lovecraft was not the best writer on the planet, nor are his stories always incredibly frightening. What does set him apart from other writers is the bizarre and unique alien world he describes. In Lovecraft's stories humans are not by any stretch the center of the universe. Some of the alien gods and races briefly notice humanity, but deem it largely ignorable.

Compare this worldview to every other writer who puts his or her heroes, and humanity in general, at the very heart of everything. In Lovecraft's writings, humanity isn't worth the very small effort it would take to exterminate. Like ants on the wall, humanity can occasionally observe (but generally not understand) what the true powers of the universe are doing, but they can do nothing to stop them.

-- Stephen Cumblidge

Ms. Miller does both lovers and haters of H. P. Lovecraft's work a disservice with her article.

Although she has done some research into in life, his times and the reactions of his readers since his death, she leaves out facts of his life that make him appear as a complex human being struggling with his existence, and the legacy his writing has left upon pop culture and horror as a genre.

Nowhere does she mention the contradiction between his proto-white supremacy beliefs with the fact that his short-lived marriage was to a Jewish woman! If race mixing was such an abhorrent proposition to this man, what would lead him to enter into a marriage with somebody of "inferior blood"?

Secondly, Miller simply skipped over the fact that H. P. Lovecraft wrote the book that helped define horror (and to a lesser extent sci-fi) as a genre: "The Role of the Supernatural in Literature." Lovecraft's work along with his encouragement of other writers helped to give birth to icons and works that we still know today.

-- David Sinclair

I read Lovecraft years ago when I started writing horror myself because he was supposed to be one of the Great Masters of the craft. Your article hits the nail on its tentacle-enshrined head about Lovecraft's writing style. You left out one thing, though: Unlike a lot of horror fiction (especially the popular ones today), there wasn't even a glimmer of hope in Lovecraft's writing. The scariest thing about reading "The Call of Cthulhu" was the fact that at the very end of the story mankind was doomed to destruction by an angry god when he finally rises again from the ocean, and there wasn't even a trace of hope on how one might survive when that happens (you don't, period). Horror fiction in general doesn't scare me much (if at all), but pessimism on that scale did unnerve me a little.

-- Kelly Rothenberg

I found several things I enjoyed in this Lovecraft essay -- a balanced and very well-written summary of the overriding themes of sex and race in Lovecraft, the mention of "Cthulhu camp" -- but I had a huge problem with Miller's division between high and low literature. She's implicitly judging Lovecraft according to a standard in which really good literature has psychological depth and realistically individuated characters. I really despise this assumption and the way so very many people automatically accept it. Yes, Lovecraft had cookie-cutter characters, but that's another flaw that turns into a strength insofar as he can make individuality itself uncertain, vulnerable and meaningless in the face of a hostile and indifferent universe! (I wish I could have inserted some egregious italics there.) How on earth does this compare to the standard, very humanistic Stephen King plot, in which a lovable band of misfits always ends up saving the day? Also, Lovecraft and the writers he admired and worked with had a lot more things than scaring people on their agenda. It's too bad there wasn't any mention of either his little-read contemporaries Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton-Smith, or his very frequently read protigi, Robert Howard of Conan fame. To sum it up, too much Wilson on Lovecraft and too little of S.T. Joshi, whose "Annotated Lovecraft" series I highly recommend.

-- Hannah Aki Hawkins

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