He devoted himself to horror fiction just after World War I, creating unsettling and often interrelated stories, many of them published in the pulp magazine “ Weird Tales.” He married, briefly, and spent a few years living in Brooklyn, a period that inspired stories like “The Horror at Red Hook.” When his marriage ended, he returned to Providence, where he expanded into novellas like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “At the Mountains of Madness.” (When both of your parents die in the same psychiatric hospital, two decades apart, maybe that’s not a huge surprise.) After leaving high school during his senior year, a move precipitated by a nervous collapse, he began to write short stories indebted to Edgar Allan Poe, and dabbled in amateur journalism as well as racist and xenophobic poetry. If you don’t know your Yog-Sothoth from your Shub-Niggarath - good! Run while you can! But if you hold your sanity lightly, here is a brief guide to the man, the monsters and the popular culture slime trail his works have left behind.īorn in Providence, R.I., in 1890, to a well-off family who quickly tumbled down the social ladder, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a precocious child who became a deeply strange adult. The devouring Shoggoths from the “Lovecraft Country” pilot? A squelching tip of the hat. That giant squid from “Watchmen”? Lovecraft again.
The stomach monster from “Alien”? Extremely Lovecraft. Still, he remains influential, with his sinister, squishy qualities still felt across media - television, film, fiction, comics, video games, role-playing games, visual art, plushies - and multiple genres. To adapt a Lovecraft work is to reckon with a troubled and troubling legacy - blatant racism and sexual phobias blight much of his work. His brand of weird is gooey and misanthropic, with an insistence that the universe is at best indifferent to human life and at worst antagonistic.
Filled with miscegenation, tentacles and unspeakable dread, his works often begin with ordinary or ordinary-seeming men drawn into extraordinary and otherworldly situations. Lovecraft, the widely cited if narrowly read pulp fiction writer from the early 20th century.īroadly - and with plenty of exceptions - Lovecraft’s stories suggest huge and unfathomable horrors lurking just beneath the surface of the mundane world.
Based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, the series is a sideways look at the terrors of Jim Crow America that nods to and reframes the work of H.P. 16 on HBO, follows a Black family entangled in eldritch phenomena.
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