Lovecraft’s racism is satisfyingly subverted in HBO’s new big-budget series, Lovecraft Country, debuting on Sky Atlantic on Monday. A brief sojourn in New York installed in him a dread of migrants, those “squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes”. He admired Hitler and recoiled from anything foreign or exotic. This scion of a once wealthy Providence, Rhode Island family fallen on hard times was a bug-eyed racist who appeared to live in genuine fear of the Anglo-Saxon bloodline becoming tainted with corrupting influences. Yet if Lovecraft is an icon he is an increasingly problematic one. “Lovecraftian” is a widely deployed synonym for unfathomable terror the author’s signature creation of Cthulhu has come into his kingdom as geekdom’s very own Mickey Mouse – an octopoid mascot familiar the world over. His vision of a vast uncaring universe, brimming with madness, chaos and cruelty (and tentacles) has influenced everyone from Stephen King to John Carpenter, to say nothing of HR Giger’s Alien and generations of video and tabletop games. “I was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard his screams when the thing came to him but all the peasants and police in County Meath could never find him, or the others.”Īt the time of the recital, Lovecraft was utterly obscure. “Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has gone,” begins Lovecraft in his familiar anachronistic style. Taking their seats, the gentleman of the club listened, rapt, to the very first reading of HP Lovecraft’s The Moon-Bog. St Patrick’s Day was approaching and to honour the occasion a local horror writer had been commissioned to pen a creepy story with an Irish setting.

On the evening of March 10th, 1921, the esteemed members of the Boston Hub Club literary and journalistic society gathered around a fireside for a tale of mystery and imagination.

Memory by hp lovecraft