The science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft is famed for his apocalyptic oeuvre. His work is deeply marked by racialist science and colonial history, linking them as structural constants that produce ...the outbreaks of horror in his stories. The horror is repeatedly represented as a dysgenic devolution with exterminatory implications. Yet similar treatments of racialized fear are commonly expressed in many non-fiction texts and biopolitical agendas, particularly in colonial contexts, and this conjunction also occurs in real events, including the historical apocalypse of the Holocaust. This paper will discuss Lovecraft’s apocalyptic fiction as a structural elaboration of the consequences of colonialism, racism, and scientific rationalism that reveals, despite its fantastic irrationality, a fundamental truth about extermination and modernity.
As part of historically minorized culture, Catalan literature endured difficult periods, e.g., the Francoist regime. To imagine different worlds writing in this language was even more arduous in the ...20th century because of the negative attitude towards the fantastic shared by two fundamental trends of Catalan literature up to the 1970s: Noucentisme and historical realism. Nonetheless, H.P. Lovecraft was an important reference in the Catalan non-mimetic fiction that had a certain revival in post-war times. As a step towards “normalization” of Catalan literature after Franco’s death, the writers’ collective Ofèlia Dracs published several collections of short-stories of “genre” fiction–among them Lovecraft, Lovecraft! (1981). On the one hand, this article inscribes this exceptional collection in its historical context and in the contemporary Catalan literary system; on the other, it aims to shed light on Lovecraft’s role in Ofèlia Dracs’ book, proving the projection of his extraordinary supernatural world onto it by the presence not only of Lovecraftian hypotexts in its different tales, but also of metafictional elements inherited mainly from Joan Perucho’s postmodernist writings.
In this paper, we suggest a speculative comparison between the short story The Color Out of Space (Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1927) and the documentary film Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds ...(Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, 2020). We explore the similarities between Herzog’s specific interest in extreme phenomena of Nature and Lovecraftian Cosmicism. We observe that both authors have, to a certain extent, compatible views on the relationship between humans and nature: Herzog and Lovecraft seem to be interested in identifying and investigating humanity’s difficulty in coping with their insignificance when facing catastrophic events caused by indifferent Nature; both chose the same kind of landscape (iced lands, volcanic areas) and extreme natural phenomena (like meteorite falls); and they show a particular interest in characters connected to scientific experiences, and obsessed (even sometimes driven to madness) with the mysteries of nature. Our analysis does not suggest a direct influence of Lovecraft on Herzog, but a productive coincidence that can shed light on the film Fireball and its possible Lovecraftian resonances.
If parapolitics, a branch of radical criminology that studies the interactions between public entities and clandestine agencies, is to develop as an academic discipline, then it must develop a ...coherent theory of aesthetics in order to successfully perform its primary function: to render perceptible extra-judicial phenomena that have hitherto resisted formal classification. Wilson offers the work of H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) as an example of the relevance of subversive literature—in this case, cosmic horror and the weird tale—to the parapolitical criminologist. Cosmic horror is a form of writing that relies heavily upon the epistemological assumption of a radical and irreconcilable disjunction between appearance and reality, perception and truth. In many ways, the well-constructed weird tale strongly resembles the hard-boiled detective story or the noir thriller in that the resolution of the narrative hinges upon a dramatically shattering confrontation with an unspeakable reality. Apart from its obvious utilization of conspiracy theory, the primary attraction of the Lovecraftian text lies with its remarkably sophisticated utilization of two central tropes of classical aesthetic theory—the sublime and the grotesque. Not only does Lovecraft’s oeuvre represent a remarkable use of both of these motifs, but the raw literary power of the Lovecraftian weird tale serves as an outstanding exemplar for the parapolitical scholar to emulate in formulating an alternative mode of discourse, or poetics.
The article proposes that engagement with John Milton's Paradise Lost in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris furnishes a clue to comprehending the duology. These twin volumes present an ...extraordinary brother and sister, Bobby and Alicia Western, as a new Adam and Eve in a vitiated world. The narrative suggests that the Western siblings' unconsummated love and the underlying theme of the absent child they never had make their circumstances a dark variation upon the Edenic story. McCarthy countervails his well-documented distrust of language by reinvigorating Milton's haptic motif of Adam and Eve's handclasp and offering an alternative form of human connection, lying beyond language, in interpersonal acts of care. McCarthy's duology instructs his readers by negative example to be thankful for life's most precious gifts by revering nature, loving another, nurturing a child, and showing kindness to those other passengers who travel with us in our shared lives.
This essay attends to the 'turn to horror' that ends Alan Moore's career as a comic book writer, focusing on his trilogy of miniseries inspired by the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. After tracing the ...ways in which Moore's Lovecraft comics employ techniques found in his revisionist superhero comics from the 1980s, the essay argues that Moore's horror comics also revisit a political critique from his early superhero work. Attention to Moore's turn to horror clarifies the shape of his career.
A number of scholars have commented upon Augustine of Hippo’s influence upon J.R.R. Tolkien’s portrayal of evil in his legendarium. However, in his seminal work J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, ...Tom Shippey pushes back against this perception, noting that there are some forms of evil in the legendarium that do not adhere to the Augustine’s belief that evil is merely a “twisting” of good. This article argues that Ungoliant is one such exception to the Augustinian paradigm because of the uncertainty regarding her origins. This uncertainty complicates the Augustinian view of evil that permeates the legendarium and instead echoes the kind of evil emphasized by one of Tolkien’s contemporaries—American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
"Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium ...of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and horror meet. Employing rigorous analysis, incisive experimentation, and novel invention, this anthology asks about the use that speculation can make of horror and horror of speculation, about whether philosophy is fictional or fiction philosophical, and about the relationship between horror, the exigencies of our world and time, and the future developments that may await us in philosophy itself. From philosophers working on horrific themes, to horror writers influenced by heresies in the wake of post-Kantianism, to artists engaged in projects that address monstrosity and alienation, Diseases of the Head aims at nothing less than a speculative coup d'état. Refusing both total negation and absolute affirmation, refusing to deny everything or account for everything, refusing the posture of critique and the posture of all-encompassing unification, this collection of essays aims at exposition and construction, analysis and creation – it desires to fight for some thing, but not everything, and not nothing. And it desires, most of all, to speak from the position of its own insufficiency, its own partiality, its own under-determinacy, which is always indicative of the practice of thinking, of speculation. Considering themes of anonymity, otherness and alterity, the gothic, extinction and the world without us, the end times, the apocalypse, the ancient and the world before us, and the uncanny or unheimlich, among other motifs, this anthology seeks to articulate the cutting edge which can be found at the intersection of speculative philosophy and speculative horror."
Religion suffuses H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) short stories—the most famous of which, “The Call of Cthulhu,” has led to a literary subculture and a shared mythos employed by Lovecraft’s successors. ...Despite this presence of religion in Lovecraft’s work, scholars of religion have paid relatively little attention to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, with a few notable exceptions. This article offers a close analysis of millennialism within Lovecraft’s thought, especially as expressed in three of his “Cthulhu mythos” stories: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” This article considers Lovecraft’s formative experiences and non-fiction writings so as to contextualize his approach and millennial outlook. Tied to his nativist views of social decline, I argue that Lovecraft expresses in his fiction a peculiar form of millennialism, “anti-millennialism,” which entails the reversal of traditional millennialism, offering no hope in a collective salvation, but rather expectation that the imminent future would bring only decline.
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