Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we take the mountain
of sources you shared with us and distill them
down to the essential, fascinating, and sometimes
terrifying truths. And today's mission is a big
one. It is. We're going to move beyond, you know,
the green tentacles and the easy scares and plunge
deep into the profound, complex, and often contradictory
life, philosophy, and enduring legacy of Howard
Phillips Lovecraft. Lovecraft, born in 1890,
dies in 1937. And he really stands as arguably
the most significant figure in 20th century supernatural
horror. But he's so much more complicated than
that. Oh, completely. When you truly deep dive
into his biography, you realize the man himself
was a walking paradox. You have a writer who
is incredibly prolific. I mean, thousands of
pages of letters, dozens of stories, yet who
could never earn a comfortable living from his
fiction. Right. And you have this rigid traditionalist
and aristocrat who eventually becomes a supporter
of. Well, a form of elitist socialism. And the
greatest contradiction of all, the one that I
think really defines his legacy, is that his
horror wasn't rooted in classic supernatural
tropes. You know, no ghosts or devils. Instead,
his entire philosophy was rooted in scientific
materialism. He was a traditionalist whose fiction
predicted the utter insignificance of humanity
based entirely on scientific and astronomical
progress. It was a terrifyingly modern worldview.
Exactly. We're dealing here primarily with weird
fiction, horror, fantasy, and some very early
science fiction. Lovecraft essentially defined
the modern cosmic horror genre. But the sheer
volume of his influence means we should probably
clarify some terminology right up top. Definitely.
When people talk about his great contribution,
they immediately jump to the Cthulhu mythos.
And that's important to clarify right at the
start for you, the listener. While Lovecraft
is credited with creating the entities and concepts,
you know, Kulu, the Necronomicon, the Great Old
Ones, the term Kulumikos itself was actually
coined by later authors. He had a great little
nickname for it, though, didn't he? He did. In
his letters, Lovecraft playfully referred to
his fictional cosmology as yogsothothery. And
that playful term, it really speaks to the collaborative
nature of his fictional universe, which was built
primarily through correspondence with his circle
of writer friends. So our goal in this deep dive
is to move beyond the easy image of the monsters
and truly understand the philosophical bedrock
that makes his work resonate so deeply. We are
talking about cosmicism. We want to understand
the origins of this philosophy, which allows
us to grasp why his work remains so influential
today, despite the fact that he was virtually
unknown to the mainstream public during his own
lifetime. And by the end of this, you'll grasp
why the true terror in a Lovecraft story is always
psychological and deeply philosophical, not merely,
you know, some external threat. OK, so let's
unpack his biography. Yeah. Because it doesn't
just provide context. It provides the psychological
blueprint for everything he ever wrote. It really
does. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode
Island in 1890, the only child of Winfield Scott
Lovecraft and Sarah Susan Lovecraft. And the
family background was initially quite affluent.
Oh, very. Thanks specifically to the substantial
wealth of his maternal family, the Phillips,
they were in many ways old New England aristocracy.
But that initial sense of security and tradition
was shattered almost immediately. Almost instantly.
In 1893, when Lovecraft was just three years
old, his father, Winfield, suffered a severe
psychotic episode in a Chicago hotel. And he
was committed. He was subsequently committed
to Butler Hospital in Providence. And the medical
records, they indicate he had been exhibiting
bizarre and erratic behavior for a year prior
to this commitment. Winfield died five years
later in 1898. And here is where the source material
immediately links his personal tragedy to his
literary themes. The death certificate listed
the cause as general paresis. Right. So just
to clarify for you, what does it mean that general
paresis was the real cause? And how does that
complexity frame the family? is myth -making.
Well, general paresis is medically synonymous
with late -stage syphilis, and that's a fact
the family went to enormous lengths to conceal.
Of course. Winfield's condition, which involved
psychosis and eventual paralysis, was almost
certainly a consequence of this long -term disease.
However, Lovecraft was told, or perhaps chose
to maintain throughout his life, that his father
died from paralytic insomnia and overwork. That
distinction is crucial. It means the origins
of the greatest source of familial corruption
and destruction, the father's madness and death,
was covered up by a sanitized, easily digestible,
if sad, story. This immediately foreshadows that
core Lovecraftian theme. The real horror is the
secret, corrupting knowledge hidden beneath the
surface of normal life. Precisely. That need
for hidden, dark knowledge to justify the trauma
of his early life would become absolutely central.
So with his father gone, who becomes the central
figure? The key figure in young Howard's life
became his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van
Buren Phillips. Lovecraft himself later wrote
that Whipple was the center of my entire universe.
And Whipple was instrumental not only in Lovecraft's
education, fostering an appreciation for classics,
Roman culture, English poetry. But he also created
the first monsters Lovecraft ever encountered.
Yes. Yes. Whipple entertained young Lovecraft
with original weird tales of winged horrors and
deep low moaning sounds. It's a fascinating combination,
isn't it? Grounding the boy in rigid classical
structure while simultaneously feeding him chaotic,
invented gothic horror. And Lovecraft later noted
that these stories, which terrified and thrilled
him, likely originated from classic gothic novelists
his grandfather had read, like Anne Radcliffe
and Charles Maturin. But the trauma just kept
coming. His grandmother, Robie, died in 1896,
which, according to Lovecraft, plunged the family
into a gloom from which it never fully recovered.
And this profound familial despair coincided
directly with the onset of his famous recurring
nightmares. This is such a clear manifestation
of psychological stress. The nightmares of the
Night Gaunts. The Night Gaunts. He described
them as slithy, black, vast, and gelatinous things
that would whirl me through space at a sickening
rate of speed. Terrifying. What's striking is
that the Night Gaunts, these terrifying entities
of his youth, then appeared in his adult fiction
three decades later, like in the dream quest
of Unknown Kadath. So the trauma of the 1890s
directly manifested in the nightmares, which
then became physical entities in his cosmic fiction.
It's a direct through line from childhood psychological
terror to adult literary philosophy. But the
family's foundation was built on sand because
the emotional and medical tragedy was quickly
followed by financial collapse. Right. By 1900,
Whipple's business ventures were struggling and
they were forced to fire hired servants. But
the major blow came in the spring of 1904. What
happened? Whipple's largest business venture
suffered a catastrophic failure, leading to this
slow, painful erosion of the family wealth. And
within months, Whipple, the last remaining stable
male figure, died from a stroke. So the loss
of his financial foundation, the loss of his
major paternal figure, and the resulting necessity
of moving from the expansive family home to a
small duplex later that year, that marked this
as one of the darkest periods of his life. So
dark, in fact, that Lovecraft wrote in a 1934
letter that he saw no point in continuing to
live in contemplated suicide. And this is where
his intellectual life first intersected with
his emotional state. He claimed the only thing
that prevented him was his inherent scientific
curiosity. Right, the desire to know more about
the world. It suggests that reason and knowledge
were the only angers left for him, even when
they led to his pessimism. This internal chaos
was reflected in his academic life. His school
career was sporadic, marked by long periods of
removal due to unidentified health concerns and
near breakdowns. He enjoyed high school, excelled
in chemistry and physics, but he never graduated
in 1908 after suffering a severe, debilitating
health crisis. And the exact nature of that 1908
event is still a mystery. It is. His letters
described it retrospectively as a nervous collapse
or a breakdown characterized by intense headaches,
insomnia and a nervous weakness that prevented
him from continuous application to anything.
The surrounding details paint a picture of immense
psychological distress. One high school classmate
reported Lovecraft exhibited terrible tics and
would suddenly up and jump in his seat. Which
has led analysts to speculate on several possible
causes, from chorea minor, which is rare after
adolescence, to something called a hysteroid
seizure, which is a term now used to describe
atypical depression involving profound physical
and mental withdrawal. He noted that he could
hardly bear to see or speak to anyone and liked
to shut out the world by pulling down dark shades
and using artificial light. That sounds like
a total social and emotional withdrawal that
lasted for years. It did. He retreated almost
completely until 1913. And the thing that finally
dragged him back into the wider world, and thus
into his writing career, was not some burst of
creativity. It was pure literary combat. That's
often how genius is sparked, isn't it? A seemingly
trivial personal offense leading to a lifelong
pursuit. So tell us about this strange literary
feud. It began with a letter he wrote to a popular
pulp magazine called Argosy in 1913. It was viciously
critical of one of the magazine's writers, Fred
Jackson. He called his stories trivial, effeminate,
and in places coarse. And in a deeply troubling
display of his prejudices, he suggested Jackson's
characters exhibited delicate passions and emotions
proper to Negroes and anthropoid apes. This sparked
a nearly year -long public feud in the magazine's
letters section. And that bizarre, aggressive,
and frankly racist literary feud led directly
to his rejuvenation. It did. The editor of the
United Amateur Press Association, Edward F. Dace,
noticed the quality and intensity of his... critical
letters and invited him to join the organization
in 1914. And that's the moment Lovecraft marks
as his return to life. Famously, he noted that
joining the UAPA gave him a renewed will to live,
a renewed sense of existence as other than a
superfluous weight. He just threw himself into
amateur journalism with incredible passion. And
he used his position to embed his xenophobic
and racist opinions, often criticizing Americanisms
in slang, arguing that the national language
is being negatively changed by what he perceived
as uncultured immigrants. Hence, amateur activity
coincided with a renewed tragedy concerning his
mother, Susie. In the winter of 1918 -1919, she
began exhibiting severe symptoms of a nervous
breakdown. Neighbors recalled her describing
weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out
from behind buildings. The family cycle of trauma
repeated. In March 1919, Susie was committed
to Butler Hospital, the exact same place where
her husband, Lovecraft's father, had died years
earlier. That's horrifying. A direct symmetrical
echo of his childhood trauma. Both parents committed
to the same asylum. both having experienced vivid,
fantastic visions, which Lovecraft would later
transmute into literary horrors. And his immediate
reaction was deep sadness, a renewed desire that
his own life might terminate. But when she died
from complications from a gallbladder operation
in May 1921, his later response, curiously, was
relief. Relief at achieving independence. Exactly.
That relief allowed him to travel and engage
more fully with the amateur writing community,
which is how he met his future wife, Sonia Green.
This early life... drenched in disease, hidden
truth, financial collapse, and deep psychological
withdrawal provided all the core material for
his unique brand of existential horror. So let's
move from his tragic personal life to his intellectual
landscape, because we see those same deep contradictions
reflected in his personal views, particularly
his political and philosophical evolution. Right.
He started out, as you mentioned, as a staunch
conservative Tory and Anglophile. He admired
the British monarchy, opposed democracy. His
early viewpoints. which lasted until the late
1920s, were purely based on tradition, aesthetic
order, and heritage. He genuinely believed the
U .S. should be governed by an aristocracy of
the educated and well -bred. His Anglophilia
was so strong that during World War I, he published
multiple criticisms of the American government
for not joining the war to protect England. He
saw tradition and aristocratic rule as the only
bulwark against cultural chaos. But then reality
and truths, the Great Depression forces a complete
re -examination. of these conservative ideals.
He initially expected the wealthy, the affluent
to embody his ideal aristocracy and stabilize
America. But when they failed to act and he observed
the extensive societal harm, he underwent a dramatic
ideological shift. He shifted towards a form
of elitist socialism. Not rooted in Marxist economic
theory. No, it was rooted in an opposition to
cultural upheaval and a desire for an ordered
society. He still hated the lack of order that
democracy entailed, but he now saw that unchecked
capitalism produced a worse, more chaotic disorder.
And his ideal government. which he outlined in
his 1933 essay, Some Repetitions on the Times,
wasn't pure socialism though. It was socialism
administered by an oligarchy. Exactly. He proposed
governmental control of resource distribution,
fewer working hours, higher wages, unemployment
and old age pensions, all very socialistic ideas
for the time. But the crucial caveat was that
all of this should be controlled by a ruling
oligarchy of highly intelligent and educated
intellectuals. A kind of meritocratic, yet still
rigid system. He was a huge supporter of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, seeing him as someone who was at
least attempting to steer a middle course. and
restore order. Although characteristically, Lovecraft
thought the New Deal wasn't leftist enough. Right.
And then we have the troubling early political
stance on Hitler. He initially expressed support,
believing Hitler would preserve German culture
from what he viewed as chaotic modernism. That's
a complex and deeply concerning piece of context.
But the source material indicates he opposed
Hitler later, right? Absolutely. His support
quickly dissolved into opposition, specifically
after his neighbor witnessed Jews being beaten
in Germany and related the incident to Lovecraft.
The direct, tangible evidence of brutality. It
seemed to shock him out of his intellectual,
theoretical support for cultural preservation.
And his discussions of Hitler just dropped off
entirely. This political fluidity contrasts sharply
with the rigidity of his path to atheism, which
seems to have been set early in his life and
never wavered. It formed the core philosophical
bedrock of his fiction. His essay A Confession
of Unfaith from 1922 details his shift away from
the conservative Protestantism of his family.
And the very first moment of skepticism occurred
astonishingly early, before his fifth birthday.
It did. After learning that Santa Claus was a
myth, he reportedly asked his mother why God
is not equally a myth. Which is a chillingly
logical conclusion for a four -year -old. That
early skepticism led to a brief but influential
pagan phase. Right. For a short time, he accepted
the Greco -Roman pantheon as genuine until about
age seven when he discovered geology and began
to intellectually reject the mythologies of the
past. But the pivotal moment came in 1902 when
he discovered space. Lovecraft later described
this event as the most poignant and transformative
of his life. He just devoured astronomy books.
And that's the key connection. His dedication
to astronomy solidified his conviction of humanity's
impermanence. Staring up at the vast, indifferent
cosmos shattered any lingering anthropocentric
illusions. By age 17, he had fully developed
his pessimistic cosmic philosophy. This scientific
materialism led him to despise philosophical
idealism and solidified his view of the universe
as meaningless, mechanical, and uncaring. He
was willing to cast aside any comfort or illusion,
seeking only the cold, hard scientific truth.
Which brings us to the most controversial and
difficult aspect of Lovecraft's legacy. We absolutely
must confront this. The source material is unequivocal
that Lovecraft was a white supremacist who highly
esteemed English people and those of English
descent. His early works and letters contain
strong disparaging remarks against non -Anglo
-Saxon races, including explicitly racist poetry
like on the creation of niggers. He rigorously
argued for a strong color line to preserve race
and culture. And this manifests in his fiction
through allegorizing. miscegenation. It wasn't
just abstract hatred, it informed his narrative
structures. Can you elaborate on how that manifests
in the fiction? Well, in a story like The Shadow
Over Innsmouth, the interbreeding of humans with
the Deep Ones is explicitly framed as a type
of miscegenation that physically and morally
corrupts the town and the protagonist. But reflects
his real -world anxieties about racial and cultural
mixing. The fear that purity and tradition would
be corrupted by alien elements. The horror is
derived not just from the appearance of the monsters,
but from the irreversible corruption of the human
lineage. What's crucial for you to grasp, though,
is that, like his politics, his views on race
experience a degree of moderation, particularly
by the 1930s. It never became modern tolerance,
but it definitely evolved. That's right. His
worldview became more intensely classist and
elitist, allowing non -white members of the upper
class to be seen as honorary members of the superior
race, provided they aligned with the traditional
Western aesthetic he admired. But the more significant
shift was that his views turned toward cultural
relativism. Yes. His later philosophy shifted
to supporting ethnic groups preserving their
native cultures, for instance, stating he wished
merely to make the Germans more German, the French
more French. This cultural elitism. while still
rooted in xenophobia, replaced his previous support
for forced assimilation or biological degradation.
The goal shifted from enforcing Anglo supremacy
to maintaining distinct, ordered cultural units
worldwide. And this shift was partially driven
by his wide circle of diverse friends, like Samuel
Loveman, who was Jewish, and by his antiquarian
travels. He wrote positively, for example, about
Quebecois and First Nations cultural traditions.
So these real -world experiences challenged his
preconceived notions. While his racial prejudices
weren't eliminated, they did moderate from outright
biological hatred to a more complex, though still
deeply problematic, cultural elitism. Okay, so
when we turn to how he actually created the fiction
that defined a genre, we have to look at his
vast reading list. He was a voracious reader.
His childhood home had a large library filled
with classics, science, and early weird fiction.
The foundational creative fuel, as we discussed,
came early on from his grandfather's Gothic stories.
But alongside that, he was deeply engrossed in
high fantasy and mythology, 1001 Nights, Bolfinch's
Age of Fable, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The sense
of ancient pre -human mythologies came directly
from these sources. He also studied travel literature,
which influenced his world building. Absolutely.
The accounts of John Mandeville and Marco Polo
influenced how he described characters and locations,
lending an air of pseudoscience. But the single
most significant early literary influence, though,
was Edgar Allan Poe. He called him his god of
fiction. And we see direct, profound homage.
At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft directly
quotes Poe, and the novella was heavily influenced
by the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
Both stories share the theme of exploring the
unreliable nature of human language when confronted
with the truly alien. That distrust of human
language, the idea that certain horrors are simply
unutterable, is a crucial hallmark of Lovecraftian
horror. Following Poe, he discovered Lord Dunsany
in 1919, which moved his writing in a new direction,
initiating the dream cycle stories like The White
Ship. But he later repudiated Dunsany's style.
He found that writing in that overly elaborate,
fantastical vein did not come naturally to him,
and he eventually settled into the more rigid,
research -based prose style that defined his
great works. He had to shed the fantasy layer
to get to the core terror. And if we connect
this to the bigger picture of his overall philosophy,
one scholar, Barton Levi St. Armand, described
Lovecraft as a New England decadent. What exactly
does that synthesis mean? That's a powerful insight.
It's a synthesis of non -theological Puritan
thought. So the inherent gloom, the fatalism,
the fixation on decay, combined with the ascetic
movement and the decadent worldview inherited
from Poe, which prized cultural pessimism and
civilizational decline. So he took the New England
sense of gloom and moral judgment, stripped away
the saving grace of God, and combined it with
a European sense of cultural and aesthetic exhaustion.
Precisely. This hybrid identity fixated him on
the theme of collapse, both the collapse of human
civilization and the terrifying indifference
of the cosmos. This brings us directly to his
core philosophy, cosmicism. Cosmicism argues
that humanity is an entirely insignificant force
in the universe. Lovecraft specifically described
himself as a cosmic indifferentist. The cosmic
forces are not actively malevolent towards humanity.
They are simply indifferent. The universe is
perceived as meaningless, mechanical and uncaring
and fundamentally beyond human comprehension.
He allowed no space for beliefs that could not
be supported scientifically. But wait, if the
universe is truly indifferent, why do his protagonists
always feel overwhelming terror? Isn't terror
a deeply human response that implies a judgment
which counters pure indifference? That is the
ultimate tension in Lovecraft's work. It highlights
why the terror is psychological, not external.
The Great Old Ones, Cthulhu, Yog -Sophoth, are
not actively seeking to destroy us. They are
simply immense, natural forces whose existence
instantly nullifies the entire human enterprise.
The terror comes from the protagonist's realization
of this nullification. A truth too immense for
the human mind to bear. The entity doesn't care.
The human mind breaks because the mind demands
meaning. And he didn't fully incorporate this
into his fiction until around 1926. Right. The
Call of Cthulhu represents the full intensification
of this theme. What's fascinating about Cosmicism
in his storytelling is that Lovecraftian protagonists
don't discover their insignificance, they already
dread it. The plot simply provides an inescapable
confirmation of that pre -existing dread. Tied
directly to this is the theme of forbidden knowledge,
the engine of psychological collapse in his work.
He clearly suggests that happiness is only achievable
through blissful ignorance. Seeking knowledge
that is not meant to be known, consistently leads
to psychological danger and ruin. It forces the
seeker to confront the horrific true reality
that the visible, sane world conveniently masks.
But the most profound element, as you mention,
is that even self -knowledge can be ruinous.
It's the realization of one's own utter insignificance,
or worse, the realization of one's own corrupt
heritage. A weight too heavy for the human mind
to process. The horror, therefore, is not achieved
solely through external phenomena. It's reached
through the internalized psychological impact
this terrifying knowledge has on the protagonist.
We see that perfectly in the case of Charles
Dexter Ward. The central theme is the danger
of knowing too much about one's family history.
This fusion of the philosophical and the psychological
is where his love of science truly shines. He
merged supernatural horror with science fiction,
consciously shifting the focus from human issues
to cosmic ones. He extensively referenced contemporary
scientific trends, didn't he? Yes. He incorporated
elements of Einsteinian science and his personal
materialism. This peaked with The Color Out of
Space, which portrays an alien life form whose
absolute otherness prevents it from being defined
by then contemporary science. And he used mathematics
to enhance this sense of the alien, specifically
non -Euclidean geometry. Exactly. Lovecraft's
awareness of non -Euclidean geometry, the idea
that space might not conform to the flat, rigid
rules we take for granted, led to the repeated
use of impossible angles and dimensions. Cthulhu's
city of Arlaia is built on non -Euclidean principles.
It serves to challenge the very trustability
of human understanding and our senses. It converts
what would otherwise be supernatural elements
into things that have a scientific, mathematical
explanation. And finally, we have to discuss
setting. Lovecraft created a highly detailed,
fictionalized geography based on New England,
what commentators later dubbed Lovecraft Country.
And it wasn't just decorative. No, it served
a dual essential purpose. It exaggerated the
region's history and folklore to instill fear,
while simultaneously rooting the stories in a
familiar, unsettling realism that his readers
would recognize. The names were thinly veiled
versions of real locations. Arkham was based
on Oakham, Innsmouth on Newburyport, Dunwich.
on Greenwich. These vaguely recognizable decaying
locations played directly into Lovecraft's desire
to evoke a powerful, regional and deeply unsettling
mood of ancient inherited corruption. It's truly
astonishing that this man who struggled financially
his entire life. was virtually unknown during
his own lifetime, published almost exclusively
in pulp magazines. His critical reception shifted
dramatically only after his death. The initial
criticism was incredibly harsh. In 1945, the
critic Edmund Wilson dismissed his work, sneering
that the only real horror is the horror of bad
taste and bad art. But the sources note that
Wilson later softened his stance. What changed
his mind? Reading Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence,
when Wilson encountered Lovecraft the intellectual,
the sophisticated debater on culture, science,
and history, he realized the fiction was rooted
in a far deeper philosophy than he had assumed.
That slow scholarly revival began in the 1970s,
but modern literary figures sing his praises.
Joyce Carol Oates cites him as a massive influence.
And Stephen King famously called Lovecraft the
20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic
horror tale. The moment that truly cemented his
place in the literary consciousness was the inclusion
of his works in prestigious classic publishing
series. The Library of America volume in 2005
sold 25 ,000 copies in a single month. Which
surprised the publishing world. This, alongside
Penguin Classics volumes, essentially reversed
the traditional judgment, sparking a massive
surge in both mainstream and academic interest.
Let's discuss the engine of that legacy, the
Cthulhu mythos and the Lovecraft circle. Lovecraft
fostered a massive community through correspondence,
encouraging writers like Clark Ashton Smith and
August Derliff to share ideas. After Lovecraft's
death, that circle was instrumental in preserving
his work. August, Derleth co -founded Arkham
House with Donald Wondray specifically to keep
his writings in print. However, Derleth also
imposed an extensive and controversial cosmology
onto the mythos. And this is a crucial distinction.
How exactly did Derleth change the core philosophy?
Lovecraft viewed his pantheon as mere indifferent
plot devices. They existed, but they didn't care
about human good or evil. Durlith, who came from
a more traditional Christian background, could
not tolerate this cosmic indifference. So he
created a structured cosmic war. A battle between
good elder gods and evil outer gods, imposing
a moral framework onto the universe. He even
associated these gods with the traditional four
elements. So he essentially took Lovecraft's
amoral, atheistic terror and retrofitted it with
a familiar dualistic struggle between good and
evil. That's exactly right. This revisionist,
somewhat simplified view dominated Lovecraft.
for decades until scholars and writers in the
1970s pushed back, successfully arguing that
Lovecraft's original indifferent chaotic vision
was the one that held the true philosophical
power. The cultural influence stretches across
all modern media. Lovecraft's mythos is hugely
influential in music, especially rock and heavy
metal. The connection is intense. Black Sabbath's
1970 debut album featured Behind the Wall of
Sleep. Later, Metallica recorded The Call of
Cthulhu and The Thing That Should Not Be, which
is based on the shadow over Innsmouth. There's
even a deep thematic commonality between Lovecraft's
aesthetic and the black metal genre. The focus
on creating a strong, negative, isolating mood.
Moving to games, the irony persists. Lovecraft
disliked games, but his influence is immense.
The 1981 Call of Cthulhu tabletop role -playing
game introduced the insanity mechanic. Where
player characters accumulate stress and eventually
go insane from contact with cosmic horrors. A
direct, elegant transposition of Lovecraft's
psychological horror into a game format. This
spread to board games like Arkham Horror and
video games like Bloodborne. But this mass game...
often represents a break from Lovecraft's core
philosophy. Completely. Games typically focus
heavily on fighting the monsters. You have hit
points, you have goals. This tends to focus far
more on the monsters than on Lovecraft's central
theme of human insignificance, where the true
horror is the impossibility of victory. But the
influence doesn't stop at pop culture. It reaches
into high philosophy. His works have inspired
the 21st century speculative realist philosophical
movement. Figures like Graham Harman wrote Weird
Realism, Lovecraft, and Philosophy, arguing that
Lovecraft was obsessed with the gaps in human
knowledge. His philosophy is seen as fundamentally
anti -anthropocentric. It rejects the idea that
humanity is central or capable of understanding
reality. And on the more esoteric side, occultism
has adopted the mythos, blurring the lines between
fiction and supposed reality. Occult groups incorporate
Lovecraftian entities into their ritual systems.
And there's been a massive proliferation of fraudulent
books claiming to be authentic editions of his
fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon. Finally,
the legacy remains perpetually contested. The
World Fantasy Awards presented winners with a
bust of Lovecraft until 2015, when it was dropped
due to his views on race. Yet his literary standing
continues to rise. He was inducted into the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2016 and
won a Retro Hugo Award in 2019. The sheer endurance
of Cthulhu as a cultural icon confirms his lasting
impact. For someone who struggled financially
his whole life, the sheer quantity of his writing
output particularly outside of fiction, is astounding.
It's truly staggering. Lovecraft is estimated
to have written 100 ,000 letters during his lifetime,
one fifth of which are believed to survive. And
these weren't just social notes. They were full
-fledged scholarly essays. Covering everything
from art criticism to political debates, he maintained
voluminous correspondence with amateur press
colleagues and fellow writers. The correspondence
with James F. Morton is specifically called the
single greatest correspondence Lovecraft ever
wrote by scholars. But while his literary footprint
is huge, his legal footprint, specifically regarding
copyrights, is one of the messiest quagmires
in 20th century literature. The Lovecraftian
copyright conundrum. It's fascinating because
despite claims by various groups, most scholars
now accept that the majority of his works have
passed into the public domain. And this stems
from monumental confusion and possible manipulation
following his death. Lovecraft designated R .H.
Barlow as his literary executor, but he failed
to incorporate this instruction into his official
will. His surviving aunt still carried out his
wishes, and Barlow initially took control of
the estate. But this was the first legal complication.
relying on verbal instructions. And the situation
darkened significantly. Two key figures, August
Derlith and Donald Wondray, who were co -owners
of Arkham House, falsely claimed that Derlith
was the true literary executor. And this is where
the controversy sharpens. Derlith and Wondray
leveraged their position. Barlow eventually capitulated
to them, effectively handing over control of
the corpus. Tragically, Barlow later committed
suicide in 1951, leaving them in complete unchallenged
control. And this legal mess continued when Derliff
purchased the rights to Lovecraft's stories published
in Weird Tales. But even that was complicated.
It was because evidence suggests that since at
least 1926, Lovecraft had reserved all second
printing rights for himself. So Weird Tales only
owned the rights to, at most, six stories. And
even if Derleth legally obtained those copyrights,
here is the core of the problem. Under the law
at the time, copyrights lasted for 28 years and
then required a formal renewal. And the renewal
failed. It failed. Searches of the Library of
Congress have consistently failed to find any
evidence that these copyrights were renewed after
the initial 28 -year period expired. This led
most scholars, including S .T. Joshi, to conclude
that the majority of Lovecraft's works are now
in the public domain. Once a copyright lapses,
it is lost forever. But despite this general
scholarly consensus, the Lovecraft Literary Estate
continues to claim ownership and grants rights
to various publishers. Yes, they operate under
a disputed legal standing. This continuous claim
of ownership means that while scholars believe
the core texts are freely usable, publishers
often pay license fees just to avoid complicated,
costly legal battles. So what does this all mean?
We've looked closely at a man defined by a sheltered
tragic childhood that instilled in him a profound
need for order and tradition, yet whose intellectual
curiosity, fueled by astronomy and scientific
materialism, forced him into a radical, atheistic
view of the universe. His true genius lay not
in designing the monsters themselves, but in
leveraging that cosmicism to induce a specific
psychological terror. The power of Lovecraft
is the internalized horror induced by knowledge.
The awful recognition of humanity's total irrelevance
in the vast, cold and utterly indifferent cosmos.
His life was a constant tension between his desire
for ancient order and his scientific realization
of modern chaos. And that leads to a final deep
irony when we consider the man behind the philosophy.
The sources note that Lovecraft's effective fictional
career was essentially ended by the hostile reception
of At the Mountains of Madness. So if a writer
whose entire philosophy centered on the chilling
cosmic insignificance of all human endeavors
was defeated, not by the revelation of Cthulhu,
but by simple localized human criticism, the
rejection from an editor. Does that not reveal
a final, profound contradiction about the man
who fear humanity's irrelevance? The cold, uncaring
cosmos couldn't silence him, but human taste
and judgment did. What stands out to you?