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HP LOVECRAFT
example.” For all that, Lovecraft’s never quite
became a household name. “The nihilism of
Lovecraft’s world view will always place him
just a bit outside the mainstream.”
For those attuned to that world view,
however, Lovecraft’s imagery leaves an
indelible mark, as LaValle can attest: “On
the simplest level, I’d say that Lovecraft wrote
about feeling powerless and at the mercy of
powerful beings who had almost no regard for
your will. That sounds a lot like how life feels
when you’re 10 or 11. That’s what spoke most
clearly to me, at least. And because it felt so
much like my own experience, because the
sensibility got under my skin, I couldn’t ever
simply toss it away. Lovecraft, unlike almost
any writer I read at the time, ‘understood’ me.
It’s hard to forget that, even as my opinions
about him – and his work – become more
complicated. I can criticise him now, but I did
love him once. I think it’s possible to do both,
at the same time.”
LaValle’s generosity towards the writer
he once revered is impressive. Others have,understandably, found it impossible to
engage with Lovecraft’s work due to the racist
views that permeated his writing throughout
his career. In 2015, following a campaign
launched by author Daniel José Older, it was
announced that the World Fantasy Award
statuette would no longer be modelled
in Lovecraft’s likeness. The controversy
surrounding the extent of his racist beliefs
continues to rage. Poole, his biographer, is
unimpressed by attempts to gloss over this
distasteful aspect of Lovecraft’s thought.
“It’s strangely (to me) a deeply contested
issue whether or not his personal racism – and
admiration for Mussolini and fascism more
generally – had a direct infl uence on his
fi ction. I believe it did and fi nd it surprising
that there’s much discussion about it. His most
famous tale, ‘The Call Of Cthulhu’, portrays
the Cthulhu cult as made up of ‘degenerate’
races. In ‘The Horror At Red Hook’, the
‘polyglot’ mass of Brooklyn seems to become
the real monster of the tale. ‘Herbert West-
Reanimator’ concerns the fate of a Black boxer
West reanimates and Lovecraft uses the most
savage racist slurs imaginable to describe
him. He is ‘a loathsome gorilla-like thing’
according to Lovecraft.
“Apologists for Lovecraft often point to his
genteel New England upbringing and the
context of the turn of the century to explain
away his racism,” Poole continues. “Thinking
more broadly about the historical context, I
fi nd this unacceptable. While white supremacy
has always been deeply embedded in (and
in fact has structured) American society, it’s
simply not the case that everyone held the
views that Lovecraft did. One of his closest
correspondents, James Morton, who wrote
anti-racist tracts and lived in an African
American neighbourhood in Harlem as an
act of solidarity, argued with his friend about
these issues of race in their letters and so we
know that, for example, Lovecraft was aware
of the work of anthropologist Franz Boas,
which called into question the racist pseudo-
science of the 19th century. But he held to
these conceptions anyway.”
LaValle, bitterly disappointed as a teenager
by his growing awareness of his childhood
favourite’s racism towards Black New
Yorkers like himself, found an inventive, and
empathetic, way to explore the potential he
still perceives in Lovecraft’s ideas. “I wanted to
play with ideas of perception, as that’s often
at the heart of Lovecraft’s best tales. Human
beings think the world revolves around them
and the Old Ones, or some other mystery,
serves to reorient the protagonist (and the
reader) and drive him mad with the new, and
more concrete, truth of existence. So I knew
Tommy would be a person who plays with
reality – through his hustle, pretending to be
a great bluesman – but that he’d also be a
person living under certain illusions: like his
love for his father, and his father’s love for him,HP collection covers:
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