Legacy of the Weird: The Enduring Impact of HP Lovecraft

The life of Howard Phillips Lovecraft was not particularly pleasant or remarkable. Rife
with loneliness and emotional trauma, stricken with poverty, and illness both physical and
mental, it nevertheless produced some of the most influential and enduring creative writing of
the twentieth century, expanding its dark literary shadow across time and space, to bring its
unique brand of “cosmic horror” to generations of admirers. By evaluating contemporary
examples of literary fiction, post-modern philosophy, fantasy sub-culture groups, and
anthropological studies, this treatise will qualitatively define how, through his unique stylistic
approach to writing, along with his fantastical subject matter, and highly eccentric personal
attitudes, mixed with blatant racist views, HP Lovecraft has cemented for himself a complex,
controversial, and far-reaching legacy among the modern fiction community, and a permanent
transformative influence upon the nature of American popular culture.
Lovecraft’s life was filled with awkwardness, repression, and neurosis. His father,
Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was mostly absent. At the age of three, young Howard watched as his
father succumbed to a nervous breakdown brought on by advanced syphilis, whereupon the elder
Lovecraft was institutionalized in an asylum and died five years later. His maternal grandfather,
with whom he and his mother lived, was the only positive influence on Howard’s life, providing
him with a sense of wonder and imagination through fantastic tales, and introducing him to the
great literary works of history, including the Arabian Nights, which would become a major factor
in his later life.
Howard’s childhood was difficult and irregular due to his poor health and frequent night
terrors, which greatly affected him and made him unable to attend school. He consequently spent
most of his time absorbing novels and poetry, scientific texts and academic journals. At the age
of fourteen, his grandfather died, and as a result of financial mismanagement, Howard and his
mother were forced to abandon their home and occupy a nearby modest duplex apartment. At
this point, his mother suffered a breakdown herself, and began to emotionally abuse Howard,
constantly belittling him and drinking heavily. She would perpetually demand his constant
companionship and remind him that he was fit only to be shunned by polite society. He spent
years living this way until his mother was committed to the same asylum as his father had been,
dying there as well, in 1921.
Living as he had been, as a semi-recluse, Lovecraft was constantly and voraciously
devouring reading material, particularly pulp fiction magazines. Later, in his adult life, as he
began writing fictions from his own imagination, they were subsequently flavored with his
skewed sense of normality and unorthodox childhood. Highly imaginative, Lovecraft would
eventually create entire worlds in this writing, populating them with myriad layers of reality, and
always the philosophical standpoint that Man is utterly insignificant in the larger perspective of
the cosmos. This “cosmicism” was to become his trademark and the definition of the literary
genre of which he would eventually become the father. A committed lifelong atheist, he would
create his own fantastic system of myths and mysteries to illustrate this philosophy. His stories
toyed with the readers’ sense of propriety and attempted to force them to plumb their own
imaginations for elements of his stories through his use of vague descriptions, such as the
indescribable yet horror-inducing stench of certain aliens, or the “non-Euclidean geometry,
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours”[CITATION HPL20 \p 218 \l
1033 ].
 Professor of Hermetic Philosophy and leading scholar of esotericism, Wouter J.
Hanegraaff, of the University of Amsterdam, states in a dissertation on supernatural themes in
literature, that Lovecraft had a talent for teasing out the alien nature, the “otherness” of his
creations. “Not only does Lovecraft play upon the various ‘others’ of Monotheism and
Christianity (paganism, magic, demonology, witchcraft, and so on), he does the same with those
of modern rationality and science”[CITATION Hamegraaph \p 99 \l 1033 ]. The professor points
out that Lovecraft had a singular ability to draw ample material from Western religious language,
constantly applying aspects to his creatures in terms such as “abomination”, “unholy”, and
“blasphemous”, which did not specifically refer to any religion, yet were steeped in the Christian
tradition during the Age of Enlightenment. Furthermore, Hanegraaff notes that Lovecraft
stressed the alien and unknowable nature of these things by “raising them to an extreme degree”.
For instance, a traditional occult or heretical text might make a believer uncomfortable or afraid,
whereas Lovecraft’s grimoires would cause instantaneous madness when looked upon. His
forbidden rituals, instead of causing fascination or disgust in the observer, would strike men
dumb and paralyzed with sheer and unspeakable horror[CITATION Hamegraaph \p 98 \l 1033 ].
As scholar Friedemann Rimbach-Sator observes in his analysis of Lovecraft, he had an
innate ability to draw the reader in and manipulate their perception through a process of
authentication, through the “connection of fact and fiction, either as a synthesis or a factual
description of fiction”[CITATION Rimbach \p 7 \l 1033 ]. The fantastical nature of the alien
vistas, architecture, and inhabitants of his fictional worlds was described in somewhat
dispassionate and banal terms, using such language as to convey a rational and understandable
observation, which he would then juxtapose with the shattering of rationality by the
otherworldly, dark and malevolent forces of the unknowable. “For Lovecraft, the cornerstone of
real authenticity does not lie in the plot of a story, but in the creation of emotions”[CITATION
Rimbach \p 7 \l 1033 ]. Increasingly, his style became interwoven with realistic, logical
descriptions and references, couched in the impossible fictions of madness, strange, ancient
deities, and psychological torture. He began to tie his stories together, as different episodes and
events occurring within a common fictional universe, complete with geographic locations, a
shared mythology, historical references, and cultural relics and libraries of tomes which never
existed yet were often referenced. It was a fully formed alternate reality, defined by magic and
madness.
Lovecraft’s main method of social discourse during his adult life had been through
written correspondence, having written approximately one hundred thousand letters over his
lifetime. Early in his adulthood, he was employed by the United Amateur Press Association
(UAPA) as the vice president of their organization, thanks to a multitude of critical letters
Lovecraft had composed regarding a contemporary writer whom he considered an untalented
hack. The fact that each of the letters had been composed in rhyme had drawn the attention of
UAPA president, Edward F. Daas, who contacted Lovecraft with the offer of employment.
Through Lovecraft’s energetic and prolific work at the UAPA, he met and maintained close
acquaintances with several contemporary writers, including Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan
the Barbarian and Solomon Kane, and Robert Bloch, future author of the story upon which the
Hitchcock movie Psycho was based. It was this group of friends who initially convinced Howard
to try his hand at fiction, his focus up to that point being predominantly poetry and essays. As
his writing progressed, Lovecraft encouraged his peers to incorporate his fictional universe into
their own creations. In this way, the shared universe of the “Cthulhu Mythos”, so named for one
of the principle “Old Ones” within it, became a collaborative creation, greater than the efforts of
any single author, and existing independently of the compositions of a single source. This was a
key to the unique longevity and appeal of Lovecraft’s imaginative creation.
However, Lovecraft had his detractors, as well. His insular upbringing in Providence, his
lack of social norms and his bigoted belief that the Nordic European peoples were genetically
superior, all tinted his prose. His protagonists all tended to be Caucasian, who dispassionately
viewed the terror, torture, and destruction of other ethnicities as a matter of weakness in
character. In addition, his prose was considered flat and lacking in flourish, as he himself
admitted. He was generally panned by critics and thought of as a meager talent. He never saw
commercial success for his creations, barely able to earn a meager living through work as a
copyist and ghost writer for others.
For a brief period in his thirties, his fortunes would change. In 1921, he met a woman
named Sonia Haft Greene at a UAPA convention. The two of them quickly became enamored of
each other and were wed in a private ceremony in 1924. The couple moved to New York City,
where Sonia owned a successful hat store.

Figure 1. Sonia Haft Greene, wife of H.P. Lovecraft.[ CITATION Unk11 \l 1033 ].

Lovecraft had an instant dislike of the city. He saw the integration of races in general society as a
failing and longed for the homogenous Caucasian nature of Providence. His wife became
suddenly ill to the point of being unable to maintain her business, which caused the failure of the
store and their eventual fall into poverty. Sonia decided to take a job offer in far-off Cleveland,
Ohio, and Howard moved to the New York neighborhood of Red Hook, which he found to be
contemptible due to its thriving immigrant population. He eventually made his return to Rhode
Island, after pleading the assistance of his two spinster aunts. He would remain there for the rest
of his life, dying at the age of forty-seven from untreated intestinal cancer in 1937.
After his death, Lovecraft’s longtime friend and contemporary, August Derleth decided
to pay homage to his departed friend by creating Arkham House Publishing, a company
dedicated solely to publishing and circulating Lovecraft’s work. Although initially unsuccessful
domestically, Derleth stayed loyal to Lovecraft and, thanks to his own wealth, maintained the
company. After translating them into French, Derleth found a receptive market for Howard’s
stories in post-war France, which was possessed of a dark nihilistic character due to the ravages
of the Nazis. Destruction on such a grand scale had robbed the nation of its collective faith in the
Christian God, replacing it with the bleakness of existentialism, the feeling of dread and
confusion in a meaningless and absurd world. This zeitgeist was exemplified by France’s
attraction to the dark melancholy and emotional horror of authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, who
was incredibly popular. French audiences soon began to flock to Lovecraft as the de facto
twentieth-century successor to Poe’s dark dread.
Through the embrace of a large French readership, Lovecraft’s works became gradually
more popular in post-war Western culture, eventually being reintroduced by Arkham House in
the 1960s to a waiting and receptive domestic audience, obsessed with horror, science fiction,
and the occult. The film genre of horror was experiencing a renaissance, as well, introducing new
concepts such as the living dead, previously taboo satanic themes and gritty tales of madness and
evil. The Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits, Rosemary’s Baby and the Hammer Horror films
dominated the world’s imagination, and Lovecraft’s singular brand of oddity, known as “weird
fiction”, immediately came into focus in the public eye.
One of the new voices in this period, a young writer named Stephen King, discovered
Lovecraft’s writings and was immediately inspired, becoming a life long dedicated advocate of
Lovecraft’s. As King’s popularity grew, so did his advocacy to his audience on behalf of
Lovecraft’s works. By the 1980s, The Cthulhu Mythos had developed a cult following among
science fiction and fantasy horror enthusiasts, who incorporated Lovecraft’s creations into their
own writing, as well as other of their esoteric interests, such as game design, artwork, and even
music. In his article for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, adjunct Professor Justin Mullis
asserts that in the fandom of the Cthulhu Mythos, one can engage in world-building, “a process
that engenders boundaries marking off a temporary ‘sacred space’ populated by the fantastic
world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and esoteric knowledge about it; a space that, for fans,
makes sense amidst the confusion and turmoil of mundane existence”[CITATION Mullis \p
512 \l 1033 ].
Simultaneously, occult practitioners and those disenchanted with standard religions began
to incorporate Lovecraft’s mysticism and otherworldly magic into their own beliefs and
practices. Focusing on the metaphorical aspects rather than the extant entities, his unique literary
style of enveloping the fiction of the fantastic in terms of the mundane enabled them to reject the
post-modern duality of the real and the unreal and to remove the distinction between the two
altogether. His mythos was compared to the creations of Alister Crowley and was embraced by

Figure 1. Arkham Asylum, named for the fictional city of Arkham, Mass. in Lovecraft's Cthulhu
Mythos stories, in Gotham City, in the Batman comic books. [ CITATION Fab13 \l 1033 ]

Anton La Vey in his rejection of Christian doctrine. This association gave Lovecraft’s work
credence in the alternative religious, esoteric and humanist communities, as well.
 Through the multiple cultural connections his work has enjoyed throughout the latter half
of the twentieth century, and thus far into the twenty-first, combined with the interconnected
nature of the community of modern fiction authors, Lovecraft’s concepts and oeuvre have been
incorporated into the imaginations of generations of writers, such as L. Sprague de Camp, Neil
Gaiman, Robert E. Howard, Brian Lumley, Terry Pratchett, and Alan Dean Foster, to name only
a few. In collegiate Professor Amy Ransom’s study of Lovecraft’s connection to Quebec City,
she presents a reflection after analyzing several Quebecois authors.
…a host of other writers, both professional and amateur, use their own craft to
pay homage to more than a body of work, but an actual mythos. At the same time,
some of the master’s glory reflects back on them, illuminating not only the
universal, but also the region-specific aspects they share with him. Lovecraft is
generally seen as having renewed American horror, passing it on directly to
writers like Fritz Lieber, Robert Bloch, and through them, to Stephen
King[CITATION Ran15 \p 463 \l 1033 ].
Also, through those cultural connections, his writing has served as inspiration for hundreds of
musicians, film and television writers and producers, graphic novelists, game creators,
illustrators, and other artists of all types. His uniquely dark, hopeless angst resonates in the works
of Roger Corman, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Metallica, Rod Serling, Guillermo del Toro,
and more, comprising a plurality of mainstream entertainment, including some of the most
recognizable individual contributions to popular culture.
Lovecraft was even honored by the literary world, having a bust bearing his likeness serve as the

Figure 3. An artist’s depiction of Cthulhu, from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (left). The xenomorph, from the movie
Alien, created by artist H.R. Giger (right). Alien director Ridley Scott was heavily influenced by the works of Lovecraft.
[ CITATION Aki20 \l 1033 ][ CITATION Gig20 \l 1033 ]

physical trophy of the World Fantasy Awards, from 1975 until 2015, The award is given
to outstanding authors in the field of fantasy fiction. His Cthulhu Mythos was also
awarded the 1945 Retro Hugo Award for outstanding achievement in the literary field of
science fiction and fantasy, presented in August of 2020. Unfortunately, his unpopular
racist beliefs have recently been brought back to light in the modern climate of racially
charged social tension. Controversy and public outcry persuaded the World Fantasy
Convention to remove his likeness from their awards, beginning in 2016. Likewise, his
reception of the Retro Hugo in 2020 has caused a major outpouring of discontent and
anger. It must be reiterated, however, that the award was intended to venerate the Cthulhu
Mythos itself, as a monumental and influential work of fiction, and not the author
himself. For this reason, the World Science Fiction Convention decided to allow his
estate to retain the award.
Conversely, in response to the public controversy, a new opportunity for dialogue has
arisen, allowing those in the community with conflicted emotions the opportunity to express their
concern and attempt to come to an understanding of how best to separate the failings of the man
from the greatness of the creation. Such nuanced consideration will hopefully lead to a better,
more mature public dialogue concerning race relations and inequality in the national
conversation, to perhaps bring some relative calm and reason to the emotionally charged and
divisive “cancel culture” currently dominating the public sphere, in the interests of social
reconciliation.
In summation, it is evident that the interwoven realms of entertainment, literature,
philosophy and cultural anthropology are all affected to some degree by the presence of the
singular mind and personality of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whether for good or ill. His
strained, sometimes questionable, grasp of reality and sanity, his confused, conflicted sense of
himself and his tragic childhood, his expression of his own personal angst and discontentment
with his life and circumstance through the products of his extraordinary imagination, all combine
to bring accessibility to his writing; a fragile human quality instantly recognizable by millions of
readers from a myriad of backgrounds throughout the years. In life, he encouraged other writers
to draw upon his works for inspiration to create their own contributions to a shared literary
creation. In this way, his writings became a touchstone for fans and fellow creators, a natural
resource for communities to utilize in order to engage in their world-building. Thus, as cultural
scholar David Javet, of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, opines in his analytical study of
Lovecraft’s life and works, “the Lovecraft mythology [continues] to be fed by new tales or rather
new interpretations because of the appeal it produces to the need of myth-hearing, of the need for
narratives”[CITATION Javet \p 72 \l 1033 ].
In sharp contrast, Lovecraft’s personal prejudices are responsible for emotional and moral
conflict among fans of fiction, casting doubt on his worthiness of such accolades. Nevertheless,
through their existence has been created hope for a more mature and enlightened culture, holding
Lovecraft up as an example of the complexities of human nature. By accepting his contributions
to society, both positive and negative, valuable social progress can be achieved. Acceptance of
such contributions also validates the reality that his genre-defining stories have been the
inspiration for countless ideas, resulting in hundreds of works of art, literature, and
entertainment. His contribution to the great lexicon of artistic endeavor has even contributed to
the search for meaning in the human condition, in its fashion, through the incorporation of his
ideas into the philosophical fabric of post-war Europe. In all these aspects, Howard Phillips
Lovecraft has become an undeniable icon in popular culture in the post-modern era. His
influence is evident in the collective imagination and sense of identity of the American people,
and to those of the world at large. The enduring vitality and relevance of his mythical creations
play an important role in the emotional growth and development of the public and provide
perspective in the individual’s search for identity and community. In Lovecraft’s indelible
imprint upon history, the Old Ones continue to terrify and enthrall in equal measure, as “in his
house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits, dreaming”[CITATION HPL20 \p 176 \l 1033 ].
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