Lovecraft's Racial Values

H. P. Lovecraft has become an icon of popular culture with massive distribution and advanced marketing schemes in comics, video games, role-playing, horror films and much more. He is often placed alongside Edgar Allan Poe as one of the great American authors of horror fiction, and has influenced countless writers and filmmakers eager to cash in on the legend. Yet those who display unconditional enthusiasm for an author believed to be one of the best in his genre are often those who understand his works the least. During the interwar period, when fascist dictators were seizing power in Europe, when Italian women were disenfranchised, when Nazis were burning books in public squares, when the political opposition was banned in Italy and Mussolini's air force and Hitler's Luftwaffe were bombing Guernica, Lovecraft praised Mussolini and "handsome Adolf" for their courage in the face of racial and cultural degeneracy. In many ways Lovecraft was a product of his time-a time when immigration was restricted to maintain America's racial purity, African Americans were lynched by racist mobs and Aryans were championed as the master race. Lovecraft, who was deeply troubled by these issues, found relief in writing. His weird fiction, peopled with gods, monsters and extraterrestrials, allowed him to exorcise his obsessive anxieties. In this sociohistorical context immigrants and foreigners served as the prototype for his artificial mythology, the Cthulhu Mythos.
Lovecraft's Racial Values goes to the very depths of Lovecraft's terrifying fantasies to reveal the terrible implications of his special blend of horror. Relevant facts of Lovecraft's correspondence, fiction and the sociohistorical background are brought together to assess the nature of Lovecraft's racism, its sources and its consequences. The phenomenon of racism is also examined to see why the human race is still plagued by this universal problem. Lovecraft's Racial Values answers important questions about HPL's racism and his change in political ideology towards the end of his life.
Lovecraft's Racial Values includes an index, a chronology of HPL's life and significant historical events, and a bibliography of HPL's principle works, texts on racism, immigration and literary creation. References are included for those wishing to pursue the important questions raised in this comprehensive study of H. P. Lovecraft's life and fiction.