Lovecraft Short Stories by Laura Bulbeck

His influence is felt in Stephen King, Stranger Things, and so many new and classic tales. I first encountered Lovecraftian horror in games like Diablo, Starcraft, and Dungeons and Dragons. Besides, he’s a foundational figure in speculative fiction, and those of us who love a good “What if…” must eventually wrestle with that literature’s racist past. Studying his oeuvre is not financially supporting prejudice. On the other hand, Lovecraft is dead and his works are in the public domain. Even compared to other bigots, he reads as narrow-minded and mean-spirited. But in Lovecraft’s world, some people really are better than others, and communicating with strangers could lead to the end of civilization. These authors failed to live up to their own ideals. As for the Harry Potter franchise, it was clearly intended to be an allegory for bigotry, with muggles, mudbloods, and pure families standing in for classist and racist institutions. Card’s Ender’s Game is about failures of cross-species communication, and in the sequels Ender strives endlessly to understand other perspectives. But their literature is kinder than their real lives. Rowling have sullied their reputations by scare-mongering about Muslims and non-binary people, respectively. Today, once-admirable writers like Orson Scott Card and J.K. While other (better) authors pushed literature in exciting new directions, Lovecraft’s prose looked backwards, to Poe and to run-on sentences in the Victorian style. Lovecraft’s views don’t improve when compared to his contemporaries: Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and F. But that is hardly the biggest stain on his legacy. His literary pretensions to be the next Edgar Allen Poe mostly failed, and reading his early poetical works can feel like being cudgeled with a thesaurus. He also wrote tales of ghosts and vampires, science fiction, fantasies, parodies, poems, and exceedingly boring accounts of his own dreams. This is what we think of when we think of Lovecraft: the linked tales that make up the Cthulu Mythos (very few of which involve Cthulu), the Necronomicon, and the less-well known Dream Cycle starring Randolph Carter. Of the major Lovecraftian themes, the cosmic horror has aged by far the best, and it is upon this foundation that his whole reputation rests. Lovecraft wrote scores of stories, of which 68 were published during his lifetime and after his death.

His characters encounter beings with unfathomable power, and while they mostly live to tell the tale, they suffer through an awful epiphany - that their thoughts don’t matter, their desires don’t matter, and their entire existence is temporary and fragile… a soap bubble ready to burst. Lovecraft is the horror of insignificance.

Lovecraft Short Stories by Laura Bulbeck