The Enduring Legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, Genre’s Crazy Racist Uncle

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Penguin Classic as an institution, Penguin is releasing The Orange Collection, a limited-run series of 12 “influential and beloved” works of literature with inventive, eye-catching cover designs. The lineup is full of the heavy hitters of American Lit: John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson…and H.P. Lovecraft.
How did crazy old Howard manage to elbow his way into such an august assemblage?
I’ve been a Lovecraft fan since my teen years. His stories are dense and overwrought, full of unsightly eldritch terrors and the pitfalls that come from discovering forbidden knowledge. With the passage of time, he’s become a problematic favorite in genre fiction, a racist uncle ranting and raving at our metaphorical Thanksgiving dinner (though tbh, as the kids say, dude was pretty racist even by the standards of the era). We love his creations—the betentacled Cthulhu, the Ronald McDonald on the Ancient Ones; the wily, crazed Herbert West—but even as a huge fan, I was shocked when Penguin placed him in such esteemed company. If they wanted a horror entry, why not Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hallow or anything by Edgar Allen Poe? What makes Lovecraft so special?
Despite being a “pulp” writer who died before the launch of the golden age of science fiction, the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos has endured. There’s something about the pervasive, creeping dread that permeates his stories that speaks to our collective lizard brains, that fear we all feel when we try and fail to imagine the unimaginable: the darkest depths of the ocean, the coldest reaches of space. The places we can’t go. The places where anything could be lurking. Waiting.
Horror novels tell us a lot about the fears that drive us as a culture. When Dracula was released, it spoke to Victorian fears of women’s sexuality and immigration. Stephen King’s IT reflects the shattered illusion of the idyllic small town. Lovecraft, writing during a great age of exploration and discovery—when Howard Carter was discovering the intact tomb of Tutankhamun and Robert Falcon Scott was leading a doomed expedition into Antarctica—is really speaking to our fear of the unknown: what was buried in those tombs, or buried in the icy wastes. The idea that any great discovery could be also a terrible one heavily influenced Lovecraft, and it’s a theme that still excites the human mind.
His language is denser and more labyrinthine than Charles Dickens ever dreamed, but the dry air of his prose, his banal surreality, is like nothing else in horror. Many of his stories are written as letters or journals, using the detached language to plainly introduce creatures and characters that have come to define unspeakable terror for more than 100 years. Cthulhu is his most iconic creation, a dreaded elder god slumbering beneath the sea in his terrible city of R’lyeh. His tentacled face represents everything this weird wordsmith wrote—madness, abominable terror, forbidden and awful of knowledge.
Cthulhu is joined by dreaded names like Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Dagon. Lovecraft created places like the darkly magical Miskatonic University and the creepy town of Innsmouth. These locales and ideas echo across modern-day horror, on the page and onscreen. You can thank Lovecraft for everything from the xenomorph in Alien to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s visceral video game Bloodborne. (The term “Lovecraftian” became shorthand for “creeping existential horror” for a reason, after all.)

Lovecraft’s is a literary legacy with the caveat of caveats: while he was a powerful writer, he was a terrible human being (or, at the very least, he held some soundly reprehensible opinions). He was virulently racist, a fact that makes fans of him (like me) squirm and equivocate. He was no product of his time. Not Lovecraft. Even for the 1920s, he was considered incredibly hateful; letters from his contemporaries label him as a kook and a bigot. This, too, is part of his legacy. A reminder, perhaps, that we can all stand to be better people. Thankfully, authors—many of them women, many of whom Lovecraft would have condemned based on their skin color or sexuality—are now doing that work for him, using his lore to build a better, if no less horrific, world.
Yet, despite all of this, here he is: genre’s crazy racist uncle and problematic icon, listed among a dozen giants of American literature. I wonder how Amy Tan and Ken Kesey feel about being listed next to this two-bit writer of twisted tales of madness and terror. Then again, when was the last time you heard something called Kesey-ian?
Lovecraft endures because the weird, wild stories he gave us still haunt our nightmares. He’s oft-copied, oft-referenced, but never forgotten. If that isn’t deserving of an orange Penguin cover, I’m not sure what is.
The limited-run Orange Penguin Classic edition of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is available now.