Category: Lovecraft

S. T. Joshi Is Feuding Over Lovecraft and Racism Again

11/18/2017

I know it’s been a bit of a refrain recently, but it has become rather difficult to find new and interesting things to write about. I thought about saying something on Trump judicial nominee Brett J. Talley, who is a ghost hunter and a horror novelist since he has some rather odd views about his professed influence, H. P. Lovecraft. But, really, there isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been discussed far and wide. Basically, he doesn’t know how to define Lovecraftian fiction: “The subgenre of Lovecraftian fiction, I feel like is not really that well defined,” Talley said in 2013. “What makes stuff Lovecraft? And I think really if you asked people, you’d get a lot of arguments about this.” Not really, but it’s just not something worth spilling ink (or pixels) over.

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Conservative Christian Touts Lovecraft as a Tool to Bring Readers Back to Christ

8/19/2017

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It seems like most of the fringe history purveyors have been laying low this month, the traditional time for a summer vacation. Or maybe the current flap over white supremacy has left purveyors of bad ideas about the past trying to stay below radar since so many of their ideas tend to have white supremacist undertones. Whatever the reason, it seems like there have been fewer high-profile fringe history claims this week than in most. So today I bring you an interesting meditation on H. P. Lovecraft instead. The piece in question comes from conservative Christian C. R. Wiley, who argues that Lovecraft’s weird fiction can actually help to bring Christians closer to God by giving them a “taste” of the “weirdness” of God. It’s an unusual argument, and perhaps one that Lovecraft would find amusing, if not offensive.

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Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? A Review of "Meddling Kids" by Edgar Cantero

8/17/2017

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Since the birth of my son, I’ve been a bit hard-pressed to make time for reading, and it is with regret that it took me several weeks longer than expected to finish Edgar Cantero’s new novel Meddling Kids, a mashup of Scooby-Doo and H. P. Lovecraft that earned rave reviews from critics earlier this summer. I found the book to be enjoyable, but a little less impressive than the critics made it out to be. Meddling Kids is a book I wanted to love, but it was one I liked instead. And to be frank, I think TV is ruining novels for me. It’s hard to pretend that 300 pages of a one-off novel can rival the hundreds of hours I spend with characters on TV series over the years of their runs. It takes, what, 20 hours to read this book, while, for example, a throwaway TV show on a similar theme like Teen Wolf has 100 hours of content spread over six calendar years. Perhaps that’s why I just don’t feel the same connection when I read reviews about how realistic and detailed the book’s characters are. I barely got to know them before they were gone. Each had, I believe, one personality trait. It seems like the CW’s Riverdale was more of a fresh and darker take on Archie than Meddling Kids is for Scooby-Doo

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S. T. Joshi Pulls Out of NecronomiCon to Avoid "Lovecraft Haters" and Discussion of Lovecraft's Racism

8/10/2017

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As many of you know, fans of H. P. Lovecraft gather each summer for a Providence, R.I. conference called NecronomiCon, named of course for the fictional Necronomicon, one of Lovecraft’s most famous creations. This year the run up to the conference has gotten a little hairy. S. T. Joshi, the preeminent scholar of Lovecraft, pulled out of the conference because he refused to appear in the same venue with people he describes as “Lovecraft haters” who want to devote time to evaluating the horror master’s record of racism. Joshi delivered an ultimatum, telling conference organizers to disinvite critics or lose him as a speaker. In such a context, his joke in his August 6 blog entry that questioning his opinions was tantamount to sacrilege—“Imagine anyone questioning my view of Lovecraft! The very idea is surely a kind of lèse-majesté, no?”—seems less like self-deprecating humor than a serious opinion masquerading as a barbed jest.

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Marking the Anniversary of Lovecraft's Death with a Reflection on Georgian Architecture

3/16/2017

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Yesterday marked the eightieth anniversary of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, an occasion that provoked a great deal of ambiguous observation in the media, mostly due to the tension between Lovecraft’s genius as a creator of a fictional world and his almost comically absurd levels of racism. In noting the anniversary of his passing, I thought I would break from my usual topics of discussion to talk a bit about one of Lovecraft’s other obsessions, Georgian architecture. As most readers of Lovecraft’s fiction, and especially his letters, know, Lovecraft was obsessed with Georgian and Georgian Revival architecture and found in it the form most pleasing to his sense of aesthetics. “Lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae,” he wrote to Fritz Leiber.

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On the Anniversary of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer"

3/11/2017

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Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the WB/UPN series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), but due to my review of Sekret Machines I wasn’t able to mark the occasion. Because the show was a seminal part of my adolescent years, I feel like I should have more to say about than I do, but somehow I find that the barrage of media coverage has approached the anniversary from every possible angle. Instead, I’ll just talk a little bit about the show. I need a bit of a break anyway after devoting so many hours this past week to Peter Levenda’s pretentious drivel.

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From Sci-Fi to Alt-Right: Extremists and Conspiracy Theorists Using Lovecraft to Attack Feminism and L. Ron Hubbard to Take on International Bankers

3/2/2017

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A controversy arose this past week when anthropologists discovered that white supremacists had manipulated Google’s page ranking algorithm to make a racist and anti-Semitic hate site the snippet chosen for Google’s instant answer to queries about the definition of Boasian anthropology. “Boasian Anthropology is a pseudo-scientific Jewish assault on White European racial consciousness and identity,” the Google info-box informed its readers, taking the text from a white nationalist blog. Google expressed regret over the situation but said that the company had no responsibility to evaluate the content they excerpt: “The feature is an automatic and algorithmic match to the search query,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge. This is disingenuous, of course, since Google knows full well that many users cannot distinguish between a third-party snippet and an “official” Google-endorsed definition, particularly since Google offers similar-looking info-boxes for dictionary definitions, mathematical calculations, and other facts it presents as its own. Within hours of the controversy erupting, however, the anti-Semitic result disappeared from the Google top results.

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Is W. Scott Poole Right to Claim Lovecraft's Monsters Are "Without Antecedent"?

3/1/2017

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Yesterday I started discussing W. Scott Poole’s views on H. P. Lovecraft from his recent book In the Mountains of Madness, and I mentioned that I took issue with his allegation that Lovecraft’s stories, his monsters, and his cosmic vision were unique and unprecedented. Today I’d like to talk about why I disagree so vehemently with Poole. To do so, we need to take a look at how he frames the issue:

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W. Scott Poole on Lovecraft's Relationship to Poe and His Racist Cat

2/28/2017

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Last night the CBC’s Toronto-set period detective drama Murdoch Mysteries featured H. P. Lovecraft. It was … different. Set in the early 1900s, when Lovecraft was a young teenager, the episode imagined Lovecraft as a Goth youth spending a season with his Canadian aunt. In Toronto, he became something of an autistic necrophiliac (presumably in the manner of the story “The Loved Dead”) who had an obsession with a rotten corpse. The show also implied that he had the psychic power to project monstrous fantasies into women’s minds. While it was not the be most accurate depiction of Lovecraft, it does lead me to today’s topic.

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Mystic and Artist Warlock Asylum Claims Lovecraft Had Secret Messages for Followers of Crowley's Thelema

2/25/2017

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Sensei Messiah’el Bey is an artist who operates under the name Warlock Asylum. He claims to operate in a variety of shamanic and religious traditions, including ancient Mesopotamian cults and Shintoism. His spiritual journey would be of little concern to me if he hadn’t written a strange blog post yesterday attempting to prove that H. P. Lovecraft was an occultist operating with secret connections to Aleister Crowley’s Thelema.

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S. T. Joshi Is Feuding Over Lovecraft and Racism Again

Conservative Christian Touts Lovecraft as a Tool to Bring Readers Back to Christ

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? A Review of "Meddling Kids" by Edgar Cantero

S. T. Joshi Pulls Out of NecronomiCon to Avoid "Lovecraft Haters" and Discussion of Lovecraft's Racism

Marking the Anniversary of Lovecraft's Death with a Reflection on Georgian Architecture

On the Anniversary of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer"

From Sci-Fi to Alt-Right: Extremists and Conspiracy Theorists Using Lovecraft to Attack Feminism and L. Ron Hubbard to Take on International Bankers

Is W. Scott Poole Right to Claim Lovecraft's Monsters Are "Without Antecedent"?

W. Scott Poole on Lovecraft's Relationship to Poe and His Racist Cat

Mystic and Artist Warlock Asylum Claims Lovecraft Had Secret Messages for Followers of Crowley's Thelema

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