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S. T. Joshi Is Mad Again About Lovecraft and Race

8/14/2016

23 Comments

 
Last week, S. T. Joshi, the famed Lovecraft scholar, published a blog post (August 7, 2016; he doesn’t separate entries with permalinks) in which he accused the editor of The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, book editor and reviewer Paula Guran, of vastly overstating Lovecraft’s racism in order to engage, essentially, in trendy social justice moralizing. Indeed, Joshi make a rather astonishing counterclaim, based on his 1999 book about racism in America:
An examination of my Documents of American Prejudice (Basic Books, 1999) will show conclusively that, in comparison to the astounding vitriol that was produced in his day, Lovecraft’s words are as mild as baby shampoo—and those screeds can be found in books and magazines of very wide distribution, as opposed to the private correspondence where most of Lovecraft’s racist discussions occur.
“Mild as baby shampoo”? Lovecraft was a man who complained of the “niggers” and the “puffy, rat-faced Jew”: “Either stow ’em out of sight or kill ’em off – anything so that a white man may walk along the streets without shuddering nausea” (February 1925 letter). He was the same man who spoke of “stunted brachycephalic South-Italians & rat-faced half-Mongoloid Russian & Polish Jews, & all that cursed scum” (October 12, 1928 letter).
 
But Joshi is not entirely wrong that people of the era had racist beliefs, often expressed in atrocious terms. Thomas Sinclair gave a speech at a meeting of the Sinclair family fan club (the De Santo Claro Society) in 1893 that was filled with racist fear of Italians, for example, and prejudice against Blacks and Native Americans was widespread through the middle twentieth century, and not uncommon thereafter. Any era, like the 1920s and 1930s, that saw the Ku Klux Klan marching through the nation’s streets to cheering crowds could not have been particularly racially enlightened.
 
Joshi, however, wishes us to measure Lovecraft against, in essence, the Klan, and not against the better angels of American society, which had by 1930 spent decades arguing against racial prejudice. While scientific racism was still the convenient and accepted dogma in many fields, anthropologists increasingly argued against it, and Lovecraft’s views reflected a scientific consensus that began breaking down before 1900.
 
Yet Guran is not right either in ascribing to Lovecraft almost exclusively racist motives. Here is how Joshi, in typically angry fashion, describes Guran’s view:
Guran concludes her discussion with the remarkable utterance that Lovecraft chose to infiltrate his stories with racism “to alarm and distress the primarily male, supposedly ‘superior’ possessors of light-skinned Nordic genes. One must assume Lovecraft never considered anyone else as a potential reader.” So now Guran reveals the enviable ability to read the mind of a dead man!
Guran is here half right and half wrong. Lovecraft’s stories are filled with racism, literal and figurative. The literal racism is comparatively rare: “The Horror at Red Hook” being the worst example, but manifesting in other stories, like the description of a Black man in “Herbert West—Reanimator,” or his references to Polynesians in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” But his discomfort with the Other, especially racial and ethnic minorities, bled into his depiction of the Old Ones and gave them their power. The idea that the familiar civilization he knew from his WASP upbringing was under fire from strange, confusing foreigners grows, ultimately, into his conviction that nearly omnipotent but horrific forces of the wild and of chaos constantly threaten to destroy the fragile fiction of our civilization. Though Joshi intentionally chooses not to see this, it is rather clear in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, to take but one example. In that story a noble and civilized people (the Old Ones) colonize a new continent and get into wars with other races until they are brought low by a mongrel race of former slaves whose wild violence overtakes them. It takes very little effort to see in this a lightly veiled version of Lovecraft’s own explicitly stated views about Anglo-American culture being under assault from immigrants from other countries and African-Americans at home.
 
“Some people may like the idea of a mongrel America like the late Roman Empire,” he said in an October 12, 1928 letter, “but I for one prefer to die in the same America that I was born in.” Such a belief is, in essence, no different from the anti-immigrant sentiment of the Trumpeters demanding a border wall to keep “them” out. It goes back, too, to the anti-immigrant sentiments of the nineteenth century.
 
Yet here is where Guran is less correct. While it is true that Lovecraft’s own racism informed his fiction and indeed would distress white, male readers, Lovecraft was under no illusion that WASP culture was ultimately “correct.” It was one of many cultures, and in his fiction cultures of all kinds are nothing more than a beautiful lie imposed over the horror of reality, an illusion we keep to remain sane. This is a subtler view, and a more interesting one. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that the fictional world Lovecraft created was not the same as his own beliefs, and in some respects the lessons we can draw from his stories emerge despite Lovecraft’s own racist views.
 
Joshi, though, will have none of it, condemning all this talk of racism as coming from French writer Michel Houellebecq and English author China Miéville, whom he derides as ignorant for merely reading Lovecraft’s stories rather than accepting at face value what Lovecraft’s letters say about them:
And not one actual Lovecraft scholar—Donald R. Burleson, David E. Schultz, Steven J. Mariconda, Robert H. Waugh, and a dozen others one could name—has interpreted racism as central to Lovecraft’s work. But we are now asked to believe that a Frenchman who has done no original research on Lovecraft and an Englishman in similar circumstances are suddenly endowed with the transcendent insight that allows them to deliver a magisterial condemnation of Lovecraft on this subject.
That paragraph is disingenuous on many levels. First is the lit-crit fallacy that the author’s explicit intent should be the governing interpretation of a story. Consider this: What if Lovecraft wasn’t aware that he was a racist because he considered his beliefs correct and normal? If this were so, then his letters would provide no insight into motivations he did not himself understand. Stories, ultimately, have meaning beyond the author’s conscious intention, and it is hardly illegitimate to offer criticism based on the text of the fiction rather than the author’s private explanation of it.
 
Joshi, being unusually literal, refuses to see racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, or xenophobia in anything except explicit racial slurs. For a literary critic, he seems defiantly immune to metaphor and symbolism:
The bottom line is this: Racism is not at the root of Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought, and those who attempt to maintain such a thing do so in defiance of the mountains of contrary evidence found in his stories, essays, poems, and letters, and in the accounts of nearly all who actually knew and met him.
For Joshi, Lovecraft’s fear of cosmic destruction is exclusively the product of his atheism, of a world unmoored from traditional morality and supernatural protection. And yet Lovecraft chose to depict atheism through the lens of horror, where the forces from outside constantly threaten to destroy the fragile “normal” Anglo-American civilization while non-white people cheer on the coming destruction and work to hasten its arrival. Lovecraft’s conscious motivation may have been cosmic, but the specific form this took was unconsciously shaped by his views on culture, nationalism, ethnicity, and race.
23 Comments
Templar Secrets
8/14/2016 08:30:50 am

Well, Lovecraft himself was rabidly anti-Semitic.
This has been covered before.

Reply
Joshi daddy link
8/22/2016 07:17:42 am

Well u see,....Joshi was indeed hurt and jealous ....but is was only because love craft held her dark temptation and addictions in side till they ruined each other. . Jenn... u obliviously love and hate Joshi. .but after this blog. All you will have is that ankle bracelet to remember me and fines of fraud u have created thru fake reality.. Joshi has freedom and peace... bye momma

Reply
Ph
8/14/2016 11:04:38 am

Racism is just a symptom of an underlying need to hate something to feel better about yourself. Works wonders in groups where the hatred reinforces everyones selfesteem.

With information flow rates as we had begin 20th century, there is not much variation in what is socially tolerable to hate.
Nowadays racism has become socially intolerable and the same people full of hatred have an information overdose and subjects enough to choose from and groups to flock to.

I believe both parts played a role, the "need to hate" and the environment which supplied the norms and values of that time

Reply
kn83
10/16/2017 04:19:05 pm

That is pure psychobabble. Racism is a primal unconscious instinct, not a learned behavior. It has no connection to self-esteem nor to any psychological need or disorder. It is simply a by-product of innate ingroup preference.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2164844/Racism-hardwired-human-brain--people-racists-knowing-it.html

Reply
Only Me
8/14/2016 12:44:59 pm

Joshi has a problem. His unbending defense of Lovecraft strikes me as hero worship, with a lot of arrogant belief only he is capable of understanding "senpai's" work.

Great analysis, though.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
8/14/2016 02:01:31 pm

I guess it's understandable that Joshi would be in denial that the author he's devoted a significant portion of his career to was a racist prick. It wouldn't kill him to handle it with a little grace, though.

Reply
spookyparadigm
8/14/2016 04:10:24 pm

I'm ok with Joshi's blind spots. It means more for other analysts.

Reply
Brian
8/14/2016 09:25:32 pm

“but I for one prefer to die in the same America that I was born in.”

I think that's the basis of so much trouble. Many people seem to have idealized the extremely narrow experience of their childhood, and growing up have felt that new experiences ("there are people out there who aren't like me or my family!") are assaults rather than interesting opportunities. I wonder if those whose childhood's were less than secure aren't especially prone to this?

Reply
V
8/15/2016 03:32:57 pm

Well, anecdotally--my childhood wasn't really "less secure," but it was definitely much broader than the average childhood; we've always been a family invested in traveling and learning, so I wasn't sheltered from a lot. And as an adult, I kind of don't really see "there are people out there who aren't like me," I generally kinda see, "Everyone out there ultimately IS like me--we all have feelings I can empathize with, and we all have the same root needs for things like food, shelter, and friendship. Everything else is fascinating window dressing." (Like, I don't really suffer from "culture shock," no matter where I go. Yeah, I need to pick up local manners and mores, but they don't SHOCK me.)

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
8/15/2016 09:13:29 am

Joshi seems to have forgotten that being well-known for Lovecraft scholarship gets you about as far as being well-known for eating hot dogs, and in the arena of literary criticism it's about as valid a credential; the opinion of any other person in the interpretation of a piece of art is as valid as his. Least the hot dog champion has a clearly measurable yardstick. Lovecraft was prima facie blatantly racist, though so was most of society at the time. He was just better at turning a phrase than most of society.

Reply
Residents Fan
8/15/2016 11:10:54 am

"An examination of my "Documents of American Prejudice"..."

Wait, we're only allowed to consult Joshi's books on the history of
racism and anti-racism in America now?

While it is true there was racism in America in Lovecraft's time, there was also a less widespread, but equally strong anti-racism.

Here is a quote from a white Male, Robert M. La Follette, in August 1919:

"The mobbing of harmless, helpless Negroes in the capital of this country is the nation's everlasting shame.

The responsibility for starting the riots, which ruled Washington for days, rests upon disorderly lawless whites.

Peacable, unoffending colored men and boys were beaten up and murdered by brutes who boast of our white civilization".

That's from "La Follette's Magazine" (now called "The Progressive"),
a nationally circulation magazine of the time.

Reply
Residents Fan
8/15/2016 04:37:18 pm

On the subject of Lovecraft and gender: it's known that HPL was a bellicose supporter of the UK in WWI, despite some misgivings about a conflict between the "Teutonic" Britons and Germans. In several of his writings on WWI, he attacks American opponents of
the war in passages such as this:

"The effeminate idealist, half awaked from his roseate vision of
universal brotherhood, shrieks at the mutual slaughter of his
fellow-men, or singles out individual acts of cruelty or treachery as
the objects of his well-meaning rage..." ("The Crime of the Century,
April 1915).

"After the degrading debauch of craven pacifism through which our
sodden and feminized public has lately floundered, a slight sense of
shame seems to be appearing, and the outcries of peace-at-any-price maniacs are less violent than they were a few months ago...." ("The Renaissance of Manhood", October 1915).

"Under the first head of unconscious physical cowards we must
group the sobbing sisterhood who sigh forth in melody of questionable musical and poetical value that “They Didn't Raise Their Boys to be Soldiers”....it is the beginning of the end of supine submissiveness and womanish ideals on the part of the majority"
("The Renaissance of Manhood", October 1915).

"Our fathers were both rude and bold,
And would not live like brothers;
But we are of a finer mould--
We’re much more like our mothers! "
("Pacifist War Song, 1917").

In each case, Stay-At-Home-Patriot Lovecraft ties opposition to American involvement in the bloodbath to women, or "feminized" men.

"Effeminate" ,"Feminized", "Womanish", "like our mothers" -each is used to describe people who hold anti-war sentiment. This may not be "hatred" or "fear", but Lovecraft's writings of this period do give off a contempt for women.

Reply
Alex
8/15/2016 05:55:31 pm

I like Lovercraft an lot, I have read all of his stories but hes an racist. theres no sugar coating that, in all fairness hes not more racist than an lot of people were in the early 20th century. but its not something you can overlook. I am suprirsed Joshi didn't try to blame SJWs for over-blowing Lovecraft's racism

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Manuel Marinho
8/16/2016 04:52:39 am

"The bottom line is this: Racism is not at the root of Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought, and those who attempt to maintain such a thing do so in defiance of the mountains of contrary evidence found in his stories, essays, poems, and letters, and in the accounts of nearly all who actually knew and met him."

That reads more like an Internet comment than lit criticism. Anyway, what's interesting to me is that Joshi goes from arguing that racism isn't important to Lovecraft's literary work because Lovecraft didn't say it was, to arguing, essentially, that Lovecraft wasn't really a racist. The first position is arguable (though wrong, in my opinion), the second is absurdly indefensible.

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Residents Fan
8/16/2016 11:05:37 am

"That reads more like an Internet comment than lit criticism."

Yes. The thing is, the argument that Lovecraft in person was a more friendly and open-minded person than the Thomas Dixon Jr.
imitator of the letters is valid.

But the idea that there are "mountains of contrary evidence" in Lovecraft's non-fiction to repudiate the charge of that racism was at the root of his work is unconvincing.

Poems like " De Triumpho Naturae", and "On the Creation of [N-words]", and the long, long passages in his letters advocating racial segregation, banning of inter-racial marriage, violence against ethnic minorities, the defence of white imperialist rule in places like India and the Phillippines... it would be hard to deny a large portion of Lovecraft's non-fiction is indeed devoted to advocating race hatred. One could legitimately make the argument that racism is at the root of Lovecraft's work, based on his non-fiction (although I don't
agree with this idea myself).

Certainly there's a reason this aspect of HPL's work is regularly reposted on white supremacist websites.

Reply
Pierre Cloutier
8/16/2016 09:36:59 am

One of the fascinating things about late 19th and early twentieth century racism is that much of it was a defensive, hysterical racism much obsessed with the fear of being drowned by huge numbers of people of "inferior" races.

This was quite different from the self-confident Racism of the early and mid 19th century. During that time period many racist writers and experts were confidently and gladly predicting that the "inferior" races would disappear when coming into contact with Europeans. And of course the coming disappearance of those "inferior" races was a source of great joy to those thinkers. Thus the disappearance of groups like the Tasmanians, (Who actually didn't really "disappear".), was in their eyes a good and wonderful thing.

Thus thinkers like Knox in Britain anticipated with joy and pleasure the disappearance of "inferior" sub-Saharans, Asians etc., which would "inevitably" happen upon contact with "superior" Europeans. In fact one of the most amusing tropes of late 19th century writings about race in America was the notion that many held that once blacks were removed from the benevolent (snark) embrace of slavery they would be unable to survive and would gradually disappear because they needed being enslaved in order to survive. so many American writers joyfully wrote about "evidence" that Blacks were dying out and look forward to the day they utterly disappeared.

By the late 19th century it was becoming clear that "inferior" races were not vanishing. This produced in many a fear response. So you get writers like Grant who shrieked hysterically about "the passing of the Great Race", about how the "Mongrel" hordes would overwhelm those of European ancestry etc. The happy visions of the "inferior" races vanishing was replaced by hysterical fears of being overwhelmed, of visions of racial defilement and corruption of fear laden paranoia. In America the happy vision of Blacks dying out was replaced gradually by fear of racial pollution, of being overwhelmed.

Lovecraft's racism was in many respects part of this fear, this reaction to the "terrible" news that the "inferior", the other were not disappearing has they "should".

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trajan23
8/16/2016 05:49:31 pm

" it is rather clear in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, to take but one example. In that story a noble and civilized people (the Old Ones) colonize a new continent and get into wars with other races until they are brought low by a mongrel race of former slaves whose wild violence overtakes them."

Well, it is important to note that the culture of the Old Ones was already in decline before they were exterminated by the Shoggoths. Indeed, their saga on Earth is a veritable ode to decay. And what makes their decline all the more frightening, all the more inexorable? It just happens. They lose their ability to fly through the aether. They lose the ability to create life. No reason is given because no reason is necessary. Decline simply happens. Even worse, their art declines:

“Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves; and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendours than its own people could create.”

Indeed, towards the end, they had even ceased to notice their degenerate condition:

“By the time total abandonment did occur—and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced—the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art—or had ceased to recognise the superior merit of the older carvings.”

Reply
trajan23
8/16/2016 06:08:06 pm

" it is rather clear in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, to take but one example. In that story a noble and civilized people (the Old Ones) colonize a new continent and get into wars with other races until they are brought low by a mongrel race of former slaves whose wild violence overtakes them."

A couple of points:

The rival races (The Yuggothians and Chtulhu-Spawn) are, like the Old Ones, colonizers. None are native to Earth.

"a mongrel race of former slaves whose wild violence overtakes them.":

To my way of thinking, the Shoggoths read more like a sermon on the dangers of technology. Recall, after all, that the Old Ones on Earth are a kind of quasi-Luddite colony, one which eschews the full range of Old One tech:

"Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man’s today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying."

The Shoggoths (created by the Old Ones out of inorganic matter) were intended to function as biological robots, protoplasmic substitutes for the mechanized servitors that they had abandoned. Eventually, however, they acquired sentience and rose up against their creators .And, the subway metaphor used in the conclusion drives home the “Shoggoths-as-runaway-machines” symbolism:


“South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard. . . .” The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that should not be’; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder."

Mercy Killing: I kinda feel that the Shoggoths’ genocide of the Old Ones actually saves us from witnessing the ultimate horror. The Old Ones, after all, were quite decayed by the end, so far gone that they could not even seem to understand how far their art had degenerated. Imagine what a further half-million years of cultural entropy might have wrought.Frankly, I don’t think that HPL could have endured depicting the Old Ones reaching the ultimate nadir (cf THE MOUND for a parallel text, one which depicts an even more extreme degree of decay).

Reply
Bob Jase
8/17/2016 02:35:50 pm

Well yes, HPL was a racist but as he's been dead almost eighty years I've given up on him changing his views.

Reply
Drew link
8/17/2016 06:50:40 pm

As Lovecraft's racism becomes more and more acknowledged today, there's been a rise in a Hot Take contrarian response that I've seen bandied about more and more - that Lovecraft really wasn't that racist because all those non-Anglo cultures with their weird rituals were actually right and that it was the WASPs who were truly the ignorant ones because they didn't know enough to not poke the Otherworldy bee's nest.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this Hot Take as Lovecraft's descriptions of non Anglo Saxon cultures is pretty dire. Even if the locals know the rituals that keep the monsters at bay, it's implied that they know how to do so because they are halfway to being monsters themselves.

(PS - The New Yorker goes into Lovecraft and his influence on Stranger Things this week.)

Reply
David McMillan
3/3/2017 07:26:15 pm

Your point that Lovecraft did not prioritise European culture, which he portrayed as a narcissistic masquerade, I agree with wholeheartedly. His narrators, as they close in on some dismal truth, are driven mad by Ultimate Reality, and cannot return to the comforting lies of their former beliefs. Centrally, many of these beliefs are incredibly racist! But here's where the stories are interesting, the racism of the narrators is actually part of their downfall, their single-minded assurance that their superior race and culture and intelligence will conquer where native superstition and traditional instinct have failed is part of their undoing.

I believe at this point on my Lovecraft journey, that Lovecraft himself probably was deeply and parochially racist, but I would argue that the stories are not racist, they take racism as their central subject. They are about racism - in so many of the stories, there is that groan-inducing moment where non-whites are portrayed as stupid, boorish and violent, but this observation is usually through the lens of the narrator, who is himself on his way to complete madness as his own staunch superiority crumbles and he gives more and more credence to the non-white perspective as he nears some shard of Ultimate Reality.

Lovecraft is such an amazing artist that he dissects his own delusions with profoundly disturbing ramifications. On the lighter side, I see a man who wants to shed his uptightness and dance to the drum and flute cosmic combo but who can't help but be self-conscious at that exact moment of transcendence, and this generates remarkable tension, full of unexpected colours, in his stories. For God's sake, he's got one story which seems like a parody of Rider Haggard where an English lord discovers his research into some 'obscene' ape worship in Africa is basically his own family tree, with his own birth the fruit of some kind of jungle beastiality cult. Whoops! Didn't want to know that Fluffy from Creepshow was actually your grandmother, did you, Arthur?

Reply
Adam Berger
10/26/2018 05:36:52 am

Fine. Have it your way, progressives. Deprive future generations of this brilliant author of horror–the single most influential and imitated author in the genre, perhaps in all of speculative fiction. Deprive them of his flawed but still powerful work because you don’t trust readers to be capable of taking the good with the bad. Because you don’t trust them to come to the realization that nobody is perfect, and that authors from many decades or centuries ago were just as influenced by their environment as you are. And even if someone occasionally wrote some crudely racist depictions of fictional characters, that doesn’t mean the many, many other brilliant elements of his work cease to be brilliant or worthy of continued admiration and analysis.

No, just erase him completely. Better safe than sorry! Pave the way for a glorious, shiny future of inoffensive, bland writing that can’t possibly trigger any sensitive souls. Better boring than even a tiny bit RACIST.

Reply
ASH CHARLTON link
8/17/2020 02:48:10 pm

I don't think anyone is saying that future generations should be 'deprived of this brilliant author'. As Mr Berger points out, when reading the writing of the past, you have to accept the different mores of the time - Victorian literature, even by women, reads as unbelievably sexist today, but nobody is suggesting that we shouldn't read Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot.
I'm with N.K. Jemisen with this one - like other problematic writers (Lawrence, Durrell, Fowles) Lovecraft may be all means be read, but it the reader deserves to know the truth about the man's outlook, which was pretty strong even for it's time, and how it may be argued to inform his work. Nothing wrong with an informed readership, or with criticising the viewpoints of the past. I think we 'proceed with caution' in reading such writers, and warn others of the toxic beliefs they may be unthinkingly taking in with the other things they're consuming.
A similar debate should be happening with homophobic writers like Frank Herbert. Again, Dune is an amazing achievement and Herbert was a great writer. He also expresses strongly homophobic views through his fiction - the two are not incompatible. As a gay man I'm dismayed by Herbert's homophobia, but can enjoy other aspects of his writing, as long as it is acknowledged that on this topic the guy goes a little crazy and wrong-headed!
Lovecraft was a loony on race - when he wasn't directly addressing that issue his fiction remains gripping and fascinating, but we do need to acknowledge the problem. And it is worth debating how far his racism penetrates into his fiction (is the fate of the Great Old Ones a racist parable - interesting debate!), as long as we acknowledge this IS a debate, and you can argue both sides quite cogently.

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