I like H.P. Lovecraft. Or at least, I like his universe. I read S.T. Joshi’s massive Lovecraft biography, and there’s plenty not to like about the man. His WASPish ideas about miscegenation, immigrants, and cultural change are racist. I see that now. It took me a while to get that. I first read Lovecraft when I was in my teens, and I didn’t grow up in the States. So the entire cultural context the stories were written in was pretty alien to me.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward — a posthumously published short novel — was the first Lovecraft story I got my hands on, and I was immediately sold. There are two things I like about Lovecraft’s universe. The first is that he radically stepped away from the types of protagonists traditionally found in horror literature until then. No ghostly apparitions, mummies, werewolves, or vampires. Instead, his ‘monsters’ are hard to describe, difficult to imagine, and impossible to relate to. They are truly alien. Secondly, I liked his nihilistic take. Lovecraft’s ‘monsters’ aren’t evil in the sense that they’re not out to purposefully destroy mankind. We’re so far beneath their contempt, so insignificant, they don’t even notice us. Their relation to mankind is like ours to the bacteria in our gut. On a normal day, we’re not even aware they exist. When the Outer Gods return, it’ll be the end of mankind. Not because they’re out to kill us. They’ll simply transform Earth to suit their needs, and those aren’t compatible with ours. That’s it. For us, it’ll be a disaster. For them, it’s just business as usual.

I wanted to do something with that idea. What would cause the Outer Gods’ return? Did they plan for it? Or is it something that’s bound to happen anyway ‘when the stars are right’? An inevitability? Lovecraft tells us there are still two Outer Gods amongst us when all others have left aeons ago: Cthulhu, the chthonic aquatic being that lies dreaming in sunken R’lyeh, and Nyarlathotep aka the Crawling Chaos. I decided to use these two characters to drive my narrative and put a bit of a new spin on them

There’s already so much analysis of the Lovecraft universe available, I don’t think that adding my two bits can be relevant in any way. I’d like to refer you to two texts I found interesting.

Michel Houellebecq is a French writer and intellectual and wrote ‘H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life’. Originally written in French, there’s an English translation available, with an introduction by Stephen King, no less. You can find it here : H.P. Lovecraft Against the World, Against Life

Alan Moore probably doesn’t need an introduction. He’s an avid explorer of the Lovecraft universe himself, and I’ve enjoyed his take on it in his graphic novels ‘The Courtyard’ and ‘Providence’. He wrote several texts about Lovecraft. One of them is the interesting preface for The Folio Society’s beautifully presented edition of Lovecraft stories ‘The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories’. You can find more about it here: The Folio Society