H.P. Lovecraft: In Memoriam

86 years ago, the writer whom I thoroughly treasure for changing my academic life forever, died. At the exact moment of his death, he was younger than I am now: this simple fact makes me think of what I would call “the delayed impact,” when someone who is about to drastically transform reality, is suddenly taken out from the world of poverty and obscurity, leaving only a few to grieve and care, but whose death quickly—and mind-bogglingly—ends up being the cause of truly tectonic shifts, which in this case would be the actual reassessment of horror literature.

He did for horror exactly what Wilde did for a drowsy late Victorian literary canon and Nietzsche for the way the fin de siècle thinker approaches the borders of perception—he changed the way the reader of the upcoming modernity would think of themselves and their place in the world of impending doom. The Nietzschean “God is dead” was morphed into “God doesn’t care,” and the Lovecraftian “De Profundis” bears the same feeling of frustration and despair.

“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,” says Wilde;

“At such time will the down-goer bless himself, that he should be an over-goer; and the sun of his knowledge will be at noontide.

“DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE SUPERMAN TO LIVE.”—Let this be our final will at the great noontide!—” says Nietzsche,

and Lovecraft would response, “The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods. . . . There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging. . . . Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!”

Lovecraft is the one: always was and forever will be. He didn’t shy away from his human fears, making his eschatology one of the most consistent and the utmost poetic. He will never go away. May he rest in peace.