A quick rant. in The Big, Blue, House. Year two.

Every time I make the mistake of looking at a YouTube video about H.P. Lovecraft, I wind up coming here to vent. I’ve done it so many times now, that I might ought to just search for my own older entries and re-read those.

I’ve argued, at great length, with authors, and casual fans, and people only just barely acquainted with the subject, against offhandedly denouncing his entire body of work, and him as a person. He’s become a “popular” thing to be outraged about, and the sheeple flock to validate each other for hating on the socially correct things.

People defend Poe’s pedophilia at every turn. He married his own thirteen year old cousin. At face value that should certainly be at least as morally offensive as using the “n” word in a poem and a short story. But no. Poe gets reams of excuses from endless hoards of apologists, while great glee is taken in creating all sorts of content bemoaning how terrible Lovecraft was.

People. Seriously. He died in 1937, from intestinal cancer either caused or greatly exacerbated by his incredibly poor diet, because he was so broke. He lived an incredibly insular life, suffering from undiagnosed neurological and mental issues. He was xenophobic to the point that it literally crippled him. He couldn’t hold a job. He wore his late uncle’s old suits. He had very little social contact outside of his aunts and his pen pals. His lone romantic relationship ended abruptly, because he couldn’t deal with the city, or being employed. He lost both of his parents while he was young, and never had any childhood friends. His life overflowed with suffering from start to finish. CAN WE CUT THE GUY A FUCKING BREAK ALREADY.

I console myself with the fact that, no matter how many YouTubers, or podcasters, or Redditors, or writers rant and rave, his works are permanently seared into the fabric of horror and science fiction. They can no more extract H.P. Lovecraft from the collective history of fiction, than they could dig up every spore of armillaria ostoyae, (the world’s largest, predominantly underground, fungus), from Oregon.

Tale Foundry on YouTube made an abhorrent video decrying his essay on cats: “seems likes a joke”, and “a bit much”. I commented: "He was right about cats though, in every respect. His writing is beautiful, merging prose and horror in ways that simply no one else has. That you would find it "a bit much" speaks to your personal taste. It's art, and art is by it's very nature subjective."