How H. P. Lovecraft Predicted Today
The eldritch horrors have won.
When I first encountered the works of H. P. Lovecraft as a teen, they enthralled me. Here was writing as bleak as my worldview at the time. This fiction wasn’t pandering to me to get me to like it, and it wasn’t glossing over reality with a Disney Effect Pollyanna insistence that everything would always work out well in the end. The protagonists were typically professors or other intellectuals keen to understand things rather than macho shoot-first-while-making-quips types. Dense blocks of complex vocabulary and the stubborn efforts of hubristic humans being brought low by cosmic immensity spoke deeply to me.
Inevitably my reading interests expanded enormously. For all his inventiveness Lovecraft didn't exactly pen a broad range of literary styles, and being dead he wasn't about to provide new material at the rate I could consume it. When my mood returned to the dismal he was reliably there, humourlessly consistent in his conviction not only that there were limits to what we understand, but also to what we are mentally equipped to understand, and that there were mind shatteringly awful things we surely didn't want to understand.
Today, I have to admit he was on to something. Just as one of his protagonists might pull back the curtain of comforting assumptions to reveal cosmic…
