May 23, 2025

 Greetings Everyone!

My new book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales, was recently published by Bloomsbury! I hope that all of you will pick up a copy!

Lovecraft scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, in his essay “Tekeli-li: Poe, Lovecraft, and the Suspicion of Sameness” (2017) poses these questions: “If the affective power of a text is derived from retrograde sociopolitical points of view, to what extent is the reader who enjoys the works implicated in approving of and disseminating those opinions?  How, in short, should we read—and teach—racist texts?” 

After reading Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft, the reader should be in a better position to answer these questions, and though a few readers might find the answers easy, the majority, I think, will find them even more difficult.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107690/

JLS

May 10, 2025

 Greetings Everyone!

My new book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales, was recently published by Bloomsbury!  I hope that all of you will pick up a copy!

Paul Rolland, Lovecraft scholar and author, writes: “The deficiencies of the man do not....debase the quality of his best work.  If anything, they invest it with a twisted passion that is missing from his more fantastic fiction.”

"Twisted passion” is the perfect phrase to describe Lovecraft’s work, especially the racist works.  One could argue, in fact, that this twisted  passion enhanced Lovecraft's fiction, especially the hybrid, degenerative monster tales, making them much more frightening and  investing them with raging, nearly psychotic emotion.

You may agree with this, or not.  But my book is, at the very least, an attempt to study and understand exactly how passionate and twisted Lovecraft really was.

So, please check it out!

JLS

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107690/

 

April 23, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

My book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales, was recently published by Bloomsbury!  I hope all of you will pick up a copy!

Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft is the first, book-length study that addresses the topic of Lovecraft’s racism and white privilege.  The book will show for the first time the full extent of Lovecraft’s racism, which ranges from the early works—the hybrid, degenerative monsters tales, as I refer to them, to the later, mature works—the great tales, as they are sometimes called, where Lovecraft’s extra-terrestrial alien races—all of them cosmic slave masters—square off against their own manufactured slave races and, in certain cases, human slaves as well.

The book, in particular, studies how Lovecraft uses his racial hatred creatively by developing racist images and narratives to advocate for his xenophobic, political beliefs: western civilization is in decline due to unrestrained immigration, miscegenation and hybridism; and, slavery is not only endemic, but justifiable among superior civilizations, especially the white, Anglo-Saxon civilizations.

There is no writer in the English language, and certainly, no writer of comparable magnitude to Lovecraft, who even attempts to do such a thing.  It is, quite literally, an unprecedented phenomenon.

So, please check it out!

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107690/

John L. Steadman 

April 5, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest book! You can get it at Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line book sellers.

In my previous series of postings, we have studied H. P. Lovecraft’s theory of devolution—Lovecraft believed that pure-blooded white, Anglo-Saxons who have intimate contact, especially sexual contact, with blacks or non-whites risk devolving, i.e. moving from a higher evolutionary stage to a lower stage. That is, their blood is tainted by contact with those who don’t have pure blood and they become more like animals than humans.  These whites also risk producing hybrid children who literally are monsters. 

Lovecraft’s theory was influenced by two great vampire novels: Bram Stoker’s  Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.  Both the title characters are undead, devolved creatures that are  more animal than human.  Thus, being “undead” is equivalent to being a Lovecraftian hybrid.

Interestingly, the recent movie Nosferatu, which has drawn mixed reviews, captures perfectly what the real vampire may have been like, at least the historical vampire.  According to records dating back as far as the 1200’s in Europe and elsewhere, vampires are almost always lower-class, peasant workers, ordinary looking if not outright ugly;  not gorgeous or handsome counts or countesses, and certainly not the teen heartthrobs  pictured in the Twilight saga or in the Interview with the Vampire film franchise.

Though Count Orlac, the vampire in Nosferatu, is, indeed, a nobleman, at least in terms of his title, he is a grotesque, hideous monster.  He is only remotely human in appearance, and though he is undead, like Dracula and Camilla, he is much more repulsive than they are.  He is basically a rotting corpse, decaying second by second, literally falling apart as he seeks out his victims.  He drinks the blood of both males and  females alike, and he does this like a large, filthy, leech, laying naked on top of them as he slurps up their blood gluttonously. 

At the end of the film, Orlac is destroyed by sunlight streaming in through the apartment window of his last victim, the wife of the film’s rather ineffectual male protagonist—the final image of Orlac’s naked, rotting body  lying on top of the heroine’s dead body, represents the epitome of graphic, unpleasant cinema. 

The moral of Nosferatu is the same as the morals of Bram Stoker’s and Le Fanu’s  novels: devolution results from tainted blood and is a stronger force than evolution!

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

JLS

March 24, 2025

 Greetings Everyone!

I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest book! You can get it at Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line book sellers.

In my previous series of postings, we have studied H. P. Lovecraft’s theory of devolution—Lovecraft believed that pure-blooded white, Anglo-Saxons who have intimate contact, especially sexual contact, with blacks or non-whites risk devolving, i.e. moving from a higher evolutionary stage to a lower stage.  That is, their blood becomes tainted by contact with those who don’t have pure blood and they become more like animals than humans.  Over time, these hybrids literally transform into monsters. 

Lovecraft read about fictional characters such as Mr. Hyde and Dorian Gray who reinforced his devolutionary fears.  Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was particularly inspiring.   Dracula is undead, neither alive nor dead. This state of being, according to Stoker, represents an impurity in the blood that causes a living, human being to devolve into a monster.  Dracula, thus, is similar to the kinds of hybrids that result from sex between whites and  blacks.

Lovecraft was also influenced by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire-lesbian novel Carmilla (1872).  The title character, Carmilla, is a vampire, like Dracula.  She seduces a young woman, Laura, and drinks her blood, hoping to turn her into a creature like herself, just as Dracula does with Mina Harker.

Carmilla is beautiful on the surface, but beneath, she is a monster.  In one graphic scene, Laura sees her as a monstrous, black cat: “four or five feet long...[moving] with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage... I felt it spring lightly on the bed.  The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted...deep into my breast.”    

The moral of Le Fanu’s novel is the same as Bram Stoker’s: devolution results from tainted blood and is a stronger force than evolution!

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

JLS

March 11, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest book! You can get it on Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line book sellers.

In my previous postings, I argued that H. P. Lovecraft’s theory of devolution derives, in part, from  Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Lovecraft was also influenced by Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel Dracula (1897).

The title character, Dracula, is a perfect embodiment of devolution and degeneration.  He is, of course, undead, neither alive nor dead.  But the living part of him is animalistic, not  human.  When we first see him in the castle, he reminds us of an old satyr: ugly, decaying and repulsive; as hideous as Hyde or Gray.  

There is a particularly graphic description of him lying in a box in an old chapel, gorged with blood.  The narrator, Jonathan Harker, describes him as if he were a “filthy leech,” his eyes burning like coals; his flesh swollen and puffy; and with  blood trickling from his mouth.  Obviously, being undead is akin to devolving into a lower life-form.

The moral of Stoker’s novel is the same as Stevenson’s and Wilde’s novels: devolution is stronger than evolution!

The themes of degeneration and devolution are central, also, in  J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire-lesbian novel Carmilla (1872), a novel that is almost as popular as Dracula.   We shall look at this book in my next posting.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

JLS

February 28, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest book! You can get it on Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line sites

In my previous posting, I argued that H. P. Lovecraft’s theory of devolution derives, in part, from  Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Lovecraft was also influenced by  Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of  Dorian Gray, written around the same time.

The plot is fairly well-known: Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man, wishes that he could stay young and beautiful while his portrait ages.  He gets his wish; he looks exactly the same for twenty years; the painting, however, grows old and ugly.

Dorian complicates the issue by living a terrible, evil life—he commits murder and he drives men as well as women to suicide.  The portrait reveals Dorian’s inner corruption and it ends up looking even worse than simply an ugly, old man; it looks like a  misshapen, degenerate monster—a half-human, half simian monster.

At the end of the book, Dorian can no longer stand seeing himself like this and he stabs the portrait; the painting  becomes beautiful again, but Dorian dies, and he leaves behind  the ugly, deformed body of his alter ego—much as  Jekyll in death left behind the hideous body of Hyde.

The moral of Wilde’s story is the same as Stevenson’s: devolution is stronger than evolution!

The themes of degeneration and devolution are also central to Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula.  And this goes for J. Sheridan Le
Fanu’s equally famous novel Carmilla.   We shall look at these books in my next two postings.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

JLS