Happy New Year Everyone!
I hope that all of you will pick up a copy of my recent
book, Horror as Racism in H. P.
Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales!
Lovecraft lost his privileged lifestyle in his teen
years, when he and his mother were forced to move out of their Providence Rhode Island mansion and live
instead in rented rooms located just blocks from their former house.
This was the most traumatic event in Lovecraft’s life
and his racial hatred against non-whites intensified, for he could see that he and
his mother weren’t as privileged or superior to these so-called inferior races
as he had believed.
This event, also, triggered a pattern of loss and
failure that characterized Lovecraft’s life from that moment onwards: whenever
he found himself facing a “crisis,” he would freeze up and be unable to
act—thus, whatever he was trying to accomplish usually ended up in
failure.
The pattern of loss and failure is evident not only in
the various personal crises that Lovecraft found himself having to face in his
adult life, but we see this same pattern of behavior reflected in the lives and
careers of the fictional protagonists in his major works.
You can read all about Lovecraft’s personal traumas
and the psychological & psychosomatic problems that plagued him in Horror
as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft!
All of these traumas and problems laid the foundation
for most of his greatest tales, especially “The Rats in the Walls,” The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Dreams in the
Witch-House."
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107690/
JLS
No comments:
Post a Comment