June 16, 2024

Greetings Everyone!

I hope 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.   You can order it online from Bloomsbury, my  publishers, or from Amazon and other online booksellers around the world.  The book is also available in bookstores here in the states as well as overseas.

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

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 birthright.   This was the most traumatic event in Lovecraft’s life and it activated his white fragility, which had been latent up until this time.  Lovecraft’s racism intensified as well, for he could see that he wasn’t as privileged or superior to the so-called inferior, non-white races as he had believed.

Lovecraft’s loss of his privileged lifestyle, 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 ended up in failure.   This pattern 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 and  psychosomatic problems that plagued him  in Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft!

JLS