August 23, 2024

Greetings Everyone!

My new book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales, was recently published by Bloomsbury, the foremost academic publisher in the United States and in the United Kingdom!

I hope that all of you will pick up a copy; you can order it online from the publishers and, of course, 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’s theory of evolution reveals a fear on his part that degeneration is a stronger force than development; that human beings can more easily degenerate than they can regenerate.  Lovecraft’s theory derives, in part, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a book that Lovecraft was very familiar with.

Mr. Hyde is described by numerous characters in the novel who get a close look at him as “deformed” or “degenerate.”  When  Jekyll transforms into Hyde, this can be interpreted as a devolution from a higher form of life into a lower one.  Over the course of Jekyll’s transformations, Hyde begins to dominate Jekyll, such that Jekyll finds it increasingly difficult to make the transition back to his integrated self.

Finally, in the climax of the novel, Jekyll cannot return to being Jekyll, and frustrated, he commits suicide and dies.  Interestingly, however, Jekyll still cannot break free; the dead body that remains is Hyde’s body.  The transformation is permanent, even in death. 

Here, Stevenson seems to be making the same argument that Lovecraft makes in his hybrid, degenerative monster tales: degeneration is a stronger force than regeneration. 

Or, to put it more bluntly, devolution is stronger than evolution!

JLS