September 14, 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! 

Lovecraft makes extensive use of racist images in both his early and later works.   These images are drawn from Lovecraft’s observations of members of the non-white race that he most despised and abhorred,  African Americans,  especially as he observed them in the slums of his hometown Providence, Rhode Island and at close quarters during his brief residence in the Red Hook district of New York. 

Lovecraft focuses on the simian and ape-like characteristics that he insisted on seeing in the faces and forms of  the locals and then simply projects these onto his monsters.  He does this in a very conscious and deliberate manner in order to enhance the horror and the repugnance that these creatures inspire in the minds of his readers (or at least, so Lovecraft presumed).

Check out my book for analysis of how Lovecraft uses these images creatively in some of his most popular tales: “Arthur Jermyn,” “Herbert West—Reanimator,” and “The Rats in the Walls”!

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

JLS

September 4, 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!

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

Lovecraft’s theory of evolution reveals a fear on his part that devolution is a stronger force than evolution.  In my previous posting, I argued that Lovecraft’s theory 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 (1891).

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; then,  the painting  becomes beautiful again, but Dorian dies, and he leaves behind  the ugly, deformed body of his alter ego—much as Dr.  Jekyll in death left behind the hideous body of Mr. Hyde.

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

JLS