One Lovecraft story cited often in this connection is “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927), where cosmic horror rears its head in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was in the 1920s, as it is today, on the fringes of white middle-class areas. As anyone who has dipped his or her toes into critical commentary on Lovecraft knows, there’s a school of Lovecraft criticism that emphasizes the social meaning of his work.Īccording to this school of thought, the basic scenario facing a typical Lovecraft protagonist, where the familiar world is under attack by ghastly, “unutterable” forces from another dimension, is plainly a metaphor for what Lovecraft thought of as the situation of the conservative white Anglo-Saxon male in an America of the 1920s subject to transformation through an influx of foreigners from wildly different backgrounds. It would be silly to deny Lovecraft’s interest in racial controversies or his role as a forecaster of the tensions that would strain the political process as racial firestorms erupted and race came to dominate public discussion. Reading these letters is a litmus test for anyone today who considers himself or herself enlightened and tolerant. Lovecraft unquestionably held ugly and ignorant views about Africans and Asians, and at times used abusive language in reference to them in the many thousands of letters he wrote to friends, colleagues, and admirers during his forty-six years.
His detractors deny that we should continue to recognize and venerate such a figure through the bestowing of his likeness. Lovecraft was as politically incorrect as they come. Though few dispute that Lovecraft had an incalculable influence on horror, fantasy, and speculative fiction, and that the weird field as it exists today is pretty much unimaginable without that influence, the man wrote candidly in letters to friends about his hostility toward dark-skinned immigrants and his longing for a more stable and homogenous polity. Lovecraft’s creepy visage no longer goes to the winners of the World Fantasy Awards. Le Guin, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Peter Straub, to name just a few, have won the illustrious prizes.
The tradition of bestowing these awards began in 1975, at the annual World Fantasy Convention, and in the years since, luminaries such as Robert Bloch, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Richard Matheson, T.E.D. The World Fantasy Awards have long been some of the most coveted prizes for authors who write stories and novels in the weird, horror, fantasy, and slipstream genres. Lovecraft (1890-1937), designed by Gahan Wilson, in recognition of their achievements, or whether a more politically acceptable figure should be the emblem of the revered program. In 2014, a storm arose over whether winners of the annual World Fantasy Award should continue to receive a bust of H.P.
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