"The Oldest and Strongest Emotion" : Lovecraft’s Inescapable Racism and Lovecraftian Horror in the 21st Century

Sammanfattning

Finding outdated views and racism in older literature is not uncommon, but the works of H.P. Lovecraft are especially rife with such instances. In the short stories “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Horror at Red Hook”, Lovecraft attempts to horrify his readers using techniques such as nested narratives and omission of detail. However, in both of these stories, the author’s racism also becomes central in creating horror. Through frequent use of othering, as defined by McConeghy and Khair, Lovecraft describes the villainous forces present in his short stories with racist terms, creating a contrast between the racialized other and the “safe” white protagonist in order to horrify his readers. In addition, I analyze The Ballad of Black Tom in order to uncover how author Victor LaValle develops his protagonist in order to separate him from Lovecraft’s story and give him the agency that the othered, antagonistic force in “Red Hook” never had. The evil, racialized mass of people that Lovecraft describes in “Red Hook” are recontextualized by LaValle, serving as a critique of the way Lovecraft constructs his villains. The aim of this paper is to argue that Lovecraft uses racism and othering in “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Horror at Red Hook” to terrify his readers, but that LaValle gives us a Lovecraftian horror from the perspective of the “monster” essentially in order to critique Lovecraft’s othering.