’s true. I heard it on Writer’s Almanac this morning. Today, August 20th, is the anniversary of that grand sir of the horror genre, H. P. Lovecraft. Happy Cthulhu Day!

For some strange reason, Google has not seen fit to commemorate this happy occasion with a custom logo. They celebrate Edvard Munch by turning their title image into a digital replica of “The Scream”; they give us Sherlock Holmes with pipe, deerstalker, and magnifying glass for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; but no eldritch squid-like beasties grace the page on Lovecraft’s special day. I propose we begin to make amends for this lack, thus:

In any case, Writer’s Almanac briefly quotes the author:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Lovecraft spoke from experience; his own great fears visibly inform his body of work. “Fear of the unknown” has as many manifestations as their are unknowns to fear; that which haunted Lovecraft most could probably be said to be fear of The Other.

Given that we just had a run of blog posts concerning racism–and, inescapably, other forms of Fearing/Persecuting The Other in society such as sexism and homophobia–it seems appropriate to point up Bruce Lord’s 2004 essay “The Genetics of Horror: Sex and Racism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction.” Says Lord,

It is my contention that Lovecraft’s anxiety concerning racial degeneration and his anxiety concerning all matters sexual intersect at several points in Lovecraft’s body of work, and that together they cast a new angle of light on Lovecraft’s conception of humanity and its fate. In Lovecraft’s vision of humanity in decline, sexual reproduction causes an effect exactly opposite to Darwinian evolution: negative biological traits propagate whilst positive ones become extinct. For Lovecraft, the ‘natural’ act of reproduction is not equated with life, but with degeneration, decay, and eventually death. Lovecraft’s primary conception of humanity as an insignificant species dwarfed by the sheer scope of the universe and the indifferent horrors that occupy it thus is coupled with another, equally horrific fate. Humanity, as portrayed in Lovecraft’s fiction, is not only incapable of resisting the impact of racial and hereditary degeneration, but also incapable of maintaining itself ‘properly’ via sexual reproduction, an act that for Lovecraft gives birth to nothing but nightmare.

Consider it an introduction to your assigned reading^* for the night. (Don’t ever say I never gave you nuthin’.) Get to it so we can discuss tomorrow, ‘K?

Go on. It’s fascinating stuff. Really!

^*Extra Credit: The corresponding Wikipedia page and section