This is an interesting article by Marc Fitch for The Federalist, and it’s well worth reading in its entirety. We all know how fashionable it is to automatically dismiss and sneer at horror fiction – and not just horror fiction but speculative fiction in general – especially among those who have never read a word of it (and it’s not just culture snobs and literary critics who do this). Usually it’s because people will unthinkingly assume that horror fiction is all about mindless entertainment and cheap chocks and thrills. And of course they couldn’t be more wrong. First of all, there’s nothing wrong with entertainment, since it takes just as much skill and talent, if not more so, to create intelligent and first-rate entertainment as it takes to write some “literary” novel about social issues. But if we do have to deal with social issues, in all their dreariness, then it’s obviously also the case that the best of speculative fiction can easily rival the best of literary fiction when it comes to addressing, confronting, and commenting on these issues. And speculative fiction usually does this while also being interesting and exciting at the same time (in contrast to literary fiction, which will put you to sleep after the first page, as I know from a lot of personal experience).

Anyway, here’s a quote from the article:

Bram Stoker Award-winner Sarah Langan says, “Horror and Sci-Fi are the most political of all genres, including literary. It’s all they ever cover—violence, war, social policy and hierarchy, and most importantly, right and wrong.”

And here, of course, is the real reason I linked to this article (with quotes about Lovecraft and cosmic horror from Nick Mamatas and Laird Barron):

Today, modern horror fiction is dominated by what is known as “cosmic horror,” and its godfather is H.P. Lovecraft, a man who has been dead since the 1930s but whose work has seen a resurgence unlike any author in modern memory. Lovecraft was virtually unknown during his time. Mamatas—whose forthcoming novel I Am Providence is a murder mystery set during a Lovecraft festival—is an expert on all things Lovecraft.

“In his lifetime, Lovecraft wasn’t very commercially ambitious. He never really tried to submit novels, and was happy to be published in the amateur press as well as the pulp magazines.” Lovecraft wrote about “elder gods” – ancient, inter-dimensional beings that are occasionally summoned by occultists and the sight of which drives people insane. Lovecraft was a shut-in who feared the waves of immigrants coming to the country. His racism is the subject of at least one panel discussion at every Lovecraft festival every year. Some have suggested that his vision of these demonic beings may have been a metaphor for his fear of race-mixing, but the hard evidence is scant. His views certainly don’t explain his popularity in a genre of writers who pride themselves on inclusivity.

“Certainly, Lovecraft could find many co-thinkers were he alive today, but his popularity has more to do with the cosmic horror—the idea that humanity is inconsequential in the scheme of things—and the camp value of his otherworldly creatures—than his politics.” Lovecraft’s popularity may be more about religious transference than politics, according to Barron. “Lovecraft’s ascent coincides with the steady decline of Christian-Judeo primacy. HPL wrote about gods that weren’t gods. He naturalized spirituality into the realm of science fiction and sketched a framework that supports mutability, adaptation.”

Mamatas has said some truly horrendously idiotic things about Lovecraft in the past (in this post, for example, he manages to get pretty much everything wrong, which is quite an impressive feat), but here, at least, he seems to be on the right path – although, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure who is saying what in that last paragraph, the way it’s written. But the main point, and this simply cannot be stressed enough, is that Lovecraft’s fiction was about cosmic horror and not his private racist opinions, and that’s why his stories are so popular today.

Finally, Thomas Ligotti also gets a mention:

Similar to Lovecraft, but less well known, is the cultish figure of Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti picked up many of Lovecraft’s themes and ideas but treated them with a fierce nihilism that showed man as nothing more than a puppet, doomed to a banal existence of being pulled at by outside forces. The horror of his vision is often the horror of inescapable nothingness.

A fitting culmination.