Speaking of fantastic terrible movies, I watched Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond last night. It was much better than its source material—a Lovecraft short titled, oddly enough, From Beyond—and it got me thinking about that Anglophilic old mollycoddle. Lovecraft, I mean. Not Stuart Gordon (who is neither Anglophilic nor a mollycoddle, as far as I can tell).

What is it about H.P. Lovecraft that endures? It can’t be his writing—precious and overwrought, creaky and humorless, the equivalent of faux Medieval antiques. It’s not the man himself, a caricature of the underappreciated artist muddling his fiction with talk of inferior races and his repetitive themes of indescribable horrors lurking about in crypts and mountain caves. Why does he linger then, on the edges of pop culture, much like his howling Other Gods linger on the edges of our world? Why hasn’t he faded into amusing irrelevance? Why do I criticize the man’s work and still count him as one of my earliest influences?

Lovecraft is a little like George Lucas, in that we wish he’d hired a ghostwriter to take his terrific concepts and turn them into literary gold. The Lovecraftian universe works despite itself, a perfect illustration of the almost, a set-up man tidying the path for more talented writers. Mignola and Gaiman come to mind; Mignola’s The Conqueror Worm is better than anything Lovecraft ever did, which may be an unfair comparison (Mignola had Hellboy and Nazis to work with) but I’m making it anyway. Chabon’s August Van Zorn showed promise but disappeared into the ether. And the less said about my early Lovecraft homages, the better.

Still, the man endures. Or, rather, his mythos endures. Perhaps the Lovecraftian philosophy was the greatest of his artistic creations, a kernel of truth buried beneath a soft pulpy shell. Call it existential vertigo if you must, but those of us in the know understand our abiding horror was packaged to perfection by Lovecraft. His portrayal of the universe as a cold, unfeeling abyss, populated by unknowable beings paying us little mind, strikes too close to home. It puts us in the role of the blind ant, antennae to the ground. It wounds our ego and corrodes our comfortable mythology of creator as loving father. Lovecraft’s gods are absentee, at best. And just as plausible as anything the world’s religions have come up with.[*]

I can’t think of any fictional literary world as open source as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. His influence is found in unlikely haunts, from video games (Capcom’s Marvel Super Heroes playable character Shuma-Gorath, the tentacled, monocular demon[†]), to New Age bookstores (a small but persistent community of crystal-wavers and chakra-navigators believe Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh to be the location of Atlantis[‡]), to the Necronomicon (an apocryphal book of conjuration by the non-existent mad Arab Abdul Alhazred) occupying its own obscure niche as the world’s first proprietary grimoire. And the list goes on, filled with fan fiction, satire, and marketing cross-overs (Church of Sub-Genius, Justice League, even the kid’s show The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy all contain subtle and not-so-subtle references to the Cthulhu mythos).

The communal imagination spawned from Lovecraft’s pen is reason enough for his recent surge in acceptance and popularity (can you imagine a “serious” writer counting Lovecraft as an influence fifteen years ago?). Lovecraft has gone from pulp to pop, a jump of Warholian proportions. For all his technical faults, for all his literary myopia, he accomplished what every writer dreams of—immortality and worship. The Other Gods would be proud. If they cared.