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?