Hermenautic Circle blog

There are few greater examples of the alchemy of pulp fiction than the tales of H.P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937), the weird uncle overlord of the twentieth century horror story. Working with the febrile sensations and adjectival miasma that pervade the lowbrow lit of the time, Lovecraft crafted a body of work that expressed, in the midst of its writhing Poe-faced cephalopodic thrashings, a new quality of the cosmic imagination. He called it outsideness, a stark vertigo in the face of a cosmos utterly hostile to human meanings — including traditional images of evil. This appropriately “nameless” cosmic dread was the affective and visionary expression of Lovecraft’s own pitiless and misanthropic philosophical materialism, which peels back the religious mask of the sublime to discover the meaningless bio-physical clockwork that modernity installed in the rotting corpse of the old enchanted universe — that very cosmos whose uncanny afterimages continue to compose the core material of fantasy. As if that weren’t enough, Lovecraft also deployed the productive referentiality of meta-fiction in order to create a virtual gamespace — the so-called Cthulhu Mythos — whose infection of the collective imaginary has brought his pulp visions to a half-life impervious to the in-jokes (like Cthulhu plushies) we might throw at them to keep them at bay.

Each day, Hilobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday. Click here for more Hilo Hero shout-outs.