foulone 's review for:

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

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This is a very difficult book to rate and review. The stories are excellent - providing creepy atmospheres & spine-tingling horror. However, and it’s a big however, if I’d known how racist Lovecraft was before I started reading the book then I wouldn’t have read it. Sometimes you can make exceptions for the time period or separate the art from the artist. Yet, in this case, Lovecraft was a viciously racist man who actively praised Hitler and his stories are full of racist tropes and unforgivable statements. Whilst doing some background reading, I came across a quiz entitled ‘who said this - Lovecraft or Hitler?’, which tells you a lot about who Lovecraft was.

I would love it if someone rewrote the creepy tales with the racism removed - because the horror is truly horrifying and Lovecraft’s influence is apparent in so many authors’ work today. But the racism is very present in this book, and it’s nauseating.