bhirts 's review for:

4.0

H.P. Lovecraft is very, very racist; he's racist in a way that goes beyond "time" and "upbringing", beyond background eccentricities or quirks. His racism pervades his world-view, it is intrinsically tied to his fear of the vast unknown and the Other and made all the more pathetically, gratingly obnoxious by his propensity for embellishment and grandiosity: it is intrinsically tied to what makes him a "great" writer.

Lovecraft's fiction seems to be an amazing trampoline of imagination, teasing your mind along, hinting and provoking in all the right ways. Beyond that he was simply an incredible aesthete; "Lovecraftian" is now a recognizable, cohesive adjective, distinct from "fantasy", "horror", "sci-fi" and all their constituents, can apply to any medium and extends beyond what he himself crafted with it.

My favorite story was "Celephais".