Lovecraft was a visionary who left an indelible stamp on horror and SFF. Lovecraft was also a racist xenophobe who championed classism and celebrated segregation. Lovecraft was, in a word, problematic. As we grapple with the personal and professional legacies of many authors whose views are anathema to our own, it’s neither productive nor even possible to simply “cancel” Lovecraft. We first of all have to understand the milieu that produced and supported him, in order to repair what lingers of it. And second, we have to grapple with the idea that people with bad ideas can also have good ideas. This is much harder than cancelling. But it’s necessary if we also want to honour the progress (and lack thereof) of SFF history, and more importantly, to honour the subcultures and individuals who took meaning and solace from Lovecraft’s work, using it to celebrate being different, outside, apart.
I firmly believe that art has the unlimited potential to transform and redeem, and that applies to previous works of art as much as anything else. Here are books and authors who took on the project of transformation and reclamation of cosmic horror, of doing Lovecraft without Lovecraft.
The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Kiernan has long been a Lovecraftian and cosmic horror writer, and really any of her books will show you space-, time-, and mind-breaking phenomena. The Drowning Girl is one of her best, featuring a queer woman who may be experiencing symptoms of her mental illness or may be haunted by a woman (or entity) with vast and terrible secrets. Lovecraft, as a consequence of his time, had an imperfect understanding of mental illness and “madness.” Kiernan gives us a far more nuanced exploration of the inconsistencies and possibilities of the mind.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
This is a direct and explicit critique of Lovecraft’s racism and the gatekeeping of SFF/Horror as well. Tom is a musician drawn into a conspiracy of white men, and what he discovers is both unsettlingly alien but also exhaustingly familiar. The ending is dark and bleak and amazing in a way that even Lovecraft never managed, and I still think about it years later.
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
Matt Ruff always finds incisive ways to take current political narratives and turn them on their head. He challenged 9/11 narratives with Mirage, and challenges racism and the horrors of the Jim Crow South with this novel about badass veteran Atticus Turner. This will be a series on HBO produced by Jordan Peele very soon, so get reading!
A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs
These two novellas are both pointed ripostes to Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia. One features a Latina woman who must return home fight foreign threats–and here “foreign” means both interdimensional horrors and US black ops in a scathingly apt reminder of how the CIA interfered in Latin America. The other features a journey into the American South, and one very dark folk tradition. Both are genuinely scary, and I was sublimely creeped out the whole way through reading both of them. John Hornor Jacobs is way underappreciated in general, but ignoring this particular book verges on criminal.
Catfish Lullaby by A. C. Wise
A. C. Wise’s debut novel features a queer black protagonist trying to unravel the terrible mysteries of a local family and what they get up to in their isolated house in the woods. His compassion and bravery is the counterbalance to horrors both cosmic and depressingly human.
She Walks in Shadows by ed. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
This collection of Lovecraftian fiction by and featuring women is edited by and filled with all-stars all writing about strange beings whom Lovecraft rarely ventured to describe: women. Yeah, not many women in Lovecraft’s works, but these authors go a long way toward fixing that.
Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror by ed. Joyce Carol Oates
This book offers additional female and feminist takes on Lovecraft’s worlds and ideas. There’s an early work from Tamsyn Muir now of Gideon the Ninth fame, as well as from mainstays of cosmic horror like Caitlin R. Kiernan, Gemma Files, Sonya Taaffe, and more.
American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett
Think Pleasantville meets Lovecraft in this tale about the dread perils of suburbia and nostalgia. What if cosmic horrors found us as fascinating and strange as we found them? What if they wanted to stay and enact our human foibles, and force humans to join in? Sounds funny, and part of it are, but it’s also smart and scary.
Uzumaki by Junji Ito
This is, in my opinion, Japanese horror master Junji Ito’s most magnificently unsettling work. Inexplicable compulsions and transformations begin to take hold of a small Japanese town, gradually making the residents obsessed with replicating spiral patterns. Vignettes about the townspeople are tied together by Shuichi and Kirie, who observe the phenomena and are eventually dragged into the collective hysteria. You’ll never look at snails the same way again.
Innsmouth by Megan James
Have you ever wished that you could have a wee little shoggoth for a pet, keeping it in a cat carrier and letting it out to make its cute little “gibber, gibber” noises? No? Well, you will. This adorably irreverent take on Lovecraft’s whole mythos is just starting, but promises to be an ongoing delight.
Death Sentences by Kawamata Chiaki
Six interconnected stories tell a single overarching narrative of one man’s disturbing success in using art to break time and space. It’s fitting, then, that the novel spans from the early twentieth century to the distant future, and from Japan to France to colonies on Mars. Mysterious surrealist Who May is behind it all, but was his work an accident or an act of genius—or malice? People have compared this to The Ring, which is fair in terms of some of its themes, but it’s also definitely pure cosmic horror.
The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
What’s it like to live in a universe where the physics are fickle and the gods even more so? Vellitt Boe knows, and she doesn’t have time for bombastic Kadath or any other such Daring Adventure. She has a world to save and a girl to find, a young woman who was formerly her student, but has since disappeared and disturbed a god by her absence.
Caitlin Kiernan’s _Agents of Dreamland_ is also a fine addition to the Lovecraft-inspired canon, and I think her short story “Houses under the Sea” is a masterpiece.
None of the authors mentioned above for a start.
Big ups for Uzumaki. Genuinely chilling – a book a I remember long after reading.