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By the Mystic Housatonic: The Platypus Reads Part LXXIV


What's good in Lovecraft?  What good can their be in the writings of a thin-skinned, morbid, racist, hack whose every page screams with overly-articulate horror at the meaninglessness of the Neo-Darwinian universe? 

H.P. Lovecraft intentionally situated himself as the continuator of Edgar Allan Poe; of whose writings we might ask similar questions.  However, in his deep love of Southern New England, he has just as much in common with Nathanael Hawthorne.  Like Lovecraft, the quality of Hawthorne's writing is inconsistent and has the peculiar flavor of the literary autodidact.  The power of Hawthorne's writing doesn't come from high literary style, or flawless creative art, but from his ability to give us a vision of New England and its inhabitants that rises above the mundane to resound with spiritual power.  The same can be said, on a lesser level, for H.P. Lovecraft.

No matter where the far-flung action of the Lovecraftian imagination may take us, to the snowy depths of the Antarctic or the heart of the cosmos where the idiot god Azathoth devours the universe to the tune of insane pipes, the anchor of the work will always be firmly grounded in the wooded hills and quiet townships of New England.  This strong sense of place gives the doomed characters of Lovecraft's drama something on which to take a stand, however weak and fleeting, against the cosmic horrors that they confront.  They are not Robert Howard's barbarians, creatures of instinct, but civilized men, standing up for all that is good and noble in the world against the inevitable onslaught of meaninglessness and decay.  They are Puritans who have long ago lost their faith, but not the steel that toppled tyrants and empires.  At rock bottom, Lovecraft is, with all his flaws, Chesterton's patriot.  He loves his homeland, and with whatever tools he has, rough and awkward as they are, he seeks to fashion New England into a place that can hold weight in the great cosmic scale and, if only for a moment, stand against the tyrannies of a vast, cold, and meaningless universe.  The giant must be slain because it is gigantic.

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