The only question at this point is whether Lovecraft would have been an anime avatar, a Roman statue, or a Central Asian dog
"How many layers of racism are you on right now?"
"I don't know, maybe 5? 6?"
"You are like little baby. Watch this"
"The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised."
lol. Houellebecq presaging a lot of his own soon-to-come preoccupations here
If none of his proteges outside Bloch got this, it's almost certainly because they, like Lovecraft, were possessed by Cthulhu's 1930s progressivism, which promised a utopian deliverance from Evil.
Coincidentally, Lovecraft wrote all his "great works" before this change of mind.
You want some true "Lovecraftian vertigo," as Houellebecq calls it, the contrast between forces hundreds of millions of years old, and the exact moment of the present?
How about that Lovecraft's theme about his own life was "Nothing ever happens"—the exact motto of /pol/?
This quote deserves more to be said about it: Lovecraft's disciples might not have gotten it "rationally," but they certainly got it viscerally, that's why they became disciples
Lovecraft was the Velvet Underground of horror writers, everyone who read him was swayed by him
They memed his works into the literary consciousness because they couldn't get it out of their own. And his heartbeat has only grown louder since then, not fainter
In a class of college students in 2001, maybe 1-2 might have known who he was. In 2021, I bet *most* do.
The modern person, like Lovecraft's disciples, feels what he did more and more viscerally, whether they like it or not, no matter the sweet solutions those profs are promising
They can't escape their senses, no matter how much they, like his protagonists, are horrified by them
An unwilling mind is forced to confront horrors beyond his comprehension, and from there dark truths he wishes he never knew. Many such cases.
I believe that Houellebecq was one of them, too.
(All of this, by the way, is from Michel Houellebecq's HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes both of them. Recommended to me by @yama_pain )
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