Lovecraft’s views don’t improve when compared to his contemporaries: Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and F. But that is hardly the biggest stain on his legacy. His literary pretensions to be the next Edgar Allen Poe mostly failed, and reading his early poetical works can feel like being cudgeled with a thesaurus. He also wrote tales of ghosts and vampires, science fiction, fantasies, parodies, poems, and exceedingly boring accounts of his own dreams. This is what we think of when we think of Lovecraft: the linked tales that make up the Cthulu Mythos (very few of which involve Cthulu), the Necronomicon, and the less-well known Dream Cycle starring Randolph Carter. Of the major Lovecraftian themes, the cosmic horror has aged by far the best, and it is upon this foundation that his whole reputation rests. Lovecraft wrote scores of stories, of which 68 were published during his lifetime and after his death. His characters encounter beings with unfathomable power, and while they mostly live to tell the tale, they suffer through an awful epiphany - that their thoughts don’t matter, their desires don’t matter, and their entire existence is temporary and fragile… a soap bubble ready to burst. Lovecraft is the horror of insignificance.
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