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1924: then as now, science was displacing previously dependable explanations of life, decentring the human, cutting away the moral underpinnings of the universe. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a genteel New Englander whose family had been reduced to poverty by the death of his father from syphilitic paresis, found himself declassed and living among "monstrous half-breeds" in the infamous Red Hook district of New York.
Howard had been a sickly child, dependent on his mother until she followed her husband to the asylum and died, and even at 34 years of age had no idea how to earn a living. He married a milliner, but she got ill, too, and had to give up her business. After that his only hope lay in a cacophonous, incantatory prose, a repressed but murderous rage and a deep fear of non-Euclidean geometry. New York soon sent him back to Providence, where he lived in poverty with his Aunt Lilian; but out of the Red Hook defeat emerged the core stories of his oeuvre.
Lovecraft intended these tales to crawl with the unnameable, the meaningless horror that lies behind the world we see. As an earnest of this the mysterious Old Ones, who "filtered" down from the stars a hundred million years ago, sleep beneath the Pacific, waiting to be woken by "mixed-blooded and mentally aberrant" worshippers. Their monstrous servants, genetically modified from our ancestors, suck and slither in the waste spaces of Tibet. Their abandoned Cyclopean cities rear up out of the Antarctic ice, or hang off the Himalayan mountainsides as "curious clinging cubes and ramparts".
The...