Supernatural Horror in Literature

H. P. Lovecraft

Hun 2013 · The Palingenesis Project (Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group)

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Originally published in 1927 in a small-circulation amateur magazine,
spanning the period from antiquity until the 1930s, and covering both
the Anglo-American world and Continental Europe, Lovecraft’s essay
remains unparallelled as a survey of horror literature in our
hemisphere. Said literature’s emergence as a genre coincided with the
institutional establishment of liberalism, which represents a
diametrically opposed worldview. This would suggest that horror
literature, even if inadvertently or subconsciously, represents an
attempt at escaping the limitations of the secular, materialist,
rationalist Weltanschauung of liberal modernity, as well as a
desire for meaning in a world rendered meaningless through ‘liberation’
from hierarchies, folk traditions, the occult, and the supernatural.
Also of interest is the fact that the aesthetics of Gothic horror are
invariably and luxuriantly beautiful (if in a dark way), whereas the
logical extreme of rationality (utilitarianism, standardisation) is
inherently anti-aesthetic. Would this not indicate, then, that the Age
of Reason marked the beginning of a process that concluded in late
modernity with the wholesale destruction of beauty, except where it, or
the counterfeiting of it, was dictated by economic necessity? If so, we
may view Lovecraft’s essay not merely as a resource for those seeking
entertainment within a genre of literature, but also a map for those
seeking to escape, and begin to transcend, the despair engendered by a
worldview that pronounced itself dead when someone spoke of ‘the end of
history’.

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) was an American author of weird fiction, a genre pre-dating the conventions of genre fiction that encompasses supernatural, mythical, and science fiction. Obscure in his lifetime, he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. As much a scientist as an aesthete and intellectual, his outlook was fundamentally aristocratic, traditionalist, and anti-humanist—in his and our age, a man against time.