He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.What use does the Necronomicon even have? Almost every time it's mentioned in a Lovecraft story, it either is implied to be cursed outright, factually inaccurate (the repeated instances of a protagonist seeing/experiencing something only 'hinted at' or 'not even whispered of' in the book itself, which end up being large swaths of the background lore by the time you've read his complete fiction, leaving one wondering what the hell is even in that book if it somehow doesn't include all that we've already seen by that point), that fact that few if any extant copies seem to actually be complete, and that every existing copy is itself a copy of a copy of a translation of a copy of a book that is self-admittidly written by an insane dark age dessert wanderer who just wrote down stuff he heard/thought he heard. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.Īlthough Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.

Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

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