HP: madmind


Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence Rhode Island to his parents: Sarah Susan Lovecraft and George Phillips love craft. At the age of three Lovecraft father fell ill to a nasty case of syphilis and was admitted to a hospital in Boston, where he stayed until he died. H.P. and his mother stayed in Rhode Island, he was raised solely by his mother who homeschooled him and forbade him to leave the family home. His mother would every day tell young H.P. that he was hideous, while that might be misleading; she loved him very much and only wanted to protect him from the outside world.

From a young age H.P. was open only to one point of view, this was his mother’s Anglophile view of America and her intense racism. H.P. himself was racist only to a cultural point seeing all non-English cultures as inferior, despite this he would go on to marry a Jewish woman.

Lovecraft is generally associated with the genre of fiction he pioneered: “weird fiction” with common themes similar to that of Poe’s gothic style of literature, albeit on a far stranger scale. His stories included large creatures from the deep ends of space called the “Great Old Ones” these beings were for the most part so powerful and so massive, that they were literally incomprehensible to the human mind. These creatures formed the basis of “The Cthuluian Mythos” the fiction continuity where most of his stories took place. However the majority of his writing were various letters and essays covering topics from art criticism to politics, he is said to have composed over thirty thousand correspondences with various people, second only to Voltaire.

At the time it was wrote, Lovecraft’s work had little effect on the viewing public, while some small groups of eccentrics rather enjoyed his work, most others scoffed at it. He only ever published one of his stories as a novel “At the Mountains of Madness” and received less than two hundred dollars for his work.

Lovecraft had scant few influences but among them were Edgar Ellen Poe (who was by far the largest) and his own nightmares. Because of his mother’s imposed isolation, Lovecraft developed a very strange imagination, and having nowhere else to Channel it, started writing it down.

And thus, modern horror was born.