Klinger as my guide, I would have been better equipped to navigate the peculiarities of the Lovecraftian universe. Then, like now, I found parts of Lovecraft’s work bewildering, so layered in florid prose that I would return to Poe as if to a lifeboat, thankful for his solidity. I loved his ability to create a sense of cosmic dread. I didn’t feel an emotional connection to Lovecraft the way LaValle did as a kid, but the apprentice writer in me was thrilled by his inventiveness and a certain voracity of the imagination that shaped everything - history, myth, superstition, reality, fiction, science, everything - to suit his vision. I came to Lovecraft in my late teens when a friend gave me a copy of “At the Mountains of Madness,” the story of a geologist whose explorations of Antarctica uncover the remnants of ancient alien life-forms.
“You can love something, love someone,” LaValle writes, “ and criticize them.
Eventually he came to see that there is no way to cut a figure like Lovecraft - one of the founders of American horror, whose work has inspired generations of writers - out of his life. Klinger, LaValle - an award-winning African-American novelist and critic - writes that he discovered Lovecraft at the age of 10 and was “here for all of it: the high anxiety, waves of madness and the terror of human insignificance.” Then, at 15, he began to understand the underlying racial prejudices in the stories, and rejected Lovecraft entirely. LOVECRAFT (Liveright, 512 pp., $39.95), which was edited by Leslie S. In his introduction to the second volume of THE NEW ANNOTATED H.
Lovecraft to be a racist - it’s a long process of soul-searching that ends in compromise. And for some - like the horror writer Victor LaValle, who discovered his childhood hero H. Still others try to quarantine the art from the artist, as if one might be spared the contagion of the other. Others reassess their taste, wondering how they were ever able to enjoy a novel with pedophilia at its center, or the stand-up routine filled with misogyny. What to do when you discover that your favorite author (or comedian, or filmmaker, or actor) is a bigot? For some, it inspires a total rejection of the artist, whose work becomes suddenly intolerable.
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