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[LiteraryAltHistory] What if Lovecraft wasn't racist?

Axiomatic

Axiomatic

Location
the Literature Club
Imagine that Lovecraft still mostly goes through his childhood in New England, still recites poetry by heart at 3, still falls in love with Greek Mythology and then E.A. Poe, still writes about a heartless mechanistic universe in which humanity and all its values are utterly insignificant, in short, is still into cosmic horror - but he isn't a racist.

After all, he realizes, compared to the alien unknowableness of the things that gnaw at reality in the dark corners of the world, someone who was merely raised in an African jungle is your blood-brother - his soul is indistinguishable from yours at cosmic scales.

So how does HP Lovecraft's literary output change? Do you think he would still have as profound an impact on culture as he did in the Original Timeline?
 
Some of his work, like Mountains of Madness, Rats in the Walls, and Herbert West did not have a racist component IIRC. Or at least not a strong one, so some of his hits are unchanged by removing Lovecraft's racism.

Some of his other work however was obviously more racist. Truly the most shocking scene in Shadow over Innsmouth was when our Anglo-Saxon hero looks into the mirror and realizes the eldritch horror of POSSIBLY BEING IRISH!! :p

But when we read even the more problematic or bluntly racist stories I think we filter those elements out and read because we like the spookiness of the stories. Its the idea that there is a malevolent, incomprehensible reality just beyond our own that sells his stories. That if confronted by it we would abandon our science and reason and retreat back into a savage, untamed, wild suicidal, sociopathic frenzy that sells his stories. Our faith in a scientific, rational universe is pretty fundamental to modern societies, Lovecraft effectively fucks with that faith and that is what sells.

Perhaps when the stories were written they were read in part to enjoy the racism but not today. I am not sure how popular he would have been in the 1940s if he couldn't tap into the latent xenophobia of the time. This may make him less popular than he is today.
 
This is unanswerable because Howie's literary oeuvre is so dependent on a queasy mix between xenophobia and xenophilia that it's difficult to see how he could have gotten to a story like The Shadow over Innsmouth or "The Thing on the Doorstep" or The Shadow out of Time without having first written "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family". It's entirely possible he spends most of his literary career writing comic stories like "Old Bugs" and "Sweet Ermengarde".

Now, as for his personal life, he probably has a much better relationship with Sonia Greene and their breakup is probably more amicable.
 
Well we sure as fuck ain't gonna ever see Shadow Over Innsmouth be written.
 
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