I really hate that H.P. Lovecraft has been reduced to being “the problematic, racist author,” and the only one. I recently came across a reading that simply summed him up as a fascinating author, “but a horrible man with horrible ideas”; but this same group gave Agatha Christie a fucking tongue bath (And then There Were None was not always called that), uncritically praised child molester Marion Zimmer Bradley, and read off poems by Modernist poets that were eliminationist Anti-Semites.

Hmm I wonder if the fact that so much of the wdstern literary canon was created by bigots might have wide reaching implications and consequences in the modern day, and that it’s maybe something we should spend more time interrogating instead of dismissing it as a natural product of the times.

Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?

Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.

Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.

Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.

All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.

The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.

It’s hard not to appreciate how much HP Lovecraft has influenced modern horror and media.