Lovecraft’s Otherworldly Xenophobia – Areo

Other qualities further entangle Lovecraft’s horror fiction with his personal ethnocentrism. As well as fear, Lovecraft’s creatures vividly evoke disgust and the threat of disease—they are “oozing,” “gangrenous,” “gelatinous,” “putrid” and trickling with “foetid greenish-yellow ichor.” Lovecraft was acutely sensitive to his own health, complaining throughout his life of various miscellaneous ailments: headaches, dizziness and “spells of poor concentrating power,” which at least some observers attributed to hypochondria. One can speculate, without being too reductive, on the influence of the death of Lovecraft’s father, apparently from syphilis, on his son’s preoccupation with illness and hereditary contamination.