The Outsider's Ink: H.P. Lovecraft on Monsters, Madness, and the Writing Life

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Welcome to Hacking It! - Writer by Trade.

I live in a gritty part of the city.

And you know, out here, you learn to mind your own business.

You see all kinds.

The lonely, the strange, the ones who just don't fit.

And sometimes the ones who don't fit are the ones who see things the clearest.

It's the Halloween season, and to celebrate it, I like to launch the next couple of episodes as part of a series focusing on standout horror fiction writers.

Tonight, we're talking about one of the ultimate outsiders, a guy who spent most of his life in the shadows, writing about things so big and so terrifying they made humanity look like an afterthought.

His name was HP.

Lovecraft.

We're going to trace how a lonely, broke guy from Providence, Rhode Island, who barely saw his work in print, ended up creating a modern mythology.

We'll look at his life, his grind, and how his feeling of being a stranger in his own time gave us a way to talk about our own alienation.

And I'd like to start us out with a quote by him.

This is from The Call of Cthulhu.

Who knows the end?

What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

Here is another one.

I shall never sleep calmly again, when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhollowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea.

Known and favoured by a nightmare cult, ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monster stone city again to the sun and air.

Well, it's like poetry.

It's a prose that we're not really used to listening to, to reading.

It has a dated 19th century, maybe even 18th century kind of a feel to it.

And yet, this is the prose of HP.

Lovecraft.

A man who worked by himself, just like a lot of writers.

I think we can identify with that.

Let's look back a little bit on his life.

If you don't know anything about HP.

Lovecraft, I'm going to just give you some broad strokes, and then you can dive deep into his life, the details, his influences, his background, how he ended up in life.

And there are a lot of places to go for that.

I'll put them in the show notes, and I'll also put them on cityscapepress.com.

That's the website for a press in which this podcast and blogs related to writing and this kind of a topic, if you're interested, are found, so check it out.

So he started out early in life like something, a little bit sounds like a preamble to a psychological thriller.

I mean, he started out with a dad that was in his early childhood committed to an asylum.

And an asylum back in those days was just a place where people were either voluntarily or involuntarily committed to.

We've seen all the horror stories, and what remains of them is very little, just ruins.

It's something that we talk about, or hopefully start talking about today, the need for this kind of place.

Of course, revamped and made into a benevolent place, because these places could be, depending on how much money you had, money, one of those things, and the way it was run, it could be a horrifying place.

A place that really serves as a, you know, really as a horror story, but in real life.

So that's where his father was.

He had a terrible disease of the mind, and just compulsions and all of these things are in the background of HP.

Lovecraft, the young guy, the young kid.

His mother was, by all accounts, even his own, an overbearing person, a person that today would say, this is kind of a toxic relationship.

I mean, it's someone who is following everything you do, doesn't let you have friends, and at the same time, she wasn't necessarily a doting person.

She was someone that projected, and this isn't going to read into it, but I'm just going to say that she seems like someone that projected her inner fears and her own problems on this poor kid, and she gave him a lot of complexes.

Early on, he was a sickly kid, and that's not that uncommon for these days.

As you're a young kid, you can fall sick a lot, but he was probably a little bit more than average, and he made him feel like a piece of dirt, really, and didn't give him that confidence.

That confidence early on for any child, if it doesn't come from your parents, it's got to come from your grandparents, or maybe your friends reinforce something in you, or if nothing else, you look up to somebody in sports, or in music, or in a show, something to give you a feel of how you should pattern yourself because you're forming yourself.

You're starting out looking at the templates that are available, if you could call it that.

And he didn't have any of that HP.

Lovecraft.

He just was on his own, he studied, he was a studious guy, but he was what we would call today, and even then, a self-taught person, an autodidact, just to use the fancy word, just someone who teaches himself a lot of things.

He didn't go to college, and I think that pained him a lot, and I think he tried to make up for that a lot, and you can see it in this, I wouldn't want to call it flowery writing, but the first time that I encountered HP.

Lovecraft's Cthulhu, I was just in the bookstore, and sifting through books, and looking at the horror section, and the sci-fi section.

I found him in the sci-fi section, actually.

I didn't really go to the horror section, very seldom, I'm not too attracted to the offerings there.

I thought I wasn't, and I bumped into his book, and I started reading through it, and I knew about Lovecraft, I knew some, I knew that he wrote these very strange stories, very weird, very psychological, very perhaps allegorical.

So I had a kind of a background that maybe you have to, if you've never delved into his writing.

And I started to, I looked at the cover, I remember I bought it right away, it was a beautiful cover.

Don't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you do, it attracts you, right?

Marketing, important.

So I looked at it, and it had this graphic of just this oceanic feeling to it, you know.

And I thought, okay, this thing looks interesting, it's cut really beautifully, you know, looks like a special edition.

And I started, you know, paging or leafing through it, okay.

And I found myself very attracted to the world that he pulls you in.

It sounds like something that's written by a guy who is himself some kind of an alien.

And I don't mean that in an insulting way.

I think he sounds like an original.

I mean, if you would have peaked into Salvador Dali's studio when he was nothing, I think you would have thought the same thing.

You would have scratched your head and said, what is this?

This looks surreal, you know.

Even if you didn't know the word, you think like this looks like the stuff of dreams or nightmares or definitely not a representation of reality.

Well, I think that's a lot that's going on, or a lot of the same is going on with HP.

Lovecraft and the crafting, appropriately named, of this horror genre.

We'll touch upon it a little bit.

I'm going to just give a couple of more biographical notes on him.

One of the things that distinguished him, I think, was that working the way he was working, the life that he led, and I am brushing over it because this is a short podcast.

Like I said, there's a couple of sources.

One of them will be, I think it's just hplovecraft.com, and you get access to a lot of his letters, his journals, some very controversial things that he said.

And you know, if you know anything about him, you know that he has some very bad ideas about ethnicities, about people, and it feels like he works them out in his stories, the idea of the other.

He was a real Yankee, a guy came from a middle-class family, and he was not a nobody, his family, but families, over time, they fall into decay, just like anything, and that's where he was, that's where he comes in.

So you can find a lot about his life there, and many other places, because he's a big figure, and he's got a big fan following.

And you can also go to any streaming platform, maybe not every stream, but I'm sure you can access it.

If you go to IMDB and you look up HP.

Lovecraft or something like that, I think there's, I don't think I'm 100 percent sure because I watched this documentary, a couple of documentaries by the one director, his last name is Pasha, and they're very, very nice.

We're very well thought out and brings in the dimensions, not just of the background, but also of what he means to him, to him, you know, kind of an intimate reflection.

A lot like something I can identify because that's how I think of literature.

I not only think of the background, I think of how it relates to me, how it connects to me, and how, if anything, it can inform my writing.

In this case, when I look into his background, you know, it's really...

I wonder what my impressions would have been without all of these details.

Like, you know, the fact that he was really that person who might have suffered alone a lot, who didn't have friends, and through it all, he starts forging an identity for himself and he starts writing.

He starts doing that.

And because writing is such a...

Well, it's one of the scholarly, you know, art forms.

And what I mean by that is that you have to...

It's a high bar to command the language, to learn the grammar, to edit things, to have voice, to do all of these things.

You know, I'm brushing over that, too, I know.

But if you've read or if you've attempted to write, you know what I'm talking about.

So it's got a high bar.

It takes many years to be able to even have the guts to put something out.

The ones that do have the guts, usually are little kids.

You know, if you ever read little kids' stories, it's just all in there.

It's wonderful.

There's a kind of a childlike wonder, I think, in HP.

Lovecraft's writing.

I think there's that wonder of him, the last man on earth kind of thing versus the universe, you know, or how he's in communion with it, or how the world, the cosmos itself, is indifferent to mankind's fate, that there is no such thing as fate, that there are no gods, that there is no god, that there's just you and the universe.

And that is a very lonely place to arrive at, but it also, for that individual, can be a very liberating place, because yes, the world is scary, and it's not here to help you.

It's not here to completely destroy you either, but you got to forge your own way.

It seems to be coming out of this literature.

And I don't think I'm reading too much into it.

It also makes me think a lot of how it parallels, or it reminds me, let's just say, of existentialism, because some of these same ideas in existential literature, like Le Trangère, The Stranger by Albert Camus, are there.

The idea of alienation, and the idea of our inconsequence to the order of things, and coping with that, and coming to terms with that.

It really interests me, because part of what I want to write is about that.

In fact, I'm writing a manuscript right now.

I'm finishing up something called Borderlands, and then I'm going to what I really want to write, which is, I guess you could call it straight up fiction, or so-called literary fiction, but just regular fiction, kind of a road novel about a man who's looking at these crossroads in life.

Something big happens.

But enough about me.

I'm not trying to blow my horn on that.

It's just interesting that what we gravitate to can inform, or can just sort of give us a push into thinking about our own writing.

And that's what's interesting.

It's part of being immersed in a process.

And when you get there, you're not suffering at all.

And I don't think...

I'm going to extrapolate this.

I don't think that HP suffered through writing very much.

I think that writing was a pleasure.

And I feel very close to that idea.

I think that if...

I've heard a lot of people, and I laugh and I totally understand this, that whose experiences were with writing pretty terrible.

Either it was a very bad English teacher, or a very bad experience.

Because, like I said, it's so rigorous, and it can come off rigid.

All this technical knowledge that you have, and when can I just build this, you know?

Well, it can be like that.

And I think that if you're suffering through any kind of writing, whether it's a short story or longer work, and you're really suffering through a poem or something, you've got to turn around and say, something's not right here.

And many people don't do that, and they just give up.

It's just too much.

So it's worth it to keep on, just to discover the layers beyond that.

So you're just at the frontier when you meet that place.

You're at a crossroads.

And what can come of it is, it's really rather amazing.

You have to start thinking about process.

You have to start thinking, okay, this shouldn't feel bad because I like writing.

I want to tell the story.

If you're suffering through something, and then there's many gaps or a gap that you need to kind of backfill or address.

It could be so many things.

It could be the fact that you just don't have enough writing practice.

That's pretty simple.

It can be fixed.

Anybody can do it nowadays.

It could be that you are not thinking clearly about these characters, that the story is not coming out because the frame is taking the foreground to the subject.

Then you need to really think rather philosophically about what it all means, why you are even doing this, and building some kind of self-awareness about the process.

Organizing yourself and thinking, okay, I need to put down the pen, I need to put down the tripod, or I need to put down the laptop, I need to put down my notes, I need to just take a walk and start thinking.

Or I need to watch a movie that kind of makes me think about something else.

Or I need to do something.

You do that and action creates motivation.

I didn't make that up.

That's a saying I saw something, I think in a piece of marketing.

I think about athletic wear or something.

But I like it.

It could be a Latin word, actio motivatio creata, something like that.

Because it's true.

Once we start moving, getting movement going, then that motivation starts to build.

So I think that many people quit at that point.

But I don't think that HP.

Lovecraft was one of those guys.

There was something compelling him to write.

And he got it all out there.

It's almost like he could have been a Union case study.

Because his work, it just pulls from the ether, it pulls from beyond the veil, it pulls from the ocean itself.

So having said that, I want to talk a little bit about alienation and loneliness and solitude.

So I think alienation and estrangement, those are pretty negative things to feel.

That means that you're not connected to people, you can't connect to society or the place where you belong.

You don't feel like you're part of your generation.

We hear so much about generational wars and everything.

And some people, myself, I'm a Gen Xer, I didn't feel like I was, you know, the cookie cutter stereotype of a Gen Xer.

There's a lot of things that I didn't like about my generation, I identified more with what my grandparents were saying and their great stories and their character and their depth versus our superficiality as I perceived it.

And I'm just sharing that because sometimes we get too tied in into, I guess, representations or generalizations about what you are.

And you may not be somebody that fits in with any of that.

You may not dress like anybody, you may not think like anybody.

That's even worse, because if you don't think like anybody, then there's a constant running script in your mind that's making you like an observer, a foreigner, really.

Just like in Albert Camus' novel, The Stranger.

You don't feel connected.

And you feel that you may be the last man on earth, you may be wrong about everything.

And that is a horrible feeling.

But something inside you says, no, I'm on to something.

If I'm different, it's because of this or because of that.

And there's many ways to cope with that and some pretty bad ways.

People even run to drugs.

High intelligence people suffer from this.

Creative people suffer from this.

Or can suffer from this, I should say.

It's a really, it's really a minefield.

And you have to learn right on, right away, nip it in the bud and start wrestling with these, these ideas and these notions.

But if you feel marginalized, you might recognize estrangement, alienation, what those are.

Anybody that's been to high school, probably, unless you were the popular kids, and the popular kids are probably listening to this, are you?

They're probably selling real estate or something.

But I think that that's one column.

And the other column, I think, that I thought about was solitude.

And to me, solitude has the connotation and experience of that time and space where you can disengage and where everything else seems but a dream.

It doesn't seem like the real world.

This, the work, the writing, the thinking about it, the solving the problems that come up, this joy of it, that's the real.

And the rest of it, it kind of goes into this background and it becomes almost background-noising.

Just can't understand why people are having these barbecue parties or why they're doing this.

It all seems very banal.

And it can, if you don't, if you go too extreme, make you a bit of an antisocial seeming person.

But there's a point of sacrifice.

If you really want to write, you need the time to think.

You need the time to process through things.

And you can't have that with a constant connection and communication, or as they would have said in the 19th century, intercourse with the world, the old fashion world.

Word that just means, I don't know, dealing with other people, having to do, communicate.

I myself am considered in the circles that I run as a social person.

I don't come off as an antisocial.

But in years before that, especially in my 20s, I would say, even in my early 30s, I was a guy that liked to keep to himself.

I didn't feel, I kinda almost feel like maybe I came off as a snob, or I had snobby attitudes, secret ones, you know, I looked down on things.

And I didn't process through that at the time.

It took me a while to start thinking, okay, you know what?

Just interact with people in their own context.

And it helped me a lot.

So, it helped me get through.

Now I'm back to the phase where I'm feeling kinda snobby again.

And I don't know if that's the right word, and I'm definitely not a snob.

I don't think that I am.

But I do think that there's different kinds of arts, tastes, and one can have a more discriminating taste and demand more of what one is doing and what one is reading and what one is putting into one's mind.

And that's just me.

You might have a different opinion.

Let me know.

Contact page, cityscapepress.com.

So, HP.

Lovecraft's life was one of solitude, but creative solitude, solitude that could lead into a vehicle of creativity, into a scene, a sandlot where you can play, is not loneliness.

That is a, that's a gift, solitude.

That kind of creative harmony that you can build with yourself, with the world is amazing.

And from that, we owe so much of the work that we are exposed to, so much of the art comes from solitary reflection.

It's a great moment.

And if you can learn to build that, then it's great.

I never, you're not going to believe this, but I really didn't even have anything to do with the internet until 2013.

Not that I didn't get into online or something.

I just got it on at work to pay a bill or whatever.

It wasn't as essential back then.

So I could just, you know, do that.

And I just never liked the idea of paying for another subscription.

It's a broke writer, right?

So I just didn't get into it.

And I missed out a lot, which I'm glad I did, on the Internet culture, you know, that arose somewhere around 2007.

Not that it wasn't there before, but I would say with the creation of social media networks like that, stupid Facebook and all that stuff, that the world started to change culturally.

And I was starting to not have anything to do with it.

So as a result, I have my own ways of talking and my own ways of thinking.

Not that I thought so then.

I'm looking at it back now.

I'm thinking, OK, yeah, this is how it happens.

And I'm saying that because if you become disconnected a bit, like HP.

Lovecraft might have been, you start to, if it goes bad, you start to get weird, right?

You start to not be able to relate.

You start to be awkward.

But if it's done right, with a healthy level of distancing yourself from all the ways that you can get distracted and fall in someone else's design, then it can lead to you becoming a more original person.

Your speech is not patterned by internet memes and trends and all that kind of stuff.

And that can be very helpful for a writer because it's very insidious, all this kind of talk.

And then, again, if you are a writer or if you're any kind of an artist, because this show is focusing on writing and literature, but my own idea is that I welcome any form of art, anything.

If you make art out of mud or whatever, if it's art, as long as it has voice and originality and it's something different and it gives us something, then it's something I admire.

So I welcome anyone like that.

So becoming marginalized inadvertently or not, but building a kind of self-awareness around that is very helpful or can be very instrumental to creating your character, to forming, to becoming somebody.

You can read about such a thing as called voice.

I never understood that when they spoke about it in literature classes or because I was an English major and I got my degree in English literature.

I never understood that.

Not that I didn't understand it intellectually, I just experientially, I didn't understand how it is that you would start writing and not have any kind of voice.

So why is that?

Maybe you haven't lived long enough.

My grandmother, who had a great influence on me, always said, if you want to be a writer, you got to live and you got to know things.

So there's two ways to know things, to read about them, which you should do, and to experience them, which you should do.

One of the things that I feel might have not happened until much later for HP.

Lovecraft was that he didn't experience love.

He didn't experience a girlfriend earlier on.

He didn't experience having friends to go out and just talk about anything or play around.

And that's got to have to have been a wound in his heart.

You can't be human, really, unless there's some psychological or neurodivergence present in there.

And not want to feel a connection and have experienced the remuneration of interacting with people.

We say people are hell, they're hell, yeah.

People, or hell is people, but so is paradise.

Paradise is people.

It's both things.

So we look into his publishing life, and it started out he had to take that first step.

And the first step was to start submitting his stories.

And I wonder about that.

What was that like for HP.

Lovecraft?

He's writing all these amazing stories.

He's doing all these things.

And then now he's got to take that step, actionable step, and put himself out there and submit.

And he gets things submitted.

He's starting to get readership.

People are being exposed to some amazing metaphors, all of this kind of stuff.

And he starts to take off, not in a big way, but in at least in a way that he has communion now with other writers, with editors, with other people, and starts happening for him.

For a long time, his writing kind of got locked up after his death, I believe, until he experienced a resurgence.

And we can read all about all these things, but I think I'd like to read you another quote by HP.

Lovecraft that I think expresses all of this more succinctly.

I should describe my own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and disassociated groups.

A.

Love of the strange and the fantastic.

Love of the abstract and of scientific logic.

Love of the ancient and the permanent.

Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for my odd tastes and eccentricities.

And here again in his own words another quote I'd like to share with you.

I could never write about ordinary people because I'm not in the least interested in them.

And without interest there can be no art.

Man's relation to man does not captivate my fancy.

It is man's relation to the cosmos, to the unknown, which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.

And we pause there, I pause there mentally, because he's hidden on things that I feel like I discover for myself.

And it is that isolation can drive originality, and crucially it can build self-awareness.

An artist who can do this will create, no matter who's watching, who's reading, who's judging.

It's just him and the words.

Let's touch back to the publishing history that I was talking about, how he broke in, because that's always an interesting story, or at least it's a feature of this podcast that I want to bring out, I want to make it a regular thing.

Because we always get the idea of success, someone just breaks it in, they win the lottery, and that's that.

But it really, as we might imagine, it can be an uphill thing for a lot of writers, a lot of artists.

So he starts out with amateur journalism, and he starts writing about things that interest him, community, all kinds of things.

I think there's also, he wrote for the Pulp Pipeline, which was a central role of Weird Tales magazine.

Or rather, it was like he took the Pulp Pipeline, is what I meant to say.

I'm reading my own notes.

I can't even remember what I wrote.

But it was what we would have considered the indie scene, the independent writing, the indie scene.

And I really appreciate that because this is an independent podcast.

Podcasts have a grassroot feeling to it still.

There's still a guy like me who can pick up a mic and record and express himself and share with enough of you.

And it's constantly under attack from these B-listers or these former newscasters or B-celebrities or B-lists or C-lists celebrities.

And they kind of take off, you know who you are.

And they start to encroach on this platform.

Do they have the right?

Of course they do.

It's not, you know, we don't want to censor anybody.

But it's again the old thing in the poker table, at the poker table, right?

You're the short stack and here come the big whales with all their money and all their marketing apparatus.

And sometimes, you know what?

It fails for them.

And I'm glad, what is that?

Just green envy?

Well, hell with it, it is a little bit.

Because there's so many of us out here struggling to get a voice out there, struggling to be heard.

And that's what drives a lot of art.

It's just because you've got something to show somebody, to say to somebody.

And I think that, I hope that with your support of not just a podcast like this, but of any other person who's out there producing things, I think that's the hope that we can lean on.

We're looking at a different era, perhaps, and that could affect creation up to a point, could affect the way we write creatively, the way we produce artwork.

And we know, it's become tired almost, I don't want to tire you with the AI talk, and I'll keep it short, but I'll say this, I think it's important to lean in or double down, to use a poker metaphor again, on the human side of things.

And what does that mean in the nitty gritty?

That means something like supporting local theater.

Well guess what?

AI might be able to produce something like that, pretty actress, digital actress, Tilly Norwood, but it's not going to be able to put on a theater show at your local community theater.

Or someone, doesn't even have to be something amateurish.

It can be put on by the university, it can be put on by the city, you know.

I myself am going back to that.

I used to love going to the theater when I was in college.

And then the last play that I saw was about Helen Keller, and the lady who played, the actress who played Helen was a faculty professor of acting and theater.

Myself I wanted to study theater, but I just didn't have the guts.

And back then, you know, and probably not now anymore.

And when I saw it, it was a mesmerizing performance.

It was just as good as it gets.

I still think about it from time to time.

That's how good it was.

In this little packed theater called, shoot, I forgot what it's called.

I saw The Bus Stop 2.

I was dating a girl back in the day, or I really had a crush on her too.

I think I didn't date until a little bit after.

But I was going to her plays and stuff, and she wasn't in this play.

She was in another play called The Bus Stop.

I think that was by Marilyn Monroe famously.

They just adapted it.

It was pretty good.

She was a great actress.

But the point being that if we go back to being in person, to supporting things that are being done in person, it's going to have a big effect.

And that means, too, for writers, it doesn't mean just sitting out here and submitting digitally because the AI can do that, a mimic can do that, a pulp writer can do that, a ghostwriter can do that.

But if you get out, it doesn't mean seeking fame.

It just means seeking, I guess, what I call community.

What I mean, what I'm talking about is like, almost like at the street level, we're out here.

And if it means through a podcast or a website and hopefully going to things in person and interacting with people about these ideas, about literature, about art, about whatever, I think you're going to go a long way.

It could be your local bar.

You could strike up a conversation there.

You don't have to just talk about sports.

I love sports, by the way.

Big disclaimer.

I used to not like him as much when I was younger.

Not all of them, just some.

And now I like a lot.

So it's too much.

But it doesn't mean we have to restrict ourselves.

Let's bring it back.

Let's bring back that thing that gets the energy going.

So a few of the notable things are going to be centered around, for HP.

Lovecraft, would be Cthulhu, the Cthulhu Mingthos.

And it started out, I think, it wasn't really planned.

It just started writing these stories until it hit him to write this longer work.

And that was 1928.

And from then on, he really didn't experience a mainstream success.

And you could imagine that, right?

I mean, horror itself or psychological thrillers or suspense are not big things in the world of literature.

And let's face it, back then and maybe even now, they're looked down upon, you know, by snobs, literary snobs.

And that's because a lot of the writers that are attracted to it are doing very limited things with it.

And they're looking for a jump scare, right?

In writing or in the movies or whatever.

But art really can go, an artist can really take something beyond that.

So nothing is off limits.

You can look at Shakespeare.

How does Hamlet start?

It's a ghost.

It's a ghost story.

It's a ghost of, it's a story in a way of a haunting, a psychological haunting.

But in the play, the ghost is actually witnessed by the guard.

So he's a reality.

So it's not just one person's delusion.

So you look at that, but we don't think about Hamlet as just a mere ghost story because it transcends that.

And so in writing, we've seen some really standout movies, like Rosemary's Baby, like even The Ninth Gate isn't all that bad.

There's quite a few.

And lately, you know, they called what, I think, what was that really good one that came out?

I think it was, well, I'll remember later, but it's labeled under prestige horror.

And I want to talk about genre a little bit because it started out with guys like this.

Now HP.

Lovecraft himself was aware that he was indebted to Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe is someone I want to focus on, not in this podcast, but sometime maybe next season for this Halloween kind of theme, if you will.

But he's very important.

And he looms large in HP.

Lovecraft's psyche.

And he feels a bit encroached upon or a bit obliged in an uncomfortable way.

He writes about this in his journals.

And I think that's the mark of an amateur.

I think that's the mark of a person that's not really thinking through things.

Because we don't exist in an ether.

As much as he wanted to be, or if you're a writer, you know this, or any kind of artist, you know this, you want to be the original, you want to be the one that invented something.

And you will.

But I wouldn't stress too much about something coming from something else, reworking it, reimagining it, and all that.

Because it's all in our background, in our culture.

That's what culture is.

We inherit ideas, biases.

We inherit the good and the bad.

We inherit great literature.

We inherit all these influences.

So they're there.

But you just take them and you transform them into something else.

A true original is someone that comes along very few times.

I wouldn't even say in a generation.

It could take hundreds of years.

You look at someone like Beethoven.

Well, who's the next Beethoven?

You can argue about me about that.

That's fine, because I'm not going to be a classical music expert.

I like jazz.

I love classical music.

I like the blues, but I don't know.

I look at someone like that, and it's just a remarkable talent, but he came from somewhere.

It was built on that.

He stood, as Newton said, on the shoulder of giants.

So that kind of idea about originality may be flawed.

It may be not on point.

That's my opinion, and it's because if you are so original, you might be too subjective.

You might not really reach out or be meaningful to anybody, and that can't be that good.

As it was, Lovecraft is very original, and he creates these amazing stories that weaves through, and they're being referred to as cosmic horror.

So genre for me is a very interesting thing.

I kind of went past the publishing history, but the publishing history in short for Lovecraft is that he didn't quite make it mainstream, and then he kind of just falls out of publication, I think, or is he this one guy that somehow comes into ownership of the rights to publish his works.

He just kind of locks him up, and he's just kind of very possessive of them, according to some things I've heard, until these two other guys somehow figure out a way to liberate this work.

And it's amazing to think how many people gain posthumous, so many artists and writers in particular, I think, gain posthumous fame, fame after they've died, which is not something we want to think about, and it's horrible in itself.

So I think that's why it's good to be significant in these days.

Even if it's to a small group, a small group of readers, I would appreciate that very much, because we're not looking to strike it up to the marquee letters and all that stuff.

But I think we have to appreciate and be in community.

It can happen that you're writing just like Chaucer did.

He was also one that never saw fame.

He was a civil servant and then wrote in secret.

A lot of things that he wrote, you can't really publish without going to prison or worse in his day.

Or Kafka famously, and there are many others.

So you're right because you've compelled to, and I think it didn't bother HP.

Lovecraft that much.

I don't know, I can't say obviously, but I wonder, I think that he would derive a great deal of satisfaction of have completed his vision.

And if you can do that, that is a hell of a lot.

That's a home run every day.

So that's what happened to this person.

He just breaks out because it's a grass root thing.

You know, he just, people take to him.

People like his authenticity.

Literary critics will point out, yes, some of the awkwardness of the prose.

And again, that comes from that, I think that alienation, that's what a lot of people suggest, just could have used a different kind of editing, you know, the power of a brilliant editor or somebody really crafty and just polished up some things.

But it doesn't bother me a whole lot, but it is a little bit sometimes of a slog to get through some of the other passages and I have to kind of warp my mind a little bit.

Writing itself is a solitary confrontation that is as vast as this kind of cosmological project that Lovecraft was taking.

And I think Lovecraft found his vehicle, found the vehicle to express all that was going on whether he understood it or not.

And we never do really understand, but we just got to expose it, put it out there.

And that takes balls.

That's ballsy.

His influence can be felt up to this day in modern horror, film, video games, you name it.

It's got a universality to it.

And people especially that comment, that like, and that are drawn to him are people that sometimes feel like a misfit in some ways.

They identify with these weird ideas.

I think that Lovecraft's story is a dark, complicated one.

And I think that I'm not so sure a jury's still out, whether going into someone's background as a writer, you know, as someone that were interested in their fiction, whether that's constructive or whether it's not, whether it leads to some political revisionism or not, you can tell me.

When I was going to the university and I was an English major, we focused on what was called new criticism, which means you just focus on the text.

You focus on the thing you have as though the writer didn't even exist.

You just completely focus on that, which I think makes sense.

In some cases, you have nothing else.

You can't really go into, say, the Odyssey and what Homer, who he must have been, you have to extrapolate a lot.

You have to infer a lot.

We don't really know much about Shakespeare.

In fact, we think that there was really never really a Shakespeare, but rather a person that hid and probably a noble that hid and used him as a proxy, used that name.

So we sometimes really don't get to know who produces these things.

And is it important?

It used to be for the new critics, it was almost like a, because it was before that, it was preceded by something called historical criticism.

So you would not only look at the piece of writing, but you'd look at where it historically sort of came from.

And the new critics just thought, now let's get rid of that straight jacket.

Let's just start thinking about the work itself.

So there's great things to be commended in talking to you about this.

I'm almost like taking a historical approach.

And that's because this is so interesting.

And I think that, I think the jury is still out, and I think it's up to your own decision, your own impression.

It doesn't matter, does it not matter?

But one thing that I can take away from my exposure to Lovecraft, my wrestling with what might have been his pain and his victory at the same time, is that even if he was working alone, and even if he didn't get to be known as we might know him today, he got to do the thing that we should all be doing, and that's express yourself.

So, next time you're feeling alone with your work, remember the guy who turned his solitude into a new kind of shadow on the page.

Keep writing, keep thinking.

You're not alone, but if you are, maybe it's better that way.

About the Author - Robert Cavaliere is a writer and host of the Phenomena Case Files podcast and Hacking It! Writer by Trade podcast. His fiction includes the novels Panfried Dialogues, Night City, Phenomena, Sage, Chron, and Borderlands. Preview his novels at Cityscape Press (cityscapepress.com) and Scriptoria (thescriptoria.com).