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Howard Phillips Lovecraft came into this world on August 20th, 1890, the only child of a rich mother and a father who would soon be acting strange. By 1893, W.S. Lovecraft’s behavior had become so chaotic that he was committed to Butler Hospital in the family’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. He died five years later of “general paresis,” or general paralysis of the insane. Today, we would call it late-stage syphilis.
The episode had a profound effect on Lovecraft. Whether he knew the truth or not, he later told friends that his father perished of insomnia and overwork. As it turned out, “insomnia” and “overwork” are two of the chief complaints of Lovecraft’s characters when they are hiding a terrible secret.
The horror of H.P. Lovecraft is the horror of insignificance. His characters encounter beings with unfathomable power, and while they mostly live to tell the tale, they suffer through an awful epiphany — that their thoughts don’t matter, their desires don’t matter, and their entire existence is temporary and fragile… a soap bubble ready to burst.
Lovecraft wrote scores of stories, of which 68 were published during his lifetime and after his death. Of the major Lovecraftian themes, the cosmic horror has aged by far the best, and it is upon this foundation that his whole reputation rests. This is what we think of when we think of Lovecraft: the linked tales that make up the Cthulu Mythos (very few of which involve Cthulu), the Necronomicon, and the less-well known Dream Cycle starring Randolph Carter.
He also wrote tales of ghosts and vampires, science fiction, fantasies, parodies, poems, and exceedingly boring accounts of his own dreams. His literary pretensions to be the next Edgar Allen Poe mostly failed, and reading his early poetical works can feel like being cudgeled with a thesaurus. But that is hardly the biggest stain on his legacy.
H.P. Lovecraft was a vile bigot. In his stories, immigrants are slain for the crime of being immigrants, women’s brains are inferior to men’s, and people with darker skin tones are inherently dumber, more “primitive,” and more prone to evil deeds. He consistently returns to body horror themes of mixing white blood with other races or species, and Caucasians are constantly under threat.
For a while in the 1920s, Lovecraft lived in New York City. He hated it, primarily because of the heterogeneous mix of people. This prejudice shows up in his fiction. In “The Horror of Red Hook”, a cop fears for his safety around “swarthy, evil-looking foreigners,” and we’re supposed to tingle with dread as he describes dark-faced youths on corners, “playing eerily on cheap instruments.”
This is New York City in the Roaring Twenties, remember, and in retrospect, he’s offered an unintentionally hilarious description of jazz. It would be funnier if the author’s perspective weren’t so bleak. It’s all too easy to picture Lovecraft himself walking the streets of Manhattan, quaking with fear and envisioning violence against everyone who didn’t look like him.
Lovecraft’s views don’t improve when compared to his contemporaries: Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. While other (better) authors pushed literature in exciting new directions, Lovecraft’s prose looked backwards, to Poe and to run-on sentences in the Victorian style. Even his prose was regressive.
Today, once-admirable writers like Orson Scott Card and J.K. Rowling have sullied their reputations by scare-mongering about Muslims and non-binary people, respectively. But their literature is kinder than their real lives. Card’s Ender’s Game is about failures of cross-species communication, and in the sequels Ender strives endlessly to understand other perspectives. As for the Harry Potter franchise, it was clearly intended to be an allegory for bigotry, with muggles, mudbloods, and pure families standing in for classist and racist institutions. These authors failed to live up to their own ideals. But in Lovecraft’s world, some people really are better than others, and communicating with strangers could lead to the end of civilization. Even compared to other bigots, he reads as narrow-minded and mean-spirited.
On the other hand, Lovecraft is dead and his works are in the public domain. Studying his oeuvre is not financially supporting prejudice. Besides, he’s a foundational figure in speculative fiction, and those of us who love a good “What if…” must eventually wrestle with that literature’s racist past. I first encountered Lovecraftian horror in games like Diablo, Starcraft, and Dungeons and Dragons. His influence is felt in Stephen King, Stranger Things, and so many new and classic tales. We can acknowledge his influence and discuss his craft without forgetting what kind of person held the pen.
A listicle can be a cumbersome way to do that — after all, how do you rank something bigoted but written with style versus unreadable descriptions of dreams? And what about the less obviously hateful stories? How far down should tales be knocked for brief moments of xenophobia or vile throwaway lines? It can’t be done, at least not in a satisfying way. It’s no good lumping all the racist ones at the bottom — too many of them are racist. Eventually, judgment calls must be made.
But I will say that bigotry has an undeniable impact on quality. Something like “The Street”, with its white nationalism and explicit, abusive language, is full of leaps of logic that make it boring and stupid as well as offensive. It’s clearly in another category from The Shadow over Innsmouth, which is well-constructed, but based in Lovecraft’s own racist fears of mixed and dirty bloodlines. The Shadow over Innsmouth is a liminal moment in speculative fiction — one of the first times that an intense aura of dread was wedded to blockbuster pacing and taut action scenes.
H.P. Lovecraft
The story is to horror writing what The Birth of a Nation was to film. D.W. Griffith’s silent epic glorified the Ku Klux Klan while innovating new filmmaking techniques that make it arguably the first modern movie. Film students study it to learn the history of cinema. They are (hopefully) also taught that in lionizing the Klan, Griffith was personally responsible for getting Black people killed. The Shadow over Innsmouth isn’t quite that evil, but it comes loaded with problematic baggage that cannot be ignored. I gave it a high ranking, not because it is good and virtuous, but because none of the stories are good and virtuous. Lovecraft was a shitty person. In the absence of admirable qualities, we’ll focus on craft. The most explicitly hateful stories are close to unreadable anyway.
Besides, the list format has one advantage over other surveys of Lovecraft’s fiction, which is that you can see at a glance just how many of his stories are ill-intentioned, poorly conceived, barely half-assed, or severely, unforgivably prejudiced. I don’t recommend reading the complete works yourself, and I would never have volunteered for this assignment if I had known what it would be like. His bibliography has unintentionally become a book he would write about, a kind of Bigotnomicon, full of shocking descriptions unfit for casual consumption.
But I don’t regret the experience, either. I learned lots of history about one of my favorite genres, and I see Lovecraft more clearly: as an unusually creative bigot, and a minor literary genius. His best works influenced generations of readers — and for good reason. Lovecraft can be as gripping as anyone and some of his ideas will endure for many years to come. But he does not belong in the top tier of genre authors, and his work should be studied with proper context, in the same careful and deliberate way that film students should encounter The Birth of a Nation.
At the bottom of this ranking of 68 novels, novellas, and short stories, you will find Lovecraft’s most overtly hateful fictions, along with his juvenile writings. (Note: I will spoil some of these endings, but I will go spoiler free as the stories get better.) The next tier is tedious descriptions of dreams (seriously, how did he get so many of these published?) as well as half-finished fragments published after Lovecraft’s death. Afterwards, we move into good ideas with rough execution and mediocre concepts that are written with skill. Beyond that come those tales which are generally pretty good, and finally the best writing that Lovecraft produced — though again, even his masterworks retain their master’s flaws.
68. “The Street” (1920)
Short Story
“There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they do not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.”
The “soul” of this street is unaccountably vile. The street feels good when white people live there, but feels bad when immigrants move in. It’s xenophobia masquerading as a tale of the strange. Lovecraft openly pines for an Anglo-Saxon America, when Caucasians took up arms against people of other countries and cultures, instead of living alongside them as neighbors. The final section of the story fearmongers against communism in the hysterical pitch of McCarthy. Besides that, the repeated use of the phrase “swarthy and sinister” is Lovecraft at his worst. The story ends with the sentient street crushing all of the immigrants who live there. It’s a repugnant white nationalist fantasy.
67. “The Beast in the Cave” (1918)
Short Story
“I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recesses of the Mammoth Cave.”
Written when Lovecraft was 14, “The Beast in the Cave” was published 14 years later in The Vagrant, an amateur magazine. Here, the juvenile writer embarks on one of the great themes of his career: humans who become debased or even de-evolved. A man lost in a cave resigns himself to death when he hears the approach of a strange creature. Sometimes it walks on four legs and sometimes on two. Alone in the dark, the man throws rocks at the creature and succeeds in downing it. After miraculously finding his tour guide, he takes a torch to the site of the conflict and there finds a horrifyingly bleached ape with black eyes. As it dies, it speaks, and the narrator realizes the beast was once a man. There’s little suspense and the style is overly breathless.
66. The Descendant (1938)
Short Story Fragment
“In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.”
One of a small number of story fragments to be published after Lovecraft’s death, “The Descendant” features a tantalizing glimpse of Lovecraft’s favorite book: the Necronomicon, by the so-called “mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” This unfinished history picks up years later with the main character of “The Nameless City”. Now, the young explorer is old and skittish, as something even more horrifying has happened in the interim. We never find out what it is. But we do learn that Lovecraft is as prejudiced against Jewish people as he is against Muslims. Even in this brief tale, he stoops to the laziest anti-Semitic tropes. Sometimes Lovecraft’s defenders point out that he had a Jewish wife — the writer called her “well-assimilated” — but his description in “The Descendent” of the Jewish book merchant should dispel all doubts on the subject. Besides that, this fragment has the least to offer among all of the author’s posthumous work. There are no horrifying descriptions or poetic flights of fancy and only the barest intimation of plot. There was no reason to save this from the trash bin.
65. “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927)
Short Story
“Just at a time when a wave of kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar embarked on a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd.”
Malone is a New York detective with an interest in the occult who is assigned to the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. Ostensibly, he’s concerned with Robert Suydam, a “lettered recluse of an ancient Dutch family,” who seems to have a lot of low-class friends. But a foul strain of xenophobia runs through the story, and Lovecraft can hardly make it through a page without using “swarthy” as a synonym for “bad” or describing gangs of youths as evil-looking foreigners. Malone hears strange music on the streets that is definitely a parody of jazz, because apparently Lovecraft found jazz music frightening. His prejudice against Black people and immigrants is on full display. From a storytelling perspective, the pacing is irregular and the climax anticlimactic. But he starts to develop his fascination with cults that would later serve the Cthulu Mythos so well.
The Alchemist
64. “Ex Oblivione” (1921)
Short Story
“In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life…”
Probably written after “Celephaïs”, “Ex Oblivione” is a shorter, duller take on the same themes. A man unhappy with his life wishes to escape into his sleeping dreams. An avalanche of adjectives ensues. Lovecraft wrote a lot of different kinds of weird tales, but the dreamy prose poems tend to put readers to sleep.
63. “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1921)
Short Story
“Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them.”
What starts as a long, dry, family history involving African explorers, tales of white apes, and ancient prehistoric cities ends with a “reveal” telegraphed from miles away. The only horror is that several generations prior, his great-great-great(?) grandfather had taken a white ape princess as his bride. That’s it. This supposedly rational, seemingly well-adjusted young man absolutely loses his mind at the thought. It’s just not scary, and the only exciting part (the narrator burned himself alive because he didn’t want to be related to his great-great-great grandmother) feels unearned. Lovecraft’s obsession with the mixing of blood led to some truly tedious stories.
62. Azathoth (1938)
Novel Fragment
“…There was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into spaces wither the world’s dreams had fled.”
This incomplete novel fragment was published after Lovecraft’s death. It survives as flash fiction about a man who’s unhappy with his life and spends all his time looking out his window at the stars until one day he flies away and finds a constellation of overwrought descriptions. As previously discussed, Lovecraft’s poetical flights rarely get off the ground. Notable for the first mention of Azathoth, one of Lovecraft’s favorite recurring Gods.
61. “The Alchemist” (1916)
Short Story
“May ne’er a noble of thy murd’rous line/ Survive to reach a greater age than thine!”
Another juvenile fiction, written when Lovecraft was 15 or so and published later. It’s an improvement on “The Beast in the Cave” at least. Antoine, last of the Comtes de C–, tells of the curse upon his family whereby all men die at the age of 32. Years ago, his ancestor unjustly killed Michel Mauvis, incorrectly supposing the medieval alchemist had murdered his son. Michel’s own son, Charles le Sorcerer, put a curse on his line. A week before Antoine’s expected death, he finds a trap door in his rundown estate, where he meets a shocking old figure. Not that it’s a surprise to the reader; as soon as the aged man appears, the conclusion is obvious, though Lovecraft feels the need to explain at length.
60. “He” (1926)
Short Story
“Then, on a sleepless night’s walk, I met the man.”
A young man moved to New York City to become a poet, but finds the city oppressive, the (non-white) people intolerable, and the daytime bustle too much to bear. He takes to nocturnal walks in the oldest parts of the metropolis, and after a while meets an ancient man who speaks to him unbidden. He follows the old man to his musty home, and it is here that “He” develops all of its fantasy elements, which is also when Lovecraft busts out his most racially abusive language. The powers involve “mongrel” half-Native Americans — “half-breeds” who taught the titular necromancer strange rites. The demonstrations of power are interesting, and the thing at the end anticipates the shoggoths, which are among Lovecraft’s most feared and beloved creatures. Unfortunately, many of the less-prejudiced cosmic elements seen in his later works still have racist roots.
59. “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937)
Short Story
“Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers.”
This is late Lovecraft, at a time when he’s come into his storytelling powers. The horror isn’t his most creative, although that’s hardly the worst of this story. The whole premise of “The Thing on the Doorstep” is that men are biologically superior to women. Therefore, a body-hopping wizard currently stuck in his daughter’s form sets his sights on the flesh of Edward Pickman Derby. The actual mechanics of the plot are mildly interesting, if derivative of better stories. But the core motivation is too stupid to find engaging. Perhaps the crisp writing deserves a better spot in these rankings, but at the end of the day, Lovecraft’s bigotry is an explicit part of the narrative. Unless you’re a misogynist yourself, it’s hard to care about whether the misogynist wizard succeeds. It’s notable that one of the very few female characters in Lovecraft’s bibliography opens up untapped reserves of disdain for women. This story was written after the passage of the 19th Amendment, after Virginia Woolf changed consciousness in literature. Again, even for his time, Lovecraft’s views were especially prejudiced and regressive.
58. “Memory” (1923)
Flash Fiction
“At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled with weeds.”
This flash fiction is about a poetically gothic valley around the river Than. There are several descriptions of natural decay, a brief conversation between a Genie and a Daemon and as much of a twist as can be mustered in a few hundred words. It’s Lovecraft in his Poe-worship mode, leaning heavily on archaic language and even using the word “sooth” for “truth.” But there’s no story, and the twist, such as it is, isn’t particularly compelling.
57. “What the Moon Brings” (1923)
Short Story
“I hate the moon — I am afraid of it — for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.”
Another short prose poem based on yet another of Lovecraft’s dreams. On the one hand, the lotus flowers turning to dead faces, the receding water, and what the water reveals make this somewhat compelling. But these images lead nowhere, and Lovecraft’s knotty sentences may require a second glance from even his most devoted readers.
56. “Ibid” (1938)
Pseudo-History
“Ibid’s masterpiece… was the famous Op. Cit. wherein all the significant undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for all.”
This not particularly funny parody was published after Lovecraft’s death. Ibid, of course, is what you write in the citations of a scholarly paper to indicate a previous reference. Here, Lovecraft’s joke is that Ibid was a real author with the ludicrous name Magnus Furius Camillus Arelius Antoninus Flavius Anicius Petronius Valentinianus Aegidus Ibidus. Lovecraft gives a brief background on his life and work, followed by a lengthy history of the fictional author’s skull. Ibid’s cranium bounces around Europe, achieves the status of sainthood, sails across the ocean to Salem, Massachusetts, and lands in a prairie dog hole in Milwaukee. One of Lovecraft’s targets here is over-ostentatious writing, and he engages in it with gusto. This hamstrings his story, however, making the feeble humor a chore to read.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
55. “The White Ship” (1919)
Short Story
“Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the heavens.”
Basil Elton, lonely keeper of a lighthouse, begins to see a White Ship on nights of the full moon. An old man beckons to him, until one month he answers the call. Elton goes on a fantastical journey through far-away lands suffused in songs and paved with marble and gold. The imagery is luscious and ludicrously repetitive while the places Elton doesn’t visit sound far more interesting than the places he does.
54. “Old Bugs” (1959)
Short Story
“He was called “Old Bugs,” and was the most disreputable object in a disreputable environment.”
Written in 1919 and set in the future of the 1950s, this speculative tale is an argument in favor the 1920 alcohol prohibition. It takes place in a speakeasy/drug den in gangster-ridden Chicago that is home to Old Bugs, a notorious derelict who may have once been a professor of some genius. His whole sordid history is revealed at the entrance of young student Alfred Trevor. It’s not a very surprising or weird tale, and the pro-Prohibition angle is propped up by a cartoonish depiction of substance abuse. It’s not that addiction isn’t a serious matter; it’s that Lovecraft hasn’t made a serious effort to understand it. This is Lovecraft the Hall Monitor, Lovecraft the R.A., Lovecraft the judgmental scold.
53. “The Transition of Juan Romero” (1944)
Short Story
“Firmly though respectfully they signified their refusal to revisit the chasm, or indeed to work further in the mine until it might be sealed.”
On the one hand, the tale of an endless chasm opened during a mining operation is a wonderful setup for a horror story, even if it’s a bit familiar. On the other hand, the descriptions of the Mexican laborers — and the blithe co-mingling of Aztec and Hindu religions — is more unsettling than anything Lovecraft did intentionally. The narrator keeps speaking about how much he’s travelled, and yet Lovecraft’s own lack of experience has rarely been so clear. The “transition” itself is too vague to be anything but disappointing.
52. “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” (1917)
Short Story
“Tho’ many of my readers have at times observ’d and remark’d a Sort of antique Flow in my Stile of Writing, it hath pleased me to pass amongst the Members of this Generation as a young Man.”
Often mocked for his old-fashioned prose, H.P. Lovecraft embraces his critics with this stylistic spoof. A fake autobiography, Lovecraft “reveals” that his real name is Humphrey Littlewit and that his writing sounds antiquated because he himself is over 200 years old. There’s not much of a plot to speak of, and the “reminiscences” of the deceased author wouldn’t have been worth publishing, even if they were real. Notable only because it shows Lovecraft had a sense of humor about his own place in modern fiction.
51. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919)
Short Story
“He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace.”
An intern at a state psychiatric institution comes into contact with a certain Joe Slader, a rural dullard. Lovecraft’s prejudices towards poor people come out, and Slader is described as a barely functioning idiot who, nevertheless, awakens in a disturbed state spouting poetical nonsense about a gorgeous other world. The narrator uses radio technology to try and communicate with Slader’s dreams, without luck, until the night before Slader dies. He experiences a communion with Slader’s soul — or something resembling it — and learns some interesting tidbits about a certain supernova recently spotted in the heavens. It’s a mean-spirited story, though, with just enough suspense to keep committed readers turning the page.
