Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft!

Today we remember the powerful work of that great author of weird tales who changed the genre through his focus on “cosmic horror.” To Lovecraft, the old monsters were quite tame, and as an atheist/materialist he conjured bleak visions of a universe in which mankind was an insignificant by-product of experiments by an alien species which settled Earth in aeons past. Here is a taste of his work from THE CALL OF CTHULHU, published in 1928 and made into a very evocative silent film directed by Andrew H. Lehman.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”