GNOAT (19)

No. 19: H.P. "Sauce" Lovecraft

Dude had a cat named Nigger-Man; he explicitly hated Jews and other minorities (possibly to make up for the fact that he was butt ugly; there's no way Lovecraft becomes a half-decent writer in this day and age, because he had a face to match his ugly vitriol, a face you'd love to punch, and a similarly punchable personality); he was a notorious mama's boy.

But, damn, the guy knew how to "craft" a horror story. Sure, he slung flowery words around like Biz Markie flicked boogers, but that's why you loved him, non? H-Dot backed up his mumblefuck prose with concepts that defined the horror genre: a man lost at sea finding himself washed upon an arid plateau, confronted by a colossus; a man climbing up levels upon levels of a buried castle only to realize that he's a zombie stumbling out of his gwave; the Cthulu Mythos; grave diggers with a fucked-up plan to reanimate a corpse; and Cool Air, which foretold the dangers of Fan Death and immigrants*.

The man was a visionary. And undeniably racist. To quote Kurtis Blow, that's the breaks. Howard Phillips Lovecraft helped shape American horror and then some. D.W. Griffith is constantly shit upon for Birth of a Nation, and rightly so; but both were pioneers.

Still, I would have ranked him higher if the fuckass didn't name his cat Nigger-Man. That's egregious.

* Sauce was an asshole, make no mistake. "Cool Air" is xenophobic like water is wet.