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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Swanosaurus" data-source="post: 9737485" data-attributes="member: 7044220"><p>What's really interesting about Lovecraft is how openly he displays how his classism and racism is rooted in anxiety and ambivalence. It's like he's lying down on the dissectioin table for the reader. Take The Shadow over Innsmouth: The whole raid, the opportunity to symbolically kill what you're afraid of and identifiy with a violent, racist act of lashing-out, is glossed over. Instead, we get the protagonists transformation, even his desire for it. Also, the people of Innsmouth are not depicted as primitives: They have a deeper insight into the nature of reality than everyone else. I think Lovecraft's readiness to highlight and heighten his own anxieties in his stories instead of "overcoming" them by symbolic violence, mingled with his racism, his classism and his fear of modernity as well as his materialistic worldview, have produced texts that, for all their blatant atrociousness, lend themselves to a deep critical analysis like few other works of fiction. I'm pretty sure it's no accident that authors like Victor LaValle, Kij Johnson or Matt Ruff keep returning to Lovecraft for inspiration and to deconstruct his vision.</p></blockquote><p></p>