HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

I want to type in famous literary passages to see what they sound like.

Lovecraft was hella racist, as were most white men at the time, and it informed (not defined) a lot of his writing, but Jesus Christ, whatever happened to "Death of the Author"?

There were only two black families in my home town, and their kids were both in grades ahead of me! I can't help that there weren't any black people at my graduation!

It's all the surface trappings. The Victorian gingerbreading, while ignoring the underlying architecture.

Another odd feature of his writing is how common it is for his protagonists to believe the exact things Lovecraft believed, and subsequently be destroyed entirely for believing those things.

You're right. Joshi wouldn't have put Dunwich on this list at all, because it totally undermines his theories about Lovecraft.

I'm not convinced anyone in the English speaking world knew about the industrial genocide. It's shameful enough that they were okay with the mass deportation and slave labor they did know about.

Lovecraft gets hammered harder than a lot of his contemporaries because he was a scientific racist (which makes people more uncomfortable than visceral, ignorant bigotry for some reason), very articulate about his reasons, and very vocal about it.

Strictly speaking, he only ever wrote one Cthulhu story.

Joshi wouldn't put "Dreams" so high on the list, and would have put "Shadow" much higher.

Joshi is the premiere Lovecraft scholar, but while downplaying Lovecraft's racism, he way overplays Lovecraft's nihilism as the be-all-and-end-all of his work.

Absolutely Perfect: "Colour Out of Space"
Vanishingly Close To Perfect: "Charles Dexter Ward," "Call of Cthulhu," "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Dunwich Horror," "Shadow Over Innsmouth"
Masterpieces: "Whisperer in Darkness," "Music of Erich Zann," "Rats in the Walls"
Great: "Dreams in the Witch House," "Haunter of…

Hellboy doesn't do a damned thing with Lovecraft except have tentacles and funny names.

The thing with Lovecraft is that for all his racism, it's the "lesser races" that know the most about how the world really works and are best equipped to survive in the universe Lovecraft posits. His neurasthenic protagonists are driven by mad by the knowledge they gain and are destroyed by their own philosophical…

And for all his talk of "lesser races", the man never advocated killing people simply because of their race, singly or as genocide. Unlike quite a few other folks of his time.

I'm not sure what the Chekov's Gun in the Moon Base is, honestly. None of the memories of the white flash have the flash coming from the Moon, but if it's not the Corruptor, I don't know what it could be!

I remain intensely curious as to whether the other organic species of gem (amber, jet, and coral) exist in Gem culture.

We learned it by watching Rebecca!

Is it a flashback episode? My impression is we're going to meet an old friend again.