LOVECRAFTIAN - adj. frighteningly monstrous and otherworldly.
August 20, 1890: H.P. Lovecraft is born.
The celebrated American author of The Call of Cthulhu, ”The Dunwich Horror”, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, and other short stories and novellas, was born in Providence, Rhode Island. As a boy, Lovecraft suffered from various illnesses, including psychological ones, which may have influenced some of his later work. He was also a voracious reader who was introduced to Gothic horror at a young age. He published his first work in a professional publication in 1919, and most of his stories, apart from his novellas, were distributed through pulp magazines. While his stories were not unknown, his name was, and it was not until after his death that Lovecraft cemented his place as one of the great horror authors, beside his “God of Fiction” Edgar Allan Poe, mostly thanks to a dedicated group of associates and followers who ensured his literary legacy did not die.
His strange, macabre oeuvre is often categorized into a subgenre known as “weird fiction”, which, really, is a fairly succinct description of many of Lovecraft’s writings. Weird, unearthly, and visceral, Lovecraft’s tales made him the pioneer of “cosmic horror”, eventually giving rise to an eponymous genre - Lovecraftian horror. Lovecraft continues to influence literature (Stephen King called him “the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale”), obviously, but other forms of media as well, and apparently, South Park.