Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the greatest writer you’ve never heard of. Whereas other Jazz Age writers plumbed the depths of the world of flappers and hedonism, Lovecraft’s fiction was concerned with something quite different altogether. He eschewed the cold, garish glitter of the Roaring Twenties in favour of his own weird creations: cosmic entities bristling with slimy tentacles, which ruled over a chaotic and malevolent universe. Discarded as irrelevant by the critics of the early twentieth century, he has since come to be recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern Horror.

An almost comically flamboyant writing style (and an early death in the thirties) would have plunged Lovecraft’s work into permanent obscurity, had it not been for a handful of fans and fellow writers who kept the alien pulse throbbing in their own peculiar ways. First there was August Derleth, a contemporary who formed publishing company Arkham House, and then there was S.T Joshi, one of the world’s leading scholars in Weird Fiction. In the twenty first century, however, two American filmmakers are carrying this eldritch torch, in the form of an online podcast.

Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey formed the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcraft over a year ago, producing over seventy episodes and a strong following of Lovecraft fanatics in the process. It has quickly become one of the most popular horror podcasts on the web, thanks to an original soundtrack, engaging guest hosts and support from online donations. Last week, The Alligator spoke to Chris and Chad about the subject of their show and his near immortal work. Seventy years after Lovecraft’s death, it still has the capacity to shock and unnerve its readers – but not always for the right reasons.

“One of the things that bugs me about Lovecraft is that he was a terrible racist,”Chris says, referring to the crude stereotypes in stories such as The Horror at Red Hook and Herbert West; Re-animator. “I’m always afraid that when I talk about how much I love Lovecraft, somebody’s gonna do a bit more research and read something like ‘On the Creation of Niggers’ which is an inexcusable, horrible poem.”

“The thing about his racism is that it’s really inconsistent,” Chad counters, “there was a disparity, as Chris pointed out in an early episode, between the things that Lovecraft said and the things that he did. For example his wife, Sonia Haft Green, was Jewish. It’s just an aspect of his personality, and it’s almost laughable when it comes out in the work suddenly, because it’s so ridiculously over the top. Unfortunately, racism was not uncommon in the Twenties, and was not a trait exclusive to HP Lovecraft’s stories, obviously. ”

“It also seems that, in his work, Lovecraft softened with age,” Chris adds. “There is this theory that there is a parallel between his aliens like Cthulhu and Azathoth and his fear of alien cultures. But, for example, in his later stories like The Mountains of Madness, the aliens are these advanced civilisations with cultures and histories, and I think a significant revelation at the end of that story is when the narrator says ‘They’re like us; we are these creatures. The horrible things that they’re doing are things that we do.’ There’s a level of sophistication of his ideas in those stories that just isn’t there in the earlier ones.”

Another point of contention surrounding the New England writer is the absence of female characters in his fiction – a grand total of three in his corpus of sixty short stories and three novellas. The pair believes that this paucity could be linked to the conceptual nature of his work, as opposed to latent misogyny or other issues with women.

“I think that bringing in women to his stories brings in relationships, and that detracts from the conceptual horror of things, it becomes about this love of the woman or keeping a loved one safe, but his stories aren’t about that. His stories are about the realization of how horrible the universe is,” Chris suggests.

Chad sees the female question in a similar light: “Look at Hemingway – he was writing about the same time, and there are plenty of women in his stories, but he’s horribly sexist. It comes up all the time. You’ve got to remember also that people weren’t reading Hemingway, or Eliot, or Fitzgerald in the twenties, unless they were very well educated. Pulpy novels about love and romance were the flavour of the day, and he’s just reacting against that: he has no interest in writing romances. Lovecraft wasn’t even that interested in plot or human relationships – he was interested in creating that effect and atmosphere – that’s why it’s weird fiction.”

Chad and Chris: two halves of the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcraft

Most critics are quick to use Lovecraft as a point of contrast against the “high modernist” writers of the early twentieth century, but Chad isn’t so sure: “A lot of the modernists were writing about the horrors of the Great War, but Lovecraft was just dealing with that in a different way. He was dealing with the same material, but using a different brush. I read quite a lot of T.S Eliot and I come across some things and think - besides the prose being much different – ‘that’s a really Lovecraftian idea’.”

Another area where the podcast breaks free from stereotypes is a refusal to dismiss Lovecraft as a sickly recluse, as he has been depicted by numerous biographies.

“He’s more social than I am”, quips Chad. “This is a guy who would make long trips to see people, and for that reason only. If I travel to see someone it’s on business only. I sure don’t keep lengthy correspondence with others, but that is something which he did more than he wrote fiction (Lovecraft scholar S.T Joshi claims the volume of correspondence is over 10,000 letters, one of the largest in recorded history). He wrote to a lot of people, was interested in those relationships, and was a profoundly social guy. I think he would have fallen apart far earlier in his life if weren’t for those enduring social relationships.”

There are very few podcasts available which tackle the work of Fitzgerald, Carver or Dickens to the extent that Chris and Chad do. Do they think that there is something particular about Lovecraft’s work which lends itself to new mediums of technology?

“I don’t think it’s his work, I think it’s the people that are into his work," Chris replies, “because he’s a nerd, he’s a real old-school nerd, and he did these really cool, creepy strange stories, and there’s something about his ‘nerdness’ that attracts other nerds.”

“Sure,” Chad adds, “and he was an internet guy, really. Before there was an internet, he was a relentless self-documenter – he talked in his letters about what was going on in his life day by day, almost as if he had a blog or a Facebook thing going on. He had a network of people he was messaging with. There’s also something fairly unique about Lovecraft’s stories, in that they’re all public domain, you don’t have to buy anything to enjoy them and listen to the show.”

“But he wasn’t doing this in a narcissistic or exhibitionist way, unlike a lot of blogs out there,” Chris adds. “It wasn’t in that kind of self-important tone which comes across when other people talk about their lives.”

Lovecraft’s prodigious amount of correspondence was not solely concerned with socialising – he was also a vocal political critic, once writing that “the Republican idea deserves the same respect one gives to the dead.” According to the presenters, however, Lovecraft’s disdain for politicians was by no means restricted to conservatives:

“When we posted that quote on Facebook, someone snapped back at us equally quickly with a quote on Democrats,” Chad says, “about, you know, how they have to put on their overalls and go out and talk to all these people to create the illusion that they’re regular folks, and thereby turn themselves into clowns. So, I think he saw the whole political system at the time as pretty silly. That said, the idea of there being some kind of social order where people didn’t have to slave so much, just to have basic necessities, was probably very appealing to him, because he wanted people in general to have more time to contemplate science, or literature.”

“Moreover,” Chris continues, “he was incredibly poor towards the end of his life, and I’m sure that added some flavouring to his ideas surrounding socialism. He wanted people to spend time reading literature or studying, instead of worrying about this can of beans they had to live off for the week. We talked about this a little on the podcast, but for example, when Lovecraft was living in New York, his apartment got broken into- they took all his suits! That’s no good, man.”

The man himself

Does the pair share Lovecraft’s cosmic world view, of a cruel and indifferent universe where humans are mere maggots held together by gravity?

“Well, just speaking for me,” Chad says, “his world view certainly resonated with me from a very young age, I mean when I was a teenager I was already sort of in love with the ideas of Schopenhauer, the idea that things are random. All sorts of terrible things happen, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. When people said everything occurs for a reason that made so sense to me. I know I said I love horror movies, but those are actually very Christian, in that they’re concerned with morality, goodness and purity normally wins out - but with Lovecraft, of course, nobody wins and everything’s horrible at the end. That made a lot more sense to me.”

When the duo inevitably cover the last story, and draw the project to a close this winter, they may well consider moving out into a “wider literary sphere.” Neither are particularly enamoured with other stories in the Cthulhu Mythos (a loose canon of fiction set in Lovecraft’s universe) yet a podcast covering Raymond Carver could be a possibility, according to Chad.

“Then again,” Chris chimes in, “a podcast on Raymond Carver doesn’t give us many opportunities for jokes. Whereas Lovecraft, he really gives us a lot of windows, just because the stories are so crazy.”

One such story, which drew much criticism from the duo, was a collaborative piece called “The Electric Executioner.” Popular pulp writer Adolph de Castro had paid Lovecraft a meagre sixteen dollars to write it. The story centred around an eight foot maniac who had invented a portable electric chair, which he wanted to test out on the protagonist. The protagonist convinced the inventor to put the machine on his own head first, who unsurprisingly tripped over and electrocuted himself. Then both characters were inexplicably teleported to a mountain range in Mexico.

“That story really was terrible,” Chad chuckles, “but listeners generally agree with us when we pick apart the ridiculous elements of a story. That said, someone wrote in yesterday and said ‘I’m happy that you guys are there to be the MST3K (Mystery Science Theatre 3000) of Lovecraft,' and I really thought that was wrong. The purpose of the show isn’t to take the piss out of these stories, it’s just that when stuff comes up and it’s bad, you should enjoy it the best way you can - which is to ridicule it a little bit. But, I don’t think of our position as sitting at the sidelines, throwing tomatoes.”

You can listen to the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast, for free, at hppodcraft.com