H.P. Lovecraft’s influence lives on long after his death—especially on Tor.com, through the weekly Lovecraft Reread and Victor LaValle’s Tor.com Publishing novella The Ballad of Black Tom, winner of the 2016 This Is Horror Awards, and Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards nominee.
On Thursday, March 23, LaValle will join three other authors at New York City’s The Center for Fiction for H.P. Lovecraft: Past, Present, and Future. Paul La Farge (The Night Ocean), Ellen Datlow (Lovecraft’s Monsters), W. Scott Poole (In The Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft), and LaValle will explore the ongoing relevance of his work on fiction and creative writing, in a talk moderated by The Center’s Events Producer Rosie Clarke.
As a primer, check out a recent installment of Genre in the Mainstream: Revisiting Lovecraft, in Horror and in Ambiguity. Tobias Carroll praised The Ballad of Black Tom as “instructive for how it hits the expected Lovecraftian story beats while also wholeheartedly criticizing Lovecraft’s racism”; you can read an excerpt here. La Farge’s novel The Night Ocean also gets a shout-out for taking a different tack, making Lovecraft a central figure in the narrative: “There’s a bizarre image involved, and a rumor of a death without a body—but the twists and turns that this narrative takes have less to do with eldritch terrors from other dimensions and more to do with deceptions, nestled narratives, and shifting identities. The terrors here are subtler ones.”
Poole’s biography of the author, In the Mountains of Madness, recontextualizes Lovecraft’s body of work in contemporary culture. Then there’s Datlow’s collection-slash-eldritch-encyclopedia Lovecraft’s Monsters, in which contributors including Neil Gaiman and Caitlín R. Kiernan present new takes on the mythology of Cthulhu to Yog-Sothoth, accompanied by chilling illustrations.
Like they said—you can see Lovecraft everywhere. Learn more about the panelists and RSVP at The Center for Fiction.
