So, on one level, yes, Cthulhu, etc...

so like cyberpunk and the 80s, lovecraftian horror is a bit out of context in the modern world and is tied heavily to the 30s?

What would you say is the Lovecraft/Cyberpunk of today? A genre of fiction that's specially suited to the post-postmodern era in which we find ourselves in the mid-2010s?

>and I typed that with little to no stress.
you also are living in 2016 where we are accustomed to such concepts. When Lovecraft wrote his works this was something we really weren't accustomed to and still kinda saw ourselves as being really important to the grand scheme of things. To really have it hit home that we are anything but, it's quite a rude awakening and one that can be frightening.

Even today we have people who can't accept that significant events can happen as a result of minor, or even random acts. these people are the ones who will create these ridiculously elaborate conspiracy theories to give significant events equally significant causes and to put power back into the hands of people (sinister people but still people). Example: World War 1, clusterfuck of overly-elaborate alliances and poor decisions? well yes but that hardly seems significant enough a cause, The Illuminati had their puppets go to war with each other in order to thin the population? Much more significant. 9/11? a bunch of pissed-off Islamists could just alter america so significantly? just like that? No it had to be an inside job! it just had to be! this is their mindset, they find it more comforting than the harsh reality of things. So imagine the shock to their psyche to have all their delusions and beliefs shattered completely in an instant and forced to face reality.

Honestly, yes. The ideas are still worth thinking about and talking about, they're still important to literature and can be used effectively in a story to excite a sense of dread through atmosphere, but to existentially or philosophically scare on anything but a personal level to someone whose never even attempted to consider it, no. The sheer impact these ideas, presented as they are, would have had in 1926, which was such a vibrant and different time when bolder statements and schools of thought about society and the world were beginning emerge, doesn't translate at all into a modern society that's lived through all of it and come out on the other side with a completely different mindset.

But I still think those terrors can be there. I think we're a very arrogant species and in Lovecraft, human arrogance in tampering with forces that exist beyond always leads to disaster. Trying to create black holes or upload organic consciousnesses to machines, who knows what'll happen. What if when we take our minds out of our brains, once physically unable to see certain things, are then suddenly bombarded by sights once invisible and unknown? Stuff like that I believe is still applicable.

Somewhat, although you are also approaching it in the wrong way. Lovecraft was not only about fear of the unknown, of the terrible future. He was also about the fear of inability, the fear of being able to do nothing, the idea that all of your life, all the years that you have spent learning and training and becoming a better human are all for naught, because in the end, the universe is completely beyond your control.

A good way to compare it is to consider your fear when one of your children have cancer. There's nothing you can do, nothing at all to save him from death.

In short, Lovecraft is the fear of the incomprehensible yes, and yes, the fear of meaningless, but his greatest ability was to induce the feeling of uselessness.

post-cyberpunk? its a more modern take on cyberpunk, where the internet isnt evil, cybernetics and AI arent soul sucking monsters, and evil corporations arent monolithic evil sinks. but are a large conglomerate of people good and bad

but it isnt really popular enough to qualify

I think cosmic horror has a place in modern society. We're jaded and arrogant, humans are thick-headed and headstrong sometimes, I think things to give us a slap on the face can still exist. They can be external forces of which we have no control, gamma ray bursts from the depths of the cosmos or first contact being less than stellar and what that might do to the human race. Cosmic horror stresses lack of control and knowledge, and today, when we really do think we're in the big leagues, it would be even more disastrous to find out maybe we shouldn't be poking around in the depths of atoms or in invisible light spectrums or seeking parallel universes.

Hey, does any Veeky Forums stuff besides that Illuminati game from Steve Jackson Games draw on Discordianism at all?

There still are people who are, for some inexplicable reason, frightened by the scale of the universe.

Stranger Things on Netflix definitely has a cosmic horror vibe to it. As does John Carpenter's The Thing.

It is almost indescribably big and should make us feel tiny. Then you look at how violent it is, and you realize how quickly Earth could disappear. That should scare anyone, at least for a little.

I'm one of those people. I've always wanted to leave a legacy for myself and one of my biggest fears is being forgotten. The idea that eventually the sun will swallow the earth and any trace that I existed will be wiped away is something that keeps me up at night.

Hell, in some of his own stories, the alien beings are actually vaguely friendly, if unknowable. The things from Shadow out of Time, for example, were nice enough, in a way. They just didn't quite understand that humans would find it terrifying to exist as a brain in a jar.

>Hi there!
>Oh christ, what are you? What is all this?
>Wow, you sure scream a lot, don't you?
>Why can't I see, or feel?
>You're a brain in a jar. We forgot to get a body ready for you.
>Oh, God. What sort of monsters are you?
>Oh, that's nice. Monsters. You're not so special, yourself, you know!
>Oh God, I'm not?

>And to think, the writing was done before atomic paranoia hit the world.
Lovecraft was alive during the Great War. Wonder if he knew anybody that caught a nasty case of shellshock, cause that has a bit in common with the madness Cthulhu seems to cause.

The Mi-Go were probably the least overtly malignant, but in the end we never did figure out their deal. The Elder Things woke up to find their city deserted for millions of years and naked apes trying to cut them open, they're arguably good guys. The Yithians were genocidal monsters, though.

I do like that Lovecraft aliens actually look, y'know, alien. Not rubber forehead bullshit, actually alien and weird. Like, "need to re-read the description several times" weird.

>"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

Modern scifi like Blindsight and Neuropath both fit the cosmic horror niche quite nicely, I think. Some of Steven King's stuff too.

The spookiest thing about Stranger Things is the implications behind the happy ending
>there's a shadow realm populated by bloodthirsty carnivorous monsters, but lets just set down for a nice family dinner
>ESP be real and the boundary between realities be porous sheeeeeit

>It's always best to just not think about the blatant xenophobia and move on.
You can't bring yourself to think over ideas in a book you're reading? Why are you reading literature?

Lovecraft is just a meme, just like mexicans.

I find that kind of comforting, in a way. You don't have to worry about accomlishing something or making your mark on history, because in the end all you have accomplished will turn to dust and be forgotten. Anybody thinking themselves as better than you is merely deluding themselves, because in the end we're all equal before entropy.

Did it ever occur to you that you might be dim user?

Did you read any actual Lovecraft, or are you basing your knowledge of the mythos on lolcthulhu memes?

Do we really need to do the "das waicist" gig everytime HPL is mentioned?

Great Cthulhu wouldn't 'choose' to wipe us all out, if it happened he'd do it by accident, like the number of things you kill when you walk on the grass, he'd be going about his business doing whatever's important to squid-dragon-godzilla and wind up causing the apocalypse without really knowing or caring

>since hardly anyone read his works when he was alive.
This makes me sadder than any amount of eldritch gods and looming apocalypses ever could. Living your entire life working towards something and never receiving any recognition for it, until you die and everyone realizes how great you were but it's too late.

My favourite way of explaining Lovecraftian horror is to imagine that every explosive, every nuke, is rigged up to a random number generator (pick any range you like) which is generating another number every second when a certain number comes up on the generator, they all detonate. Lovecraft essentially said that we're already living like that anyway, at any point forces beyond our control or ability to predict could, for no particular reason, cause massive destruction and suffering.

Sometimes terrible things happen to random people, for no purpose, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's more depressing than scary but still.

The other aspect of it which has already been mentioned is also the idea of relative insignificance. Even if humans one day were to found an empire spanning across our whole galaxy, our galaxy is just a tiny speck of light in the universe and one day it will go out like all the other and be like we never existed.

It is denigrating the concept of the noble human struggle to little more than the mould that grows on a piece of fruit left out for too long.

We have a very high notion of ourselves, our achievements and our place in the universe.

Exactly! There's one story about a ship crew who gets attacked by some black pirates. His description of the pirates' behavior is 100% similar to today's niggers during a chimpout. And is it racist to say that nignogs look like beasts/apes when you see pic related?

He's not nearly as racist as [Spoiler]____me_____

As many anons have already written, Lovecraft wrote at a time when almost everyone believed, to some extent, that humans were special, that God made us in his image, and that he cares about each and every one of us.

Now, you've seen how bent out of shape religious people get about Richard Dawkins? Now imagine that rather than a somewhat mildly spoken upper class British guy saying mean things about your God and disparaging his existence, it's a nightmarish amorphous horror you can't even describe accurately without sounding like a raving lunatic and which is somehow able to impress upon you by it's sheer existence the realisation that your most deeply held beliefs are nonsense.
That is why Lovecraftian stuff drives people mad; because it causes such powerful cognitive dissonance that trying to come up with a way of fitting it into your old world-view breaks you

I read about some philosopher or political scientist or something who described nine "revolutions" in human thought that forced us to reconsider our place in the universe. They were in three groups of threes (those we'd passe dthrough, those we were still passing through, those our society still hadnt got its head around; the first group included Heliocentrism and Evolution, the middle group the Cosmological revolution (the universe is big beyond our comprehension, i.e. Lovecraftian shit) while the last three included the Neurological revolution, where we acknowledge we're all just a load of electrical currents floating through a sack of meat and that can be changed at will.

Seems like Blindsight might be part of the latter.

As someone who has fought with depression in their life, I will tell you that that is a true existential terror that creeps into you when you are unhappy. It may be why Lovecraftian stories appeal to me, but the idea that my life is essentially pointless, that, nothing I do will have a lasting effect except to equally small and pointless lives around me and that it is just going to be filled with pain and struggle before a sharp decline to the end terrified me.

The thought of ending my life to save myself that pain and pointlessness was only countered by my near infinite fear of the meaningless of death that on the other side is only a endless abyss of non-existence.

In truth though, whilst this makes me feel very uncomfortable, I readily concede that it is in part a combination of a depressed mindset, a nihilistic perspective and personal dysfunction so might not be relatable to everyone.

Didn't you use a proper spoiler, because a proper spoiler is black___?

pic related. We really are the OG eldritch beings. A tentacle-y mass "channeling" a conciousness to drive a bone structure wrapped in meat.

The idea that humans are not the center of the universe was a horrifying truth to HP Lovecraft.

Given that it's an important life lesson to learn growing up that most kids have figured out by the time they're 15, I think this says more about HP Lovecraft than it does about humanity.

>and apparently looking at them drives you mad or whatever. Like, they're dragons with a gaze attack. Okay.
WROOOOOOOONG

THIS IS A MISCONCEPTION BASED ON A LITERAL INTERPRETATION OF THE RPG'S RULES.

THEY DRIVE YOU MAD BECAUSE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THEIR EXISTENCE ARE TOO MUCH TO BEAR.

WHICH DEPENDS UPON THE CHARACTER WHO'S WITNESSING THEM.

RANDOLPH CARTER WAS USED TO THAT SORT OF SHIT AND WAS NEVER DRIVEN MAD BY THEM.

Although Randolph was special in many ways, he was a king of a mystical land in a dimension that is largely guarded from most Eldritch beings.

I understand that there are a number of very big rocks flying through space, and that every now and then one hits the Earth and does enough damage to wipe out, say, all the dinosaurs. Not much to be done about those, whatever Bruce Willis tells you.

Oh god, why was my first thought 'Yes, that's a nervous system alright. I want to lick it.'

He wasn't the king of anything, that's Kuranes.

Yeah, my existential terror rises up to torment me a little bit when I think about it.
Then I jack off and it goes away.

You are right, I'm thinking of Kuranes from Celephais

obviously you want to lick someone's nerve endings

The existential horror comes from the Insignificance of man. It doesn't scare everyone, but Mankind likes to think of itself as important, or special in most cases, and the idea of Chthulu basically treats humanity as next to nothing.

But why?!

A lot of people miss the point of Cthulhu. Remember, this guy gets his face caved in by one dude on a steamboat- sure he regenerated quickly, but he's not an untouchable.

Yeah, Cthulhu was on one level a big scary monster, but it's not that looking at Cthulhu makes you go mad. The bigger danger to your sanity was the fact he was a walking contradiction of everything humans had taken for granted.

By merely existing, he obliterates the concept that we're the sovereigns of a universe God has created for us, making us in his image. We are not the peak of creation, we might even be less than notable.

It'd be like learning instead of God making Adam in his image and Eve from Adam's rib, humans sprung from some corn kernel in God's shit when he wasn't looking.

2. We are not alone, and Earth doesn't 'belong' to us the way we always assumed. Killing each other over chunks of the Earth suddenly seems a lot more pointless knowing something essentially owns us.

In 1930s America, we were the center of the universe in science, politics, power and God.

Cthulhu was just the guy in the rubber monster costume breaking into your bedroom at night to grab those concepts you held so confidently and chuck them out the window. Then he bulldozes your house down so he can build a condo that you can't even figure out where the fucking door is.

And if that still doesn't do it for you, then hey it's fine. Horror is as subjective as comedy and HP certainly had a specific bent to his horror. You gave it a shot and I can respect that. Better than the people who refuse to give it the time of day because "OMG RACIST"

Maybe you are just a wee bit weird?

>It'd be like learning instead of God making Adam in his image and Eve from Adam's rib, humans sprung from some corn kernel in God's shit when he wasn't looking.

None of this is a big deal to anyone who hasn't been raised religious.

Noooooo

most people were in the 20s

Well, that was his point though. Cthulu isn't necessary scary for everyone, but for it's time and for people with a particular inclination, it was.

If I wrote a horror story set mostly in a dark forest, and I was really good in writing horror, it would mostly strike you as 'that's neat'. But If you lived in a hut in the middle of the woods and that was all you knew, you'd find it scary.

Medieval horror stories are almost comedy to us. Between living with different fears and different worlds, they also care for different things. You didn't even need to deny god to scare a medieval peasant, you merely had to hint that the minor flaw of character that anyone can have, can bring awful consequences.

Horror is not a genre that ages well. It may still be neat or have a good style and prose, but the good horror captures the fears of it's time. I don't know what our generation fears are, there's something about environmental decay and science going too far, but there's probably better themes.

The worst part is the rift in the basement will only get bigger.

There's also the fact that someone saying they've internalised something and actually believing it are two different things. Take most people's reactions to sudden or sustained violence for instance, just because we're innured to a glossy and sterilised version of it through our media doesn't make bearing it a whole lot different. If anything it could just as well be painted as a form of denial.

I would have said the current generations fears are to do with the loss of privacy and restriction of information and the idea of some outside entity observing us and retaining secret knowledge about the world which we don't have. See every conspiracy theory ever.

i think that was the 80s, before facebook and twitter made us willingly give up privacy for fame

But what would be the over the top horror scenario here?

And I mean, there's a shared element between most conspiracies and lovecraft. In the sense that the Democrats Moloch cult, or society of the uber rich, or illuminatti, are just groups so big and powerful we can't do anything agaisnt them, not even prove they exist, which make us insignificant in comparison.

But I see those theories less as horror stories and more as comfort stories. If something so powerful manipulates the world, it takes one's personal responsibility in putting pressure in government and corporations.

>How is "we were the side effects of the activities of some gods that don't care about us" any worse than there not being a god? In fact, isn't it better in a way, since the vain struggle against those gods is at least more concrete than struggling against pure abstract meaninglessness alone?

If there's no god, the meaning of the universe is what you make of it, for our sapience grants us the ability to assign purpose and there is no grand purpose, no will other than ours to make us into liars, and if there are other alien species out there, they most likely are not so different from us: They may be strange, but they'll still have wants and needs we can comprehend.

Not so with Lovecraft: There IS a fundamental meaning, and humanity has no part in it. Not only is humanity meaningless in the grand scheme of things, we're also insignificant. And you can't even comfort yourself by thinking that meaning is what you make of it, for that's only a comfortable illusion when a true meaning does exist. There are also aliens, and they too look upon us as we look upon to ants.

There's still plenty of people who genuinely believe humanity is the center of the universe created in God's image. One of the reason republican-leaning politicians are more likely to oppose enviromental laws is because they also tend to be highly religious, and believe that since God gave humanity dominion over the world, we can fuck it up however we like. Besides, everybody knows the rapture or the second coming will be happening within the next decade (never mind it we've said the same thing for the past 2000 years), so no point in saving resources to future generations.

Cthulhu's also actually pretty low on the totem pole as far as Lovecraftian horrors go. He's to a human as humans are to ants (except ants and humans are at least both carbon-based lifeforms and share a very remote common ancenstor), but compared to Yog-Sothot, Shub-Niggurath and Azatoth he's barely more significant than humans are.

The existence of the aliens doesn't make their meaning any more objective than ours.
That raises an interesting question:

Would Cthulhu be driven mad by, and live in terror of, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, etc.?

>Would Cthulhu be driven mad by, and live in terror of, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, etc.?
It'd play like a scene from Rick and Morty I imagine.

It's because cosmic horror is a low genre designed to titillate plebeians, and not an intelligent exploration of anything meaningful.

Maybe some church-going prole would be scared by the idea that the world doesn't revolve around him, but even in Lovecraft's time, and long before, elites in society have always acknowledged that our greatness is subjective.

Furthermore, a cosmic horror is /not/ objectively more significant than humanity, even if it calls itself a god, is 20 feet tall, and can summon tentacles from darkness. The worth of such a being, and indeed of any being, is defined by the subjectivity perceiving it. Mankind is as important as we make it out to be, and nothing can actually challenge that notion.

I don't have a fedora big enough for this.

>Furthermore, a cosmic horror is /not/ objectively more significant than humanity, even if it calls itself a god, is 20 feet tall, and can summon tentacles from darkness. The worth of such a being, and indeed of any being, is defined by the subjectivity perceiving it. Mankind is as important as we make it out to be, and nothing can actually challenge that notion
well since yog-sothoth is the space-time continuum and azathoth is the initial creation and the final destruction I think it's safe to say they're significant no matter what viewpoint you take

>le ebin hat meme

>The existence of the aliens doesn't make their meaning any more objective than ours.
Them being so far beyond us as to be incomprehensible to us does. And though it rarely takes a central stage, not only do aliens exist, but so do literal gods.

>Would Cthulhu be driven mad by, and live in terror of, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, etc.?
He's their high-priest.

According to some sources, Cthulhu worships the Outer Gods. He's referred in the story as a high priest of the Great Old Ones, but it's not quite clear whether he is a Great Old One who is a high priest (Call of Cthulhu would imply he is one of the GOOs), or if he worships the Great Old Ones (Dunwitch Horror implies that Cthulhu is related to the GOOs but is not one himself). The common intrepertion is the former, in which case he probably worships the Outer Gods or something.

I forget where it's mentioned, but Cthulhu is supposed to be a priest of Yog-Sothoth.

>yog-sothoth is the space-time continuum and azathoth is the initial creation and the final destruction I think it's safe to say they're significant no matter what viewpoint you take
And you'd be wrong. Either these things are literally fundamental features of the physical universe in which case we have no reason to personify them, or they are, as is almost always the case in cosmic horror and with Lovecraft especially, only connected to these concepts by hyperbolic association, and therefore can be ignored outright.

Furthermore, there's nothing intrinsically important about either of those concepts, let alone their origins in the physical universe.

having read 90% of the way through an enormous anthology of lovecraft stuff, the initial cosmic horror stuff appears to come from him being an upper middle-class agoraphobe and his stuff became a lot more like other scifi horror writers once he started to travel.

>existing at every point in time and space on every possible timeline simultaneously and capable of manipulating it
>unimportant

also it's not just a non-sentient fundamental aspect of the universe because one of the book characters had a conversation with it.

What criteria would something have to satisfy to qualify as intrinsically important?

The thing is that Lovecraft was sheltered for most of his life. His friends even made fun of him because of that and kept telling him to move to Boston proper. He did and his works actually improved leaps and bounds.

according to the lovecraftian mythos as it exists now, azathoth is the creature in who's fever-dreams we live.
you can't be like "they are only associated with the universe because love craft says they are" because they don't exist in real life as far as we know and the universe that lovecraft writes about is inherently different from our own by virtue of these things existing. Cthulhu flew to earth from light years away by flapping his wings. the fact that in that world yog-sothoth is actually life itself is not that out of the ordinary as far as lovecraft is concerned.
tldr: cthulhu flew accross the galaxy by flapping his wings, your argument is invalid

It's worth pointing out that not all Lovecraft stories are 'human encounters huge monster, realises truth of own insignificance, goes mad' like The Call Of Cthulhu. Here's a few examples of other plots:

>The Rats In The Walls
>Man moves back to old family estate, discovers that his family were a mad cannibal cult back in the day and that his genetics doom him to become a mad cannibal himself. He ends up going off the deep end and trying to eat one of his friends.
>The Colour Out Of Space
>Ecological disaster strikes a remote farm. The residents become sickly, maddened and mutated, which is described in unpleasant detail. In the end, everybody dies and the area is left horribly tainted. The moral is that sometimes bad things happen for no reason, and there's nothing you can do about it.
>Dreams In The Witch House
>Promising mathematician starts to investigate a theory that would dramatically alter our understanding of the universe. Attracts the attention of much older, more horrible beings who have already mastered this mathematics and use its practical applications to torment and brainwash him, eventually implicating him in horrible crimes.
>The Thing On The Doorstep
>A man's wife uses brainwashing and hypnosis to force her mind into his body, taking it over and forcing him out of his own body. He tries to fight back, but her will is stronger. Eventually he snaps and murders her, but this doesn't help as she simply forces his mind into her corpse and takes over his mind for good. Nobody believed anything was wrong until it was far too late.
>The Shadow Over Innsmouth
>A man finds himself trapped in a remote town where the residents have allowed themselves to become corrupted by inhuman forces. When the locals realise they're onto him, they try to kill him. He barely escapes with his life, and in doing so sees the true depths of their depravity. It subsequently turns out that the same corruption was dormant in him all along.

Yog-Sothot is heavily implied, if not outright stated, to literally be the universe. Yog-Sothot exist at all points of space and time because all points of space and time exist in Yog-Sothot, and all that.

Lovecraft's "cosmology" was always kind of vaque, though, but you definitely get the idea that Yog-Sothot is at the very least the equivalent of the capital G God.

>The Rats in the Walls
Is it definitely genetic or could it be that the belief that it was certain was itself what drove him mad? That sounds far more interesting, but I know Lovecraft was a big ole racist who thought genes determined whether you were a good person or not.
>The Shadow Over Innsmouth
I'd read this one already as well as Call of Cthulhu. Dreams In The Witch House and The Thing On The Doorstep sound fucking terrifying.

It's as significant as it's made out to be, and in the case of something like that, which again I believe is completely wrapped in hyperbole and not a genuine assessment of its abilities, there is no reason to acknowledge it as a sapient creature because its sapience is not related to its power.

Nothing is intrinsically important and nothing can be intrinsically important. Significance is an assigned, subjective quality.

"God" is not a quality, it's a title. It's given to things by creatures capable of assigning it. What you actually have is a thing with lots of power. Even if it's responsible for creating the universe, it is not intrinsically any more important than your mom, and for many, probably even most people, it will not be treated as more important in fact.

I hear this all the time, but I've read a good number of his works and never really caught on to that ever. Where exactly does it come up?

It's subtler in most of his prose. I know of at least one explicitly racist poem he wrote, entitled "On the Creation of Niggers."

I'm not joking. That's the name.

However, probably in large part due to his friendship with Howard, who was kind of on the opposite extreme (anti-racist for his time), he became much more mellow about it later on, and even wrote a story in which a black family is depicted as having positive traits.

The thing with horror is it's all about the individual. It's about what scares you. If the author was scared, some reader will be scared too.

I know I never understood horror until Lovecraft gave me nightmares. And it was never Cthulhu. Rats in the Walls and Dagon. Gravity was the scariest movie I've ever seen, Windlands was the scariest game (wade into the sandstorm once and now I can't even look at it, much less fucking swing over it). Emrakul gives me nightmares.

So I don't know, if it scares you, it scares you.

All you anons here should actually read more of Lovecraft's fiction, so you can understand it instead of just reacting to memes.

It's free and online, so no excuses.

hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/

lovecraft's universe only bears the most surface of resemblances to our own. the fact that in our world the laws of physics don't change because a giant octopus says so does not mean that they don't in lovecraft's world. if being able to decide that newton's third law doesn't apply to your friends doesn't constitute important to you, I don't think we have the same definition of important

In the Dunwich Horror there's a sentence or two that states that Cthulhu can just barely see the otherworldly things in the universe, whereas humans can't see anything at all, comparatively.

The protagonist of Rats in the Walls has a cat named Niggerman. The cultists in The Call of Cthulhu are depraved, degenerate, and non-white. The Horror at Red Hook is also racist as hell. A black man is described as a gorilla in Herbert West Reanimator. That's off the top of my head.

Nah, the current fear, if i can even call it that, is the vague dread that we are in a sliw apocalypse, and that no new discovery will appear to drag us out of our hole.

Another big fear is that we are truly alone. No gods, no aliens, no dragons, not even a sxary cthulu. Just nothing, forever.

>the fact that in our world the laws of physics don't change because a giant octopus says so does not mean that they don't in lovecraft's world

It's not that they change in Lovecraft's world, it's that they function in manners and dimensions we can't comprehend.

>Nah, the current fear, if i can even call it that, is the vague dread that we are in a sliw apocalypse, and that no new discovery will appear to drag us out of our hole.
You're going to die. The world will end. These are both inevitable.

But so what? That shit will happen when it happens, and in all likelihood, that won't be for a long, long time.

>Another big fear is that we are truly alone. No gods, no aliens, no dragons, not even a sxary cthulu. Just nothing, forever.
I cannot understand the depraved mind that actively wishes for gods and monsters.

If humans are the only sapient life in the universe, then, should the absence of other sapient life be considered a problem, we need only make more. That's not an insurmountable hurdle, and in fact it's one we get closer to overcoming every day.

It's not clear exactly what happens in The Rats In The Walls, since the whole thing is narrated by the crazy guy himself, who merely claims that - although he's aware it looks like he ate his friend - actually he didn't, honest, please believe me...
There's a lot more to Lovecraft than big cosmic horror. There's very strong themes of corruption in it, too; both in people's bloodlines (look at Innsmouth) and just from contact with weird shit (as in The Colour Out Of Space). Coupled with his fascination with old, often run-down towns and buildings (the guy was really rather good at describing architecture evocatively), there's a strong sense of decay and entropy that creeps through his work. Everything is coming undone, beautiful things fall apart or rot, people go wrong in the head, the world stops making sense. (yes,since race-mixing was a big issue for Lovecraft, that theme does tend to come through in this, but it's more him using symbols that resonated with him and his culture to get his real point across)
pic related is an illustration to Innsmouth that gets that horrible corrupt feel quite nicely.

Stop thinking this line of thought and, on top of that, do not apply it to octopi.
That's my idea, patent pending

>they function in manners and dimensions we can't comprehend.
>God works in mysterious ways!

The idea that mankind is as important as we make it out to be is rooted in the same notions that cosmic horror is intended to challenge (it's success, like all horror, lies in the execution and a willingness of the audience to engage). The idea that free will is an illusion, a phenomenon experienced as a cancerous offshoot of a socialisation mechanism and that all our decisions are made by a complex state-machine our consciousness perches precariously atop of; or a non-abstracted internalisation that at any moment everything that humanity has or will ever be can be scoured from the universe for no rational reason.

This is to say nothing of the instinctive reaction to being confronted with a reality completely outside the context of human experience.