I feel like too many people are obsessed with Lovecraft’s monsters, tentacles and polyps and shuggoths. Whatever. Frankly, I think they’re missing the point. At least, I can say they’re missing the part that has played the greatest influence on me, and those elements would be the importance of atmosphere, the found manuscript as a narrative device, and his appreciation of what paleontologists and geologists call deep time. Deep time is critical to his cosmicism, the existential shock a reader brings away from his stories. Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes. Within the concept of infinity. No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us. To me, that’s Lovecraft.

Caitlin Kiernan