"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
These words could easily serve as an introductory statement encapsulating the thesis of this entire podcast. So it is not by mistake that the man who wrote them in his 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", has been referenced in a majority of AoE episodes. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was no stranger to fear and anxiety, especially when confronted with the unknown, both in his corporeal real-world experience, and in the more conceptual realms of time and space.
In this first half of our multi-episode exploration of the weird worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, we look at the man himself three-dimensionally, without smoothing over any of the jagged edges that plague his legacy. He was a myth-maker, a struggling artist, a tortured soul, a virulent bigot, and has left an unmatched impression on over a century of strange and terrifying fiction. He left this world without ever knowing the immensity that his cosmic horror genre would reach. Join us for a trip to where rational thought meets crippling madness in this very special AoE first: an in-depth profile of a true maestro of fear, Lovecraft.
