Also—Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a racist and an anti-Semite.
There. We said it.

We could give a litany of examples, but they are easy to find with a
simple Internet search. Look up the name of his cat, for instance. Go
ahead, we’ll wait.

Now that we’ve gotten that issue out in the open, let us turn our
attention to why we still find the Cthulhu mythos, of which he planted
the seed, a fruitful garden in which to find stories.
Lovecraft once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is
fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
He filled that void of knowledge with his imagination, creating Old Ones
and forbidden knowledge, strange religions and fantastical superstitions,
threats to society and suspicion of what science might unlock. We can
acknowledge the fear behind his imagination while also re-examining
what came out of it.

In recent years, many writers, including writers of color, have flipped
the perspective on some of Lovecraft’s most famous stories and made
brilliant new works. Excellent examples are The Ballad of Black Tom by
Victor LaValle, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, Hammers
on Bone by Cassandra Khaw, and Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R.
Kiernan. We hope you use them for inspiration just as much as you use
Lovecraft’s original works.