Lovecraft’s phobias

The reason I like H P Lovecraft?

He came up with book titles like Nyarlahotep, Azathoth and, in what might be an ominous portent for a pioneering Indian graphic novelist, The Doom That Comes to Sarnath.

Luc Sante has a more literary appraisal in The New York Review of Books, and a rather wonderful list of the things Lovecraft feared. Not all of them went bump in the night:

Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an “adequately excellent lover,” it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list…. The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.