The Love of Ruins: Letters on Lovecraft (SUNY series, Literature . . . in Theory)

Letter one: prayers -- Letter two: Warnings -- Letter three: Psychonautics, sublimity, love -- Letter four: Love and ruins -- Letter five: Ruins and race -- Letter six: Ruins, sublimity, laughter -- Letter seven: Race and writing -- Letter eight: Writing and the love of ruins -- Letter nine: Race, the fourth dimension, apophasis -- Letter ten: Race, the love of wounds -- Letter eleven: Wounds, race, music and noise -- Letter twelve: Race, orientalism, writing -- Letter thirteen: Time travel, white mythology, the library -- Letter fourteen: Cities in ruins -- Letter fifteen: The late city, the decline of the west -- Letter sixteen: Basalt towers, trap doors, taboos, nameless beings -- Letter seventeen: Apophasis, science fiction, visibility and racism, impossible politics -- Letter eighteen: Archive, irruption, eruption, basalt -- Letter nineteen: The great race, the archive -- Letter twenty: Comedy and laughter -- Letter twenty-one: Class, socialism, politics -- Letter twenty-two: Doubling, indirect racism, the gift of vision, non-knowledge -- Letter twenty-three: The fourth dimension, community -- Letter twenty-four: The fourth dimension, community, unworking -- Letter twenty-five: Community, sacrifice, cults -- Letter twenty-six: Racial degeneration, police, sacrifice -- Letter twenty-seven: Sacrifice, madness, one blood, the invention of the white race, frogs -- Letter twenty-eight: Untimeliness, sacrifice, religion -- Letter twenty-nine: Religion after religion, dread -- Letter thirty: Religion, the wholesome, faith and knowledge -- Letter thirty-one: Kindness, wonder, horror -- Letter thirty-two: Hauntology, religion, science, "race" and racism -- Letter thirty-three: Modern apophasis -- Letter thirty-four: The weird, the future, the open. Explores issues related to race and religion in Lovecraft criticism. Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his “Cthulhu mythos” is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media. The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or “weird” fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of “psychonaut” and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author’s racism. The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft’s love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100,000), and to emulate Lovecraft’s lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding. “The Love of Ruins ranks among the small handful of the very best Lovecraftian analyses. Erudite, sophisticated, and insightful, this volume is a pure joy to read. A must have for anyone interested in Lovecraft or the field of dark fantasy.” — Gary Hoppenstand, author of Clive Barker’s Short Stories: Imagination as Metaphor in the Books of Blood and Other Works