“My reason for writing stories,” Lovecraft says, “is to give myself the satisfaction of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy. . . .” 2 Story is not the point: the point is wonder, which for Lovecraft goes hand in hand with horror, because, he claims, “fear is our deepest and strongest emotion.” He believes this because in his “mechanical materialist” vision, humans mean nothing. The wonder of the vastness is inextricable from the horror of our own pointlessness. “[A]ll my tales,” he once wrote, “are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have
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