I recently interviewed Hector Rodriguez, the DFW-based creator of the indie comic El Peso Hero, about his new series, Pancho Villa: Monster Hunter. In it, he pits the legendary Mexican rebel leader against creatures straight from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Rodriguez is far from the only contemporary author to borrow Lovecraft’s lore for a horror story, but after my conversation with him I started wondering why Lovecraft’s creations retain such a firm hold on the American mind.
Part of it is a quirk of copyright. Lovecraft was a voluminous but not successful writer whose work was mostly printed in magazines like Weird Tales. After he died in 1937, his cumbersome literary estate went through so many twists and turns that there’s an entire wiki page for it. Some works had their copyrights renewed, some didn’t, and United States copyright law’s 95-year waiting period will render the question completely moot within the next decade. At any given time over the last century, if you wanted to plug a member of the Cthulhu pantheon into a story in any medium you could, and people did.
Which is, frankly, what Lovecraft wanted. He was very free with his creations, loaning them to authors like Texas’s own Robert E. Howard in building Conan the Barbarian’s world. Some of it might be out of guilt, as he sometimes accused himself of merely ripping off Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany, but he also felt that a shared mythos enhanced all who contributed to it. In a way, he pioneered the modern collective internet horror communities like SCP and the Backrooms, realizing that what he lost in ownership he gained in cultural weight. Writing to William Frederick Anger in 1934 Lovecraft said:
“Thus our black pantheon acquires an extensive publicity & pseudo-authoritativeness it would not otherwise get … All this gives it a sort of air of verisimilitude.”
So, one reason Cthulhu and his cosmic cousins are so prominent is because they were designed for dissemination and aided by a lack of copyright enforcement. Almost all modern American horror writers who have similar shared worlds borrow at least a little bit from Lovecraft, such as Stephen King, Laird Barron, and John Langan. It’s a well everyone has access to, but that doesn’t explain why anyone actually cares. I asked Rodriguez what he thought, and while he cited the memorable monster menagerie, he also said this.
““It’s something terrifying, you know, going above and beyond from our western spirituality. Beyond our understanding of death, of what evil is, of the unknown. It’s a different kind of void.”
I think he’s right. The Cthulhu pantheon are kind of the perfect American gods, representing what we truly fear as a people and offering a divine terror that mere Christianity doesn’t.
Americans have an individualist streak a mile wide that often gets us in trouble. Inherent to the national understanding of ourselves is the belief that everyone is a special, separate person first and foremost. Our entire conception as a people is that anyone can be anything, the master of their own destiny. It’s one of the reasons Protestant Christianity is more popular than other faiths. A personal relationship with God that welds your unique view of scripture to your will is basically sanctified bootstrapping.
But a God who answers your prayers like that doesn’t fill the other spiritual need human have: the presence of dread powers to explain the darkness of the world. Monotheism just doesn’t produce much of a rogue’s gallery, and we’re all too convinced of God’s favor for Him to be the big bad. There’s a hole in the American soul, and that’s where Cthulhu comes in.
The most prominent staple of cosmic horror is the idea that the universe is incomprehensibly vast and that humanity is utterly insignificant to it. Most Lovecraftian monsters are so unreal in shape and size that merely looking at them drives people insane. Lovecraft’s stories have almost no heroes. Most people collapse into gibbering nothingness in the tentacled face of his patheon.
You see how such an idea is the devil Americans crave. If Christian nationalism makes us the shining city on the hill, Lovecraftian antinationalism is the fear that the city and everything in it is nothing. Borders become meaningless in a kind of celestial communism with the void. The Cthulhu Mythos barely know the city is there and wouldn’t care if they did. Americans are taught to make their lives mean something, to leave legacies, to matter. The counterweight of that is cosmic non-importance, something looming in the starlit abyss above us in the night.
Ask any professional dominatrix and she will tell you one of the most consistent client sets is wealthy, powerful men seeking an escape. The desire for hyper-individualism and personal power is always at odds with the fear of irrelevance and secret yearning for the loss of self in the void. The American Dream cannot exist without the American Nightmare to give it form. The fear must be fed, and Lovecraft’s gods do it better than any major religion in the United States.
It’s also why so many marginalized people repurpose Lovecraftian deities as stories of empowerment. Lovecraft Country is the most famous example, but LGBTQIA+ have been drawing on Lovecraft’s themes of alienation, othering, and blasphemy since at least 2007. When you’re demonized, wearing the demon’s branding can become talismanic. The fact that Lovecraft, one of America’s vilest bigots, would hate this adds even more flair to it.
I doubt Lovecraft ever thought this far about his monsters, but he clearly knew that his “black pantheon” could be more than just pulp magazine fodder. The Cthulhu Mythos has become a shorthand in horror for everything America is supposed to not be, a looming shadow of personal insignificance that hits harder than any threat of Hell. At least in Hell, your individual sins are accounted. Cthulhu couldn’t care less, and that scares the pants off most Americans.
