Lovecraft

Courtesy of "THE ONION" issue of Friday, 30 April 1937

Nation Escapes Depression Through Fanciful Works of H.P. Lovecraft

Fantastical Tales of Better Times Allow Readers to Forget Troubles

Though times may be hard, Americans of all ages are forgetting their troubles with the help of beloved fantasy author H.P. Lovecraft. The recently deceased "Weird Tales" contributor transports readers to a happier land of sanity-sapping prehuman subterranea, helping folks everywhere put aside their cares and take a delightfully diverting trip to Lovecraftland.

"When the narrator recoils in horror at the non-Euclidean alien geometries of the dreaded Sleeping Elder God Cthulhu's undersea tomb, I was in dreamland, wishing my own life could be so merry," said reader Gus Derleth, an unemployed quarryman from Wisconsin. "If only I, too, could be plagued by the shifting gelatinous menace of Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young."

Lovecraft's pulp fiction has won its way into the hearts of readers eager for hope. "His disturbed, paranoid tales of unknowable crawling madness serve as a welcome respite for many people suffering through the Depression," Yale University literature professor Paul Slocombe said. "Lovecraft makes readers wish their own lives were as romantic and carefree as those in his stories, like the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, who pens the forbidden Necronomicon only to be devoured alive by invisible demons in front of screaming onlookers."

Lovecraft's gay yarns lift the spirit and take readers' minds off the difficulties of daily life. "The Dunwich Horror" tells the uplifting story of a half-human abomination born of a human woman and Yog-Sothoth, an ancient, extra-dimensional being worshiped by a half-mad death cult. And the much-beloved "Pickman's Model" has won wide popularity of a tortured painter consorting with hideous subterranean perversities too gruesome to face the light of day.

Of course, such optimism can only exist in fiction. But, in our reality, victims of these dreary times need only open a Lovecraft book to take an exciting trip to a far-off land where alien beings "construct mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, preying horribly on the minds of all they find there."

Would that real life were so grand!