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![]() ![]() We interpret it, of course: our minds are meaning-factories. In his “Afterweird” to the VanderMeers’ anthology, China Miéville describes the indefinite nature of the weird canon, saying that itsĮdges are as protean, its membranes as permeable and oozing as the breaching biology of Lovecraft’s Dunwich Horror. In fact, they could be said to go back far earlier, to the earliest superstitions of our human ancestors. Understood in Lovecraft’s own terms, they stretch back not only as far as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Edgar Allan Poe, but as far back as the early Gothic writers. ![]() Like Kafka, Lovecraft created his own predecessors. ![]() Jorge Luis Borges might have been speaking of the author of “The Dunwich Horror” and “Supernatural Horror in Literature” when he said, in “Kafka and His Predecessors,” “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” ( On Writing 87). But it is also reflected on the literary histories that were later made. The scale of Lovecraft’s influence was felt by his contemporaries and vastly more so by his successors. However, he is not so much the founder of weird fiction than one of its first self-professed authors. He is certainly one of the most important and central writers in the twisted bouquet of texts gathered in the VanderMeers’ anthology. Lovecraft may often be thought of as the father of weird fiction for the scale of his influence. ![]()
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