After this, he and his mother moved in with her two sisters and her father, successful industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. His father was committed to a mental hospital in 1893 and died five years later, when Howard was only eight years old. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an only child born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890. I’ll leave the ethical debates for others as our focus here is on his work, not his moral character. While I do not support this worldview, it is important to recognize its importance to shaping what would eventually become cosmic horror. His tragic life and unique upbringing shaped much of what went into his fiction, and his own worldview contributed to the focus on the fear of the unknown and the helplessness of the mortal man.ĭisclaimer: A lot has been said about the bigotry of H.P. It’s impossible to talk about the origins of cosmic horror without discussing Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937). Lovecraft himself may have said it best when he said that “it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage…without laying stress on the emotion of fear.” 2 The Man and the Mythos The core element that defines cosmic horror is that it plucks at the strings connected to two fears that arguably every person shares: fear of the unknown and fear of insignificance. At its heart, the genre explores the “fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance.” 1 But cosmic horror-or Lovecraftian horror as it is interchangeably referred to-runs far deeper than detective stories with cultists, strange monsters, and ancient deities.