An Ecocritical Reading of H.P. Lovecraft: Deep Ecology and The Dark Mountain Project in H.P. Lovecraft’s Selected Works

As one of the most iconic Amercian horror fiction writers of the 20th century, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has been subject to many studies which have analyzed his works from various literary and or philosophical standpoints. The most important literary significance of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction, however, might be its Ecocritical aspect. With the ever growing concern about our planet’s ecological state and more importantly, our place in it, viewing Lovecraft’s work through an Ecocritical lens will help us understand our place in our environment, and even the whole universe. Among the Ecocritical subsets, Lovecraft’s works will perhaps resonate the most with Deep Ecology and its Ecocentric points of view and The Dark Mountain Project, one of the most recent developments in the ecological scene. This paper tries to find traces of the aforementioned Ecocritical theories and terms in H.P. Lovecraft’s works and philosophy.