Last December I wrote this blog post in response to this thought provoking piece by the brilliant Nnedi Okorafor.  In the post I said the following:

 If Lovecraft was writing today, and was still very much the same man with the same fucked up attitudes, it’s likely  that the reaction from the interwebs and publishers would be enough to curtail Lovecraft’s career.  But Lovecraft has the gift of history on his side.  And by the time it became unpopular to a be racist or an anti-semite or a homophobe, he’d already been accepted into the canon of the weird.

Eight months later and my blog post provoked this response from Geoffrey E Frost:

You have absolutely no concept of what real art is. Go die in a hole, you racially backwards philistine. By your logic nearly every writing of Arabic or Asian culture should be likewise ostracized for its racist tones. You Anglophobic scum forget that Lovecraft OPPOSED Hitler’s methods as “brutal” and he later married a Jewish woman! You disregard his reverence for Arabic and Egyptian culture. His beliefs about the inferiority of ghetto culture has been VALIDATED by the modern age. He hated it for the violence, barbarity, and ignorance that defines it! People like you should be shot!

(Because I don’t want to make this a quote-fest I’m not going to print my response or his follow up this morning.  If you’d like you can click on the link above and read them for yourself)

The interwebs is a fascinating place and it still amazes me that someone would be surfing the web, come across my old blog post and feel enough righteous anger to tell to me to go fuck myself.  But that’s the power of Lovecraft I suppose.  His shitty writing evokes this sort of passion.

That said thank God I didn’t write something negative about Robert E. Howard.  Or Heinlein.  Or Orson Scott Card.  I’d be ducking and weaving from all the death threats.