Hell, if I were walking along a newly risen Cyclopean island with non-Euclidean geometry, I'd be pretty freaked out too! ;)
I think HPL had a love-hate, attraction-to-sin kind of thing going on with some of these things. At the end of the Shadow Over Innsmouth, for instance, the protagonist quite happily goes off to live under the ocean with the rest of his squishy Deep One kinfolk. Love of the forbidden, or something like that, the old "questing for forbidden lore that will drive me insane" trope. And At the Mountains of Madness and the Dunwitch Horror do show moments of sympathy for their respective extraterrene beasties -- the Old Ones are refered to as being "after all men" after being ripped apart by the Shoggoth in the former, and Yog-Sothoth's barn-sized progeny is heard plaintively calling to its father for help in the latter.
Man do I love Lovecraft.
The racism really is jarring to the modern ear, however, perhaps even by the standards of the time.
--- Andy F <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Didn't somebody call him "panphobic"? From William
> Gibson's blog, not
> well attributed:
>
>
<http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2006_10_01_archive.asp#115985691315825574>
>
> ...marine life in general, temperatures below
> freezing, fat people,
> people of other races, race-mixing, slums,
> percussion instruments,
> caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time,
> monumental
> architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts,
> oceans, rats, dogs, the
> New England countryside, New York City, fungi and
> molds, viscous
> substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle
> textures, gelatinous
> textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse
> sorts, memory lapses,
> old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling,
> whispering—the things
> that did not frighten him would probably make a
> shorter list.
>
> --Luc Sante, on H.P. Lovecraft
>
>
>
> --
> Andy
>
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>
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