By Jovan Stipić

Lovecraft written fiction before, but until 1917, nothing that even hinted at the worlds he would create for the remainder of his life. "Dagon," tells a simple story of a shipwrecked sailor trapped on a mysterious island filled with ancient ruins that whisper of horrible deeds done in the name of unnamed deities.

However, this new transition did not come without a terrible cost to Lovecraft. In 1919, his mother, Susie, had a mental breakdown before being placed in the same mental institution where his father was. Two years later, she passed away in the same building.

He was taken in by his aunts, Lillian and Annie. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t a happy relationship. Though, he met Sonia Green, the only woman we know of to be attracted to the estranged Lovecraft.

As they began dating, Sonia found him so disinterested in sex that she had to give him romance textbooks to learn about what he was supposed to do. Later, she said he was a virgin. Either way, the two truly loved one another and was wed in 1924 in secret. Barely letting his aunts know by letter, he moved to New York, where he started a new life together with Sonia.

It was a happy time in Lovecraft's life, probably the first time he had known. His stories were professionally published yearly, and Sonia's hat business was also booming. 

Unfortunately, like so many other things in his life, this would not last. 

By the end of 1924, Sonia was ill, and her failing health took up so much of her time that her hat shop shuttered. By early 1925, the two separated, with Sonia moving to her parents to look after herself while Lovecraft rented a flat in the part of New York known as the Red Hook. 

Broke and alone, Lovecraft was surrounded by immigrants who flocked to the Red Hook. Then, his vocal intolerance and racism toward others became notorious and spilled into simple, raw hatred. Though, that is not to say that his racism was simple. He was racist in the abstract sense that he hated a religious or racial group while also befriending individuals of the same group.

For example, he had a notorious relationship with the Jewish population, citing him as saying he wanted "to punch every bastard in sight." Still, his wife Sonia was Jewish, as was one of Lovecraft's best friends Robert Bloch, who would later pen the book that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."

He had no problem discarding his racial beliefs when meeting people he liked, which is in no way an excuse for his adamant hatred, which he truly did harbor towards most other groups and ethnicities. However, it is still something to be noted.

In 1926 he moved back to the flat where his aunt lived, but on one condition. They did not want him bringing Sonia with him, nor did they want him to see her again. Lovecraft agreed to both terms and was filled with the terror of being surrounded by the multicultural people of New York. He made his way back to Providence. 

He would never see his wife again.

Though a terrible thing to do, the years after he moved back proved to be the best for Lovecraft's work. It is then that he created a shadowy creature, vaguely humanoid, with feelers upon his head that towered over remote fishing towns of his tales. As the years went by, it would tower over horror fiction, casting probably the largest shadow of any literary creature to date.

Cthulhu.