Make Lovecraft Not Warcraft

It’s very cool to have gotten a Lovecraft pastiche accepted for publication (fingers crossed). When it (hopefully) comes out, it will be the third Lovecraft story I’ve published in a fiction magazine.

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I sincerely believe that people should write whatever they want, but a part of me still worries that I’m going to be judged for aligning myself with the work of such a problematic author.

The truth remains, though, that these Lovecraft stories only occupy a small closet in the house I’m trying to build with my writing. What I’d want to say to anyone who judges me is not to be like the small rural library that only had room for Stephen King and HP Lovecraft, but to create space for original work that does more than facilitate a feedback loop of preset responses.

We have decaying gothic castles at home

A tour of dead and dying malls around Philadelphia
https://billypenn.com/2022/08/01/philadelphia-malls-tour-moorestown-exton-gallery-neshaminy-oxford/

Now officially called Voorhees Town Center, following a failed 2007 rebrand, the mall is a ghost town. Footsteps echo ominously through empty tile halls that contain just four or five operational storefronts, including a karate dojo and an inexplicably new-looking Bath & Body Works. The handsome corporate modern-style food court, complete with hotel lobby palm trees, is completely vacant. Every restaurant and every concession stand has closed, leaving nothing behind but dozens of tables and a few workers from a nearby behavioral health clinic enjoying their bring-from-home lunch in uncanny silence.

I also appreciate the writer's take on the Lovecraftian architecture of the King of Prussia mall:

The interior takes on the uncanny geometry and baffling architecture of a Las Vegas casino. The packed hallways seem to fold in on themselves, leaving you disoriented among apparently endless sunlit atriums and multiple redundant food courts.