![]() ![]() ZHPL finds horror in a different place than did the earlier Lovecraft. ZHPL has written that we must “find ways of maintaining our humanity within a technological society, and to some degree, that means embracing horror.” The question To what degree? is one I will return to at the end of this essay. But he must believe his nightmare to be worth taking seriously. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare with his daytime Roman Catholicism. He need not believe his nightmare to be the entire truth-compare the Kafkaesque bureaucratic deism of G.K. To the horrorist, details of plot and character are secondary to the mood of nightmare. ![]() If, like his avowed model, ZHPL has written the same story over and over, we can hypothesize that he has done so for the same reason. In the end, he discovers hidden beneath the civilized veneer a horror so incomprehensible that it drives him mad-although we, ZHPL’s readers, are graced with a final record of the cause of his destruction. In the midst of this world, driven by curiosity, desire, and rebelliousness, the young man seeks to touch reality, to remove his blinders, to break his chains. Lovecraft (and the second novella draws explicitly from Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath). Its middle and end will feel familiar to readers of H.P. Its beginning is standard near-future science fiction: an intelligent, alienated young man moves through a world dominated by personal digital devices. These present three versions of the same three-part story. The core of ZHPL’s vision lies in the three novellas: “ The Gig Economy” (2018), “ God-Shaped Hole” (2019), and, most recently, “ Don’t Make Me Think” (2021). The first half of the pseudonym tells you the second thing to know: Zero Hit Points, a bad pun situating ZHPL as a gamer and “very online” writer, a warning that the vital spirit of our civilization has been almost entirely exhausted. Lovecraft is the chosen model of ZHPL (so I shall call him to avoid confusion). Lovecraft, early twentieth century American horror writer, incel, hyper-racist, author of often unbearably purple prose, inventor of the Cthulhu Mythos also, and most importantly, progenitor of the genre of cosmic horror, in which the plot consists of little more than the protagonist’s gradual discovery of the abyss gaping open beneath his feet-this H.P. The second half of Zero HP Lovecraft’s pseudonym tells you the first thing you need to know about him. These and other consequences of digitized life are among Zero HP Lovecraft’s foremost preoccupations. No one can: the digital Cambrian explosion has destroyed the possibility of such a comprehensive gaze. ![]() I admit, however, that I cannot claim to have compared it against the work of every other internet subsubculture’s favorite son. I believe this volume represents a major literary achievement. Over the last few years he has posted several stories and three novellas to a Wordpress blog, and he released a hardcover compendium titled They Had No Deepness of Earth on November 10. Zero HP Lovecraft, the most important fiction writer on Weird Right Twitter, is of course a pseudonym. ![]()
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