Although he possessed a devastating imagination and a profound gift for descriptive language, H. P. Lovecraft was essentially a frightened mystic. He feared progress and saw mankind’s achievements as not only cosmically insignificant, but in fact decadent and self-destructive. Despite his status as a towering genius in the fantasy genre, he is merely fortunate that his racism and xenophobia happened to manifest themselves in an artistically constructive way. In an introduction to At The Mountains of Madness - which is among my favorite short novels - China Mieville notes that Lovecraft’s shoggoth, a shapeless mass of malevolent, undifferentiated tissue, is a literal manifestation of his fear of the heterogeneous industrial proletariat.