Rewriting H.P. Lovecraft, Reclaiming the Mythos: A Writers’ Roundtable

This is an interesting article at the The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog which examines how today’s writers are reclaiming Lovecraft, and writing about the mythos from a modern perspective. As someone who was influenced by HPL, and who writes modern mythos tales, this is a welcome read.
There’s interviews with Kij Johnson, Cassandra Khaw, and Ruthanna Emrys about how H.P. Lovecraft influenced their writing and their lives … and not always for the better.

While writers have long toyed with Lovecraftian tropes, this year brings a confluence of new works that look on the Mythos with new eyes, and wrestle with what is lurking there, both the vile and the transcendent. We asked three authors who have done just that–Kij Johnson (The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, out now), Cassandra Khaw (Hammers on Bone, available October 11), and Ruthanna Emrys (Winter Tide, out in April 2017)–to join us for a discussion of Lovecraft’s legacy, and what modern writers can do to decontextualize the troubling, enduring work of New England’s strangest son.

The interview with Kij Johnson is especially telling:

Kij: Lovecraft always bugged me because he had no women. Zero. In the entire Dream-Quest, he mentions females I think once, a terrified farmer’s wife in a sentence somewhere. That said so much about how he perceived the world. He lived in our world, where (one assumes) the population was half female even then, and yet we were invisible to him, not even worth being wallpaper in his fiction. As a little girl and as a woman, this was and is infuriating.

(via www.barnesandnoble.com)