Hey, everyone, I'm thelitcritguy. I co-host the horror movie podcast Horror Vanguard, have been a regular guest on Revolutionary Left Radio, and make Youtube videos on culture and aesthetics. I write on horror, capitalism, and cultural criticism (you can read my last piece here https://readpassage.com/the-horror-of-capitalism-squid-game-and-the-gothic-trap-of-debt/)
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I mean, just read Lovecraft obviously, but from a theoretical perspective, you should absolutely read Eugene Thacker's In The Dust of This Planet, and whilst not being explicitly about cosmic horror Mark Steven's Splatter Capital is exceptionally useful for theorizing anti-capitalist horror criticism. Beyond that, read Lovecraft and read Lovecraft against himself (also check out his letters to see how he changed his political views pretty drastically)
I've read a fair bit of lovecraft including his letter where he talks about understanding the mind of reactionaries having been one himself, definitely a weird dude but not quite the caricature that he often gets portrayed as.
In The Dust of This Planet sounds really cool and I'm definitely gonna check that out that sounds like exactly the sort of concept I was grasping at.
Hope it's helpful!
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In many ways, Lovecraft stories are about semantic collapse. Everything slips into being indescribable even as we can't help but try and explain what we are seeing. I guess you need to read Lovecraft against the grain (he's not inherent leftist obviously) but in the age of the internet, when consciousness can become global and language is something that seems exhausted, why wouldn't we all be turning into the protagonists of a Lovecraft story, babbling away to ourselves
This is getting at the root of what I mentioned in my first comment on cosmic horror, the internet has become a Necronomicon of sorts, containing all recorded human knowledge and containing vast and powerful truths, but it's all adrift in an ocean of ramblings of madmen.
Swimming in the postmodern void forever baby!!!!!!!
This sounds like a bit of internal monologue from Disco Elysium (I say sounds because I could hear it as I read it lol).
I need to get on playing that again shit.
I'm also thinking Thomas Ligotti's "The Conspiracy Against The Human Race", which is not primarily anticapitalist, but gives a very good account of the psychology of cosmic horror. I'll have to check out " In The Dust Of This Planet"
Ligotti is a self-described socialist which makes for an interesting tension with his philosophical pessimism but I absolutely love "My Work Is Not Yet Done"