, fantasy and science fiction
, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction
.
Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he termed "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror"
, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.