H.P. Podcraft.com.

Hello and welcome to the H.P. Lovecraft literary podcast. I'm Chad Pfeifer.

And I'm Chris Lackey. We've got a great topic today for our bonus episode.

It was suggested by a long time friend of the show and patron Lars Baxstrom.

We've actually chatted with Lars in the past on our first YouTube roundtable, which was on the philosophy of horror.

That was way back in 2013.

Chris you remember everything we did in 2013 don't you? I remember all things in 2013.

14 I as a blur. Well Lars had a lot of insight during that discussion, but for today, the topic he's

chosen is H.P. Lovecraft's work and Asperger's syndrome.

So let me set this up with the message I received from Lars about this.

He wrote, I have a topic.

It is about H.P. Lovecraft's texts and Asperger Syndrome.

It is an advanced topic, but I think it is of great interest as both a literary

analysis of his texts and to many of his readers and your listeners.

You see, I do not like the horror genre at all, with one exception, which is H.P. Lovecraft.

I did not fully understand why, until I was diagnosed as being on the Asperger spectrum, i.e. a high-functioning autist.

As I learned more about my disability, I saw the similarities to the experiences of his point-of-view

characters in his stories and my own. The loneliness, fear, confusion, helplessness, isolation, and

inability to communicate their experience a person on the autism spectrum

feels is almost perfectly mirrored by the characters in the Lovecraft

universe. This is very personal to me since I went through

Lovecraft in hell before I was diagnosed and was then able to find employment as an IT consultant

...