Of Temporal Stasis and Cosmic Contamination: Precarious Lives in H. P. Lovecraft's Fiction

ABSTRACT This article undertakes a transtemporal reading of H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu (1928) and The Colour Out of Space (1927) through twenty‐first‐century frameworks of precarity in the Anthropocene. Contending that Lovecraft's cosmic horror anticipates contemporary ontological vulnerabilities, the analysis deploys Lauren Berlant's concept of ‘slow death’ and Andrew van der Vlies's notion of ‘blocked futurity’ to demonstrate the ways Lovecraft's fiction stages species‐level precarity through attritional violence and temporal impasse. Reading Lovecraft both historically—as a product of modernist racial and scientific anxieties, and proleptically—as a theorist of planetary‐scale precarity, the article reveals how his narratives collapse deep geological time into the present, rendering the familiar world porous to archaic, nonhuman forces. Cthulhu is analysed as an antiquarian uncanny, whose presence forecloses progressive futurity, while Colour exemplifies slow death as environmental contamination that gradually dissolves bodily and ecological thresholds. Such an approach demonstrates that Lovecraft's generic distortions offer not mere nihilism but a critical hermeneutics for navigating our own age of destruction, transforming his pulp weird fiction into an art of noticing humanity's contingent tenure in an indifferent cosmos.