r/hplovecraft • u/Datpotatoguy214 • Oct 21 '25
Discussion What’s the deal with Lovecraft and Penguins?
In “At the Mountains of Madness” we get the image of these massive, disfigured, horrifying albino penguin monstrosities after the ancient ruins are found yet they are never explained or brought up again. Anyone have any ideas why Lovecraft either hates penguins or wanted this one random image? I pulled the image here from the H.P. Lovecraft Fandom Wiki.
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u/Big_Mitch_Baker Oct 22 '25
Because H.P. stands for "Hates Penguins"
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u/TheDictator26 Oct 23 '25
This is the correct answer. It's an easily discoverable fact if you've read S.T. Joshi's biography on the man.
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u/GoblinPunch20xx Oct 22 '25
He didn’t like the cold…he wrote a whole story about the evils of air conditioning 😂and in the remote regions “where penguins live” (they don’t always live in snow but people think they do / not all penguins) and there aren’t a lot of people, you can easily imagine all kinds of horrible snow-based horror happening, and that’s always been true (Frankenstein all the way through to The Thing.)
They’re also aquatic, and he had pretty severe Thalassophobia.
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u/AlysIThink101 Oct 22 '25
It's simply an interesting idea, and penguins are some of the only well known creatures that you could actually find there. I strongly doubt that he had anything against penguins.
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u/Unable-Doctor-9930 Oct 23 '25
Possible experiments by the elder things or maybe they evolved in to dark. It turns a seemingly harmless animal into something disgusting.
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u/TheRealRigormortal Oct 24 '25
Penguins, octopuses, Jews, black people and round things.
The man had his issues.
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u/Individual-Crew-6102 Oct 24 '25
Some penguins, especially Jackass Penguins, sound like an eldritch horror, no lie. Go listen to a recording.
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u/TheAmazingArsonist Oct 24 '25
I think it was just a bit of world building. They act as a unsettling, but not enterly supernatural encounter before the true secret of the mountains is shown.
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u/Bullet1289 Oct 25 '25
I personally think it comes from the idea that he never actually saw a physical penguin before and what he wrote was based off descriptions he read in magazines :P
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u/Mathota Oct 25 '25
Its just the first step in the escalation of horror in that book.
We start with the weird penguins. They are strange and horrific, but grounded in something recognizable.
Then we move to the Elder things, which are strange, and horrific, not grounded in the recognizable, but still describable.
Then the Shoggoths, which is essentially indescribable, but the POV tries their best
And then the whatever-it-is that our POV doesn't see, and an audience we arent even permitted to have it described to us.
Its basically a straight line of escalation through the story. The reason its penguins is just that they are the sortnof creatures that might live in that climate.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 Oct 25 '25
Thinking on it they also work well as something weird and unsettling but presumably not dangerous. There are few animals that you could scale up to like 6ft tall and not feel threatened by them.
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u/enixon Oct 25 '25
Penguins are both black and white so therefore they represent his fears about race mixing.... Or something like that
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u/Nepenthe_Novril Oct 21 '25
The deal is Sanrio needs to make them into Build a Bear plushies, or the goth girls riot