ABSTRACT
H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories “The Lurking Fear”, “The Colour Out of Space”, and “The Shunned House” strikingly illustrate the many ways in which the natural world can become monstrous within a given narrative. This chapter investigates these narratives through an ecophobic lens, one which reveals how Howard P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction articulates the natural environment and its agencies as monstrous and unnerving in their wild fecundity. It offers a detailed textual analysis of the vegetal and environmental elements in some of Lovecraft’s weird fiction, thus bringing to the fore the ecophobic motifs that underpin much of the author’s cosmic horror. The narrative reifies the extra-terrestrial’s agentic mastery over nature and humans alike, where the complete transformation of the pastoral landscape by the fallen meteorite mirrors and surpasses any attempt by humans to subjugate the land.
