H. P. Lovecraft. Monsters. Aliens. UFOs. Ancient Egyptians. Sumerians. Is there nothing this book doesn’t have? Having read many of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories over the years, I have always been taken by how, as a writer, Lovecraft disappeared from public attention only to spring back in the 1990s. I discovered Lovecraft while doing research on Dagon, the putative “fish god” of the “Philistines.” Every time I typed the name of the deity into Google, I came up with pages and pages of Lovecraft. In my lonely room on a gray Wisconsin campus, I began to read his stories and shiver with fear as I walked across a dark parking lot to my car. Jason Colavito obviously has a great appreciation for Lovecraft as well, and his book The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture is a fun read for a November night. Colavito suggests that the “ancient astronaut” craze that has informed many a young mind stems back to Lovecraft’s fiction. Cthulhu and his ilk.

I’m not sure that Colavito convinced me that the ideas of ancient aliens began with Lovecraft, but he does an excellent job of exposing the foibles of many theorists who build houses of cards on shifting sand. One of the most interesting connections Colavito makes is that Creationism and Ancient Astronaut-ism are not dissimilar. “Both are, in essence, a concession that science is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and both seek to (mis)use science to give absolute authority to their beliefs” (331-2). This is an aspect of Creationism I hadn’t considered before. In the uncompromising desire for scientific respectability, the only option open is to bend science to the will of religion. This distortion must be carefully executed, convincing the followers that true science has validated a religious ideal. Rhetoric and occluding argumentation must be utilized carefully here. It seems Cthulhu has world domination in his squishy mind again.

Lovecraft famously gave us fantasy worlds where ancient space creatures left their impressions as gods upon a vulnerable humanity. Mysteries of the past—and Colavito doesn’t deny there are mysteries—are so easily explained by dei ex machina, and working with fantasy is so much easier than working with physics. To approach the mysteries with an answer already in hand, however, is to deny science its glory. As a civilization we owe much to a scientific understanding of the universe we inhabit.