How does Lovecraftian madness read in cultures that have differing conceptions of mind?
The Lao, like many communities in Southeast Asia, have only recently become familiar with Western notions of psychology and sanity. This leads to an interesting discussion of how Lovecraft’s recurring themes of the cosmic threats to sanity and an ordered, consistent sense of the cosmos may be an utterly alien topic of terror. One can almost imagine a Lao reader going “Ha ha ha. Oh. You lost the American version of your mind? That’s it?”
