Illusions

I'm not into horror fiction, and so I've never seen my way clear to reading H. P. Lovecraft, whom I am given to understand was a master of the genre. From the way his work has been described to me, the basic idea is that understanding genuine reality is so traumatic for people that they create comforting illusions, and treat those as reality, instead. But those illusions are so removed from actual reality that when people come face-to-face with the way things really are, they simply (from the point of view of people around them) lose their minds.

I'm not sure how accurate a description that is, but there are times when I look at the way that people interact with the world around them and can understand where he got the idea. Not because I think that people wrap themselves in comforting illusions to avoid a harsh reality, but because the charge of doing to is surprisingly common, and I can only imagine that this was just as common then as it is now.