Reading and Mental Health, Or Not

This will have to be an abbreviated post today. Maybe I can expand tomorrow. With regard to Cloverfield: the Wikipedia article on Cloverfield noted that there were erroneous rumors that the movie was based on H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories. I looked up the article on Lovecraft. Fair disclosure: I've never read Lovecraft. But it's amazing to me that, just as there are linkages between authors that enrich the soul (I'm thinking, for example, of the Inklings, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers) there are apparently linkages between authors whose works tend to impoverish the soul. I guess I thought of them as being birds that flew solo. Silly of me, I guess. Lovecraft, and some of the authors connected with him, seem to have one link after another to suicide, mental illness, depression, atheism, cosmicism (which is the belief that human life is not so much meaningless as it is inconsequential and doomed), and racism. Then I went into a comic book store today. I keep forgetting why I gave up comics in between my visits. This is why. Darkness has largely taken over. It's depressing. C.S. Lewis said of Boswell (which could have been said of Lewis as well) that "to read him is to grow in mental health". Without wishing to condemn any person (especially those I have not read first hand) or any genre, I think I can say that I'm reminded that there are those authors for whom the opposite is true.