Getting into the “Lovecraft Zone”

Greetings, everyone! I’d like to thank Travis for inviting me to post during this most Lovecraftian of months. And thank you for the warm welcome!

Before our discussions about individual Lovecraft stories begin, I thought I might try to “set the mood” by inviting all of you on a virtual tour. This past summer I gave some lectures at Brown University in Lovecraft’s hometown and chief inspiration: Providence, Rhode Island. After my Lovecraft presentation, I led students on a walking tour of Lovecraftian sites in the town, including places he lived/frequented and specific locations he used in his stories.

If you go here, you can take the tour virtually. In the description for each photo I’ve included an explanation of the site’s relevance and, in many cases, quotes and passages from Lovecraft about/inspired by the place. (Hint: If you choose the “slideshow” option, be sure to turn on the captions so you can read the descriptions.) I hope you enjoy! This will come full circle by our last week of discussions, when we will consider “The Haunter of the Dark,” one of Lovecraft’s most powerful tales of Providence.

There are a few other references that might also assist you in getting into the Lovecraftian mood:
* Eminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has an excellent introductory essay, “H.P. Lovecraft,” here at The Modern Word’s Scriptorium.
* S.T. Joshi also gave a one-hour lecture at SUNY Cortland Memorial Library, available here, about H.P. Lovecraft.
*The Cthulhu Podcast is inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos, and it features many great readings of Lovecraft’s work.

And here are some shorter, key reviews of Lovecraft and his legacy:
* “Master of Disgust” by Laura Miller at Salon.com
* “The Horror, the horror!” H.P. Lovecraft enters the American canon” by Michael Dirda in The Weekly Standard
* “The Horror! The Horror!” by Lloyd Rose in The Washington Post
* “The Myth Maker” by Michel Houellebecq in The Guardian

Hats off in particular to columnist Michael Dirda, who groks…

As he was dying in 1937 at age forty-six, he may well have felt he had lived in vain. His stories–sixty or seventy works of various lengths and completeness–resided in scattered notebooks and throwaway pulp magazines, uncollected and unlikely to be remembered. But it now seems beyond dispute that H.P. Lovecraft is the most important American writer of weird fiction in the twentieth century–and one of the century’s most influential writers of any kind of fiction…. What matters is that he possesses the storyteller’s greatest gift, the one Nabokov called shamanstvo: the “enchanter quality.”

And let’s not forget this memorable quote:

“Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He’s rock and roll.”
- Neil Gaiman in The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft

And now, to sign off, a relevant quote that always makes me laugh:

“I wouldn’t call the Cthulhu Mythos ‘deeply tinged with pessimism and melancholy.’ It’s more like having to endure a family dinner where everyone struggles not to mention a terrible family secret. When someone finally breaks down and begins shouting out this hideous truth, he is dragged off and killed by the rest of the family. They then sit back down to quietly eat, occasionally stealing a glance in your direction to see if you’ll be the next one to crack.”
- Wendell Wagner, Jr., in The New York Review of Science Fiction

Tagged as: H.P. Lovecraft