Pilgrimages to Lovecraft Country

Today is the birthday of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). (He shares a birthday with Nightmare Alley’s William Lindsay Gresham! What’s THAT all about, Clthulhu?) I learned to love Lovecraft relatively late in life — it was probably in 1990, the centenary of his birth (I was 25). I think I read an in-depth article about him someplace at the time observing his 100th birthday. I worked at a bookstore at the time, and proceeded to read all of the volumes of Lovecraft’s tales that we carried. I’ve since read just about every thing he wrote, in the way of strange tales, at any rate.

That said, I did – – and do — regard his work mainly as entertaining camp, effective at producing terror and unease, but also a certain amount of unintended laughter at the preposterous ornateness of his style and the adolescent seriousness with which he presents the silliest of assertions. He also drives me bonkers with his vagueness, pages and pages of fog, as though he were pumping your mind full of dry ice. I find the idea that he’s included in The Library of America series a downright scandal. Lovecraft is much closer in kinship to Stan Lee than to Hawthorne and Poe.  Pulp is pulp and literature is literature. A wizard of the wyrd, can  sometimes be wanting with the words. Still I love him, and have written MANY affectionate parodies of his writing and will no doubt produce more.

And as I get older, I feel another connection to Lovecraft that grows closer and closer. I am a writer from Rhode Island; Lovecraft is the most famous writer from Rhode Island. And Lovecraft and I are of the same stock, both with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1630s. (I have also learned that I am distantly related to him). He is therefore one of “my people” (though he was a pretty rabid racist, it must be pointed out. We obviously condemn the rottener parts of the Lovecraftian apple).

To those who have not yet been initiated into the Lovecraft cult, a brief biographical sketch is in order. Lovecraft was born into wealth, although the family resources dried up after the institutionalization of his father and death of his maternal grandfather. He spent most of his adult life living in extreme (if genteel) poverty and even starvation. Sickly since childhood, Lovecraft was a recluse, and remained virtually unknown throughout his lifetime. In the ‘teens he began contributing to pulp magazines. For a time (just about a century ago), he lived in Brooklyn (see here for an account of the Lovecraft-in-Brooklyn walking tour we took in 2015 with friend Jane Rose). He was married for a time to fellow pulp writer Sonia Greene, though their mutual poverty led over time to the marriage’s disintegration. During all this time, he was churning out works that are now considered classics of their kind, many of them published for Weird Tales magazine. He even ghost wrote for Houdini! Still he died in complete obscurity.

Posthumous appreciation for Lovecraft’s cosmic occultism began to bubble up in the 1960s. Heavy metal bands throve especially on his dark mythos. And low-budget horror films began to be adapted from his works (long about the time Corman exhausted Poe): The Haunted Palace (1963, based on “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”), Die Monster Die (1965, based on “The Color Out of Space”), The Shuttered Room (1967), The Crimson Cult (1968, based on “The Dreams in the Witch House”), and The Dunwitch Horror (1970), among them. By now, there are too many to report — over 250 cinematic adaptations of his works (or works inspired by Lovecraft). Some of the better known include the Re-Animator films (launched 1985), JohnCarpenter’sIn the Mouth of Madness (1994), and the excellent 2020 tv series Lovecraft Country.

And there are annual festivals in his honor such as Portland’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon, and Providence’s own (ingeniously named) NecronomiCon, which is held around this time every year.

In 2013 our friend the Providence mentalist Rory Raven gave us a walking tour of important Lovecraft sites. Here’s cool stuff he showed us.

Lovecraft’s House

House described by Lovecraft in his story “The Shunned House”

Funeral home where Lovecraft was laid out for his wake in 1937

Lovecraft family monument, Swan Point Cemetery. For 40 years this was the only marker indicating where he was buried (his name is at the bottom)

This marker was erected for him in 1977. The phrase “I am Providence” comes from his writings. Fans have adorned it with rocks and shells, and someone (hopefully a teenager) left a poem (folded up, lower left hand corner).

For my Lovecraft tour of Brooklyn (where he wrote some of his best stories) go here.