H. P. Lovecraft

[Scott]

A thread for general Lovecraft discussion. I just finished the Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft audiobook. It was done by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Noting new, but it was an enjoyable listen. One thing struck me as humorous while listing was how limitless Lovecraft's imagination could be with the sanity shattering alien beings he created, but on the other hand these beings that were timeless and could cross the expanses of interstellar space were using vacuum tube technology. The Lovecraftian text also made for a pretty funny blooper reel at the end of the collection.

[GRWelsh]

I love the HPLHS and pretty much everything they do is great. I own all of their Dark Adventure Radio Theater productions with the binders and props which are the sorts of things that would be perfect for a CALL OF CTHULHU game (news clippings, journal entries, drawings, etc.). I started listening to the HPLHS podcast VOLUMINOUS this week -- it is Sean Branney and Andrew Leman reading and discussing Lovecraft's letters. In letters, Lovecraft oscillates between self-deprecating and generous to insufferably pompous and opinionated, yet is almost always interesting and sometimes brilliant. I listened to the Saga of the Dark Swamp on Monday during my walk, and it was almost like listening to one of his stories. He took a rather uneventful hike with C. M. Eddy searching for a local site in Rhode Island, and added his imagination to craft enjoyable letters to Edwin Baird and Frank Belknap Long.

[GRWelsh]

I admire how Lovecraft's aliens are truly alien. They're a far cry from humanoids of different skin color and lumpy heads. He deserves a lot of credit for stretching his imagination when coming up with non-terrestrial life that may be part animal, part plant or even part mineral, or to be composed partially or wholly of matter in other dimensions and unperceivable.

One of the most difficult things about writing science fiction is imagining which technologies will endure, and which will be replaced and what they may be replaced by. Things like the vacuum tube reference date Lovecraft's fiction, but that is easy for me to overlook. Something else that always stands out to me are the Mi-Go with wings that allow them to fly through the ether. That's a long flight from Yuggoth/Pluto! Wasn't luminiferous aether already an outdated concept by 1930? This was addressed in the HPLHS's THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS movie with the dimensional gate... Although they retained the 1930's era technology appearance presumably for the nostalgia of old time monster movies. I liked that we got to see the interior of Round Hill!

[GRWelsh]

While at dinner recently, my parents and I had the idea this year -- a bit too late -- to drive up through New England to see the leaves change. I would gladly drive them around Lovecraft Country. The many places I'd like to visit on a Lovecraft-themed tour are probably too much for one trip. A good start might be Providence, Boston, Marblehead (Kingsport), Salem (Arkham) and maybe Newburyport (inspiration for Innsmouth) near the mouth of the Merrimack (Miskatonic?) River. I did a pretty extensive Providence walking tour at NecronomiCon 2019 but even then I didn't get to see everything Providence-specific.

[geneweigel]

Then branch into the FALLOUT 4 tour...

Sorry.

I have had all my Lovecraft on loan for 30 years with some coming back and I think that I have the majority of it for once with the move. I think that if I could relive my life that I would not have promoted Lovecraft so that I could at least have kept some of the dustier copies that I had.

I've promoted it with my oldest daughter and it came back with a "meh" so I didn't even bother with my other daughter (2nd). My son (3rd) is too busy living the Cthulhian lifestyle to read Lovecraft because he is in a bizarre mathematical world all the time.

Speaking of Cthulhu, last week on my Facebook page (For GaryCon;hopefully it won't be active with a "chockful of nuts" until then... ), I did one of those forced perspective photos of the bas relief that I made back in 1984. Check it out:

www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=110036511465494&set=a.102523152216830

[GRWelsh]

The forced perspective photo looks great, Gene! "Why was this section of the house walled off for ninety years?"

I loaned out a few Lovecraft books myself. I loaned out my trade paperback edition THE BEST OF H. P. LOVECRAFT: BLOODCURDLING TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE (1982) with the introduction by Robert Bloch. It was gone for years -- it went to Germany and then Florida -- but was finally returned to me. It isn't worth anything except personal nostalgia since it is the first Lovecraft book I ever owned. I can sympathize with your daughter's "meh" reaction since when I first started reading that book the earlier stories didn't grab me as much although by the time I finished I was a lifelong fan. "The Shadow Out of Time" was my favorite for many years since the sheer scope of it was unlike I had ever read. Totally mind-blowing in concepts, but HPL's writing style is deliberately dense and can be off-putting until someone acquires the taste -- and then they can't get enough (like coffee)! Maybe one day your son will read and enjoy "The Dreams of the Witch House" for its references to higher mathematics and indefinitely multiplied dimensions.

As for FALLOUT 4 I know it is set in New England but never played the games in that series. Nowadays, I'm more likely to watch the movie cutscenes and avoid actual game play, which I often find tedious -- although I still love gaming with other people at the table for role-playing, board games, card games, etc. So, I'll check it out. I am fond of other games with a retro-future setting like BIOSHOCK and BIOSHOCK: INFINITE. It is a great way to have a setting that seems familiar yet other at the same time and not have to design everything from scratch.

[Scott]

I started reading Lovecraft in 9th or 10th grade after the same group of friends that were into Stephen King started branching out. I thought it was a mixed bag at first, really liking some stories, but having to force my way through others. by the time I worked at Eide's I was a total fan.
I don't have any of my original books, having sold or given away almost everything before moving to California.
I would do more online video gaming, but the friends I used to play with seem to have given it up.

[geneweigel]

I was strongly into anthologies in the 1970's because they were short and scary. I still have this one that started me off called MASTERPIECES OF HORROR (1966) which was from my dad as a gag plus it had a Sherlock Holmes story which was his thing. It had two eyeballs on the cover and a person running from the room. There is no Lovecraft in it but this got the ball rolling for the need for short stories. There was this book my cousin had called BEWARE MORE BEASTS (1975) and that was a highlight of my childhood even though it had no Lovecraft (I later found a copy off Ebay.). The first "Cthulhian" story that I read was in there and it was Derleth BEYOND THE THRESHOLD (1941) about "Ithaqua" but I had no clue until I saw the same story again in TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS PART ONE (1973) which gave it all a familiar tone and after that I wanted to catch up with why they were all connected.

The BEWARE MORE BEASTS was notable for the story "IN THE STRAW" by Edward D. Hoch, which my cousin Vanessa was fixated on and always brought it up when we were in her barn, which featured a monstrous pile of hay. I recall when my Lovecraft fixation started (In the early 1980's I had so many Cthulhu drawings which petered out by the mid-80's) my cousin was becoming a real nasty "yuppie" type and she had said dismissively that the "IN THE STRAW" story was H.P. Lovecraft. And I corrected her and I think that might have been the bitter end of our former super closeness.

[geneweigel]

Yes, and she did play D&D many times prior to that. Sad...

[GRWelsh]

In the VOLUMINOUS podcast mention was made of two novels Lovecraft was considering writing in the 1920's, one titled AZATHOTH and the other THE HOUSE OF THE WORM. I wonder what they would have been about? It might be that AZATHOTH, started in 1922, was just the predecessor idea to THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH written 1926-27. THE HOUSE OF THE WORM was the title idea for a novel Lovecraft was considering writing around 1926, not to be confused with the short story titled "The House of the Worm" by Mearle Prout published in WEIRD TALES magazine (1933), or the later collection of short stories titled THE HOUSE OF THE WORM (1975) by Gary Myers. Another similar titled story is "The Kingdom of the Worm" (1933) by Clark Ashton Smith, but I don't know if there is any connection. It's possible, since HPL and CAS were correspondents throughout the 20's and 30's. The title does bring to mind the poem "The Conqueror Worm" by Poe (1843) later incorporated into Poe's short story "Ligeia" (1845). Bram Stoker wrote a horror novel named THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1911). HPL in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", stated that Stoker "utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile." Perhaps HPL wanted to take the magnificent idea and rework it? CAS also wrote a story titled "The Coming of the White Worm" (1941) for his Hyperborea cycle. In a letter to August Derleth, CAS wrote that this story might be regarded as a direct contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos.

[geneweigel]

Sounds familiar maybe I had read in one of those early biographies. Its funny I had the bios for years and they just vanished.

[GRWelsh]

I read I AM PROVIDENCE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF H. P. LOVECRAFT (2010) by S. T. Joshi. It is well-documented and I'm glad to own it, but it is almost too much detail and doesn't read like a story. I much prefer LORD OF A VISIBLE WORLD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN LETTERS by H. P. Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi (2000). I'd like to get LOVECRAFT: A BIOGRAPHY (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp, just to see how good or bad it is -- that's the one where people claim HPL was unfairly portrayed as a weird recluse... He was, but not for his entire life. HPL had many friends, and travelled quite a bit later in life to visit them.

I'm currently reading LOVECRAFT: A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS (1972) by Lin Carter. It is one of those early Lovecraft studies that reads like a light biography specific to what gave rise to the 'Cthulhu Mythos' and which stories deserve to be even included in that category. 'Cthulhu Mythos' wasn't even a term HPL used but was coined after his death... HPL himself used the term 'Yog-Sothery' often in a tongue-in-cheek way. The term 'Cthulhu Mythology' was used in the Derleth-Wandrei introduction to THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS (1939) published by Arkham House. I am not so sure that HPL would have agreed that his stories fit into these nice, neat categories of the 'Cthulhu Mythos' versus the Dunsanian 'Dreamlands' stories versus standalone stories. For one thing, he was writing for a throwaway, pulp market. He couldn't have had any expectation that most of his readers would have been able to collect all his fiction and see the interconnectedness of it all. Carter does have some good observations such as the origin of the Cthulhu Mythos with HPL identifying as an Arab after reading ARABIAN NIGHTS as a young child and calling himself the fanciful name Abdul Alhazred. Another good observation is that HPL probably got the invented mythology idea from Lord Dunsany after reading THE GODS OF PEGANA (1905) and others of his books around 1919. Carter often laments the "Lovecraft that could have been" and I tend to agree. In 1924, HPL was offered the editor job of WEIRD TALES but wouldn't move to Chicago to take it. He was eminently prepared for such a job from his days in amateur journalism, since making edits and offering advice and guidance to other writers is what he had already been doing for years, and would continue to do for years with his revision work! HPL essentially worked as an editor for free (in his amateur days) or for a pittance (1/8 to 1/4 a penny a word when doing revisions for the rest of his life). His wife Sonia was willing to go to Chicago with him where she would have easily found work as a retail executive. They would have been the respectable, prosperous Lovecrafts, a middle class or even upper middle class couple! Another missed opportunity was that HPL didn't try to sell his stories (usually) when Farnsworth Wright at WEIRD TALES rejected them. He let one editor of one pulp magazine determine whether he defined himself as a success or failure, for the most part. HPL didn't have to live in utter poverty, but he detested commercialism in all of its forms... If he could have just endured it as a necessity for his profession, he could have been quite successful and possibly would have lived much longer than 46 years.

[geneweigel]

Yeah, those were the two that I read aeons ago. The whole I AM PROVIDENCE tombstone thing makes me wonder how deep into HPL were these local contemporaries who bought the stone. Or was it just a superficial "Oooh, he's sort of an internationally known writer. Its pretty boring around Rhode Island." I'm picturing perhaps like the same "light" people who found out that I had a "book". "Hey! This isn't a story! What? You told me that three times? Oh..."

[GRWelsh]

On VOLUMINOUS it came up that HPL got a salesman job while living in NYC and did it for one day. By the end of the day, he was miserable and exhausted and did not go back for a second day. I thought that would be the basis for a good horror story.

[GRWelsh]

I just finished H. P. LOVECRAFT IN THE MERRIMACK VALLEY (2013) by David Goudsward and now I'm reading LOVECRAFTIAN VOYAGES (originally published 1973, revised edition 2017) by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. I suppose I'm mentally gearing up for the next Providence NecronomiCon in August. The first book was a narrow focus of HPL's visits to and relationships with the Merrimack Valley in northern Massachusetts on the border of New Hampshire, and the influences of real people and places on his fiction. The second book is an early biography, first written prior to many of his letters being discovered/published, but still an interesting read so far. Some entertaining snippets are his aunt Annie telling Bobby Barlow that HPL as a toddler insisted "I'm a little girl" -- remember in photos he had long blonde hair and a dress -- and the poetess Louise Imogen Guiney's mother nicknamed him "Little Sunshine" around 1892-93. There is a sense of doomed sadness when HPL wrote: "... my poor health and jazzed-up nerves made it clear that I was not going to be any wow at sestertius scraping myself." He felt like a failure while alive, but look at how much money people are making off of Lovecraft's coattails today...

I've always wanted to know more about HPL's nervous collapse in 1908 which prevented him from finishing high school. The period from then until his emergence into amateur journalism in 1913 is mostly a blank. For a person whose identity was wrapped up around the concept of being a scholar and a gentleman, and whose early promise was built on precocious intellect, it must have been devastating not to finish school. Imagine how horrible that would be, to be surrounded by adults impressed with your brains and certain you would go on to university and become a well-respected academic or intellectual -- and then you fail to even finish high school.

What happened?

Did anyone ever notice this period perfectly coincides with that of Professor Nathaniel Peaslee's 'insanity' in "The Shadow Out of Time"?

[GRWelsh]

I was just rereading HPL's story "The Tree" (written 1920). A few things that jumped out at me... The Mount Maenalus mentioned is named after an an actual ancient town, Maenalus, ruined by the time of Pausanius, who wrote A Description of Greece in the 2nd century. The story must be set in the time period between 485 BC and 214 BC since that is when Tyrants ruled Syracuse. The following passage was both autobiographical and a preview of a theme that would be used again later in his more famous story, "Pickman's Model" (1926).

Idle folk, indeed, said that Kalos conversed with the spirits of the grove, and that his statues were but images of the fauns and dryads he met there—for he patterned his work after no living model.

[GRWelsh]

A 'lost' story by Lovecraft story was referenced in LOVECRAFTIAN VOYAGES by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. (p.114). The first part is written by Faig, who sets up the quote by HPL:

A paragraph in his letter to Rheinhart Kleiner of February 2nd, 1916 (SL 1.20-21; RK 30) makes clear that his early reading and activity in the Providence Detective Agency during his Slater Avenue days carried over to the writing of detective "thrillers":

I used to write detective stories very often, the works of A. Conan Doyle being my model so far as plot was concerned. But Poe was my God of Fiction. I used to love the horrible and the grotesque -- much more than I do now -- and can recall tales of murderers, spirits, reincarnations, metempsychoses, and every shuder-producing device known to literature! One long-destroyed tale was of twin brothers -- one murders the other, but conceals the body, and tries to live the life of both -- appearing in one place as himself, and elsewhere as his victim. (Resemblance had been remarkable.) He meets sudden death (lightning) when posing as the dead man -- is identified by a seer, and the secret finally revealed by his diary. This, I think, antedates my 11th year...

Evidently he destroyed a lot of his juvenile fiction in 1908, and this was one of the stories he destroyed. What stood out to me though was... Again, with the lightning! That was used in several stories, including "The Lurking Fear," "The Picture in the House," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Haunter of the Dark." So, the idea to use lightning as a plot device was there from very early on.

Unrelated: There was a CBSRMT episode with a plot strikingly similar to this "lost" story idea... Episode 116 "And Death Makes Us Even Steven" (7/9/1974).

[geneweigel]

That does sound like a trend with the lightning.

Maybe he was considering the Greek myth of the hecatoncheires which I didn't really "get" until I saw the inspirational phenomena one day as multi-branched lightning. I think him being a loner was what gave him imaginative energy.

In regards to general monstrous concepts contemplated by HPL, I've had zoology and the quick write off as every animal form is explainable is bullshit just look at the firefly predator version. We don't know. Are there people amongst us that aren't people? The scientists have no idea how massive groups wholly distinct and stable from one another came about but there is a lot of assumption in the mean time.

I'm not talking religion versus science either just plain pending information. I honestly wish that "politics is science" debate would just clam up because they are in the same "church" of cynicism.

HPL drifted along beaches and I can see that sometimes because I would do the same adding also around small rivers which HPL might have done as well. The level of living things is really beyond calculation. We've written off ordinary "pest" creatures but these things are the true masters of the Earth and he saw that in his "post-human beetle race" from the SHADOW OUT OF TIME (1936). The common squirrel might not be the apex predator but its apex something. That goofy, stupid, ridiculous and nut-chewing thing just might possibly be the "great race of the future".

Just think about what HPL thought for a minute. He might have saw that we are a living planet skin that has a collective intelligence. All the technology connecting the entire planet as a massive physiology of a new "civilization" as an organism in infant stage. Is all the conflict with the great ones just alien worlds on some kind of a planetary consciousness level interacting with HPL's world that is far below that level?

The only way to survive is to adapt, or as Chaosium (Or rather who Chaosium ripped off Kuntz/Holmes in DRAGON #12 FEB 1978) flatly puts it, go insane. Are HPL characters really "going insane"? Or are they just exposed victims being misinterpreted by the unexposed?

[GRWelsh]

Today I was thinking about the more granular details in HPL's works. For example, in my favorite Lovecraft short story "The Haunter of the Dark" the general consensus is that the abandoned church in the story is a fictional version of Saint John's Roman Catholic Church at Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill that was built in 1871 and torn down in 1992 (a park is there now). It is not to be confused with the similarly named Cathedral of St. John on 271 North Main Street which is still standing and was another favorite haunt of HPL's -- in particular its ancient cemetery.



However, my theory now is that the church in the story is an amalgam of (at least) these two different but similarly named churches, since the one on Federal Hill is close to the location described but the one on Main Street (current building) was completed in 1810, was of the Gothic Revival style, and had a chapel added by the architect Richard Upjohn in 1856. Consider this description from the story:

Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy facade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more. The style, so far as the glass could shew, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.

The Free-Will Church was a real church as well, and in the story is the name of the one bought by the Starry Wisdom sect:

theusgenweb.org/rigenweb/churches/freewill.html

[Need more information on the real Free-Will Church that inspired the one in the story bought by Enoch Bowen in 1844]

So, the theory I'm currently playing around with is that the fictional church in the story is a combination of three real churches -- takes aspects from each of them. A couple other Providence area churches are mentioned in the story: Spirito Santo Church, another name for the real Church of the Holy Ghost still standing at 472 Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill not far west of where Saint John's Roman Catholic Church was, and 4th Baptist, a real church located at 734 Hope St and just north of Ladd Observatory. The Holy Ghost Church was completed in 1909 in the Italian Gothic style based on the famed Basilicas of northern Italian regions. Its facade is modeled after the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice and the bell tower after the Campanile of Saint Mark's Basilica, also in Venice.

Other tidbits in the story are worth digging into. It is common knowledge that the protagonist, Robert Harrison Blake, is a fictional version of the author Robert Bloch, who corresponded with HPL in his lifetime and previously had killed off a fictional version of HPL in his own story, "The Shambler from the Stars" (appeared in the September 1935 issue of the magazine WEIRD TALES). HPL wrote "The Haunter of the Dark" between November 5th-9th, 1935, to return the favor! But I think Blake is also part Clark Ashton Smith and part autobiographical as well. Blake, like CAS, is both a writer and an artist:

During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feaster from the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.

Bloch was an artist too, but not nearly on the same level as CAS, who produced works more in line with HPL's description above. Here is a link to some of Bloch's art from that time period:


monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2020/11/robert-bloch-hp-lovecraft-drawings-1933.html

Also, in the story Blake lives in the final house that HPL lived in, which was at 66 College Street and right below the John Hay Library at Brown University, and it is from there that he could look across the city to see the dark church on Federal Hill.

Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934–5, taking the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street—on the crest of the great eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth-century workmanship. Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level.
Blake’s study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town’s outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside’s purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person.

buildingsofnewengland.com/tag/samuel-b-mumford-house/

The location, architectural details, and appreciation of cats seem to be HPL's own autobiographical elements added to the character of Blake... Although that could just as easily be applied to the unnamed narrator who provides the framework of the story.

Some of the other names in the story I had always assumed to be fabricated based upon common New England family names that HPL came across in his reading or perhaps wandering about in local cemeteries. I remembered the autobiographical note by HPL about how a grave site in Swan Point Cemetery inspired his story "The Tomb," so I did some online searches about names appearing in "The Haunter of the Dark." Edwin M. Lillibridge was the name of the inquisitive reporter who explored the abandoned church previously and was never heard from again... Blake discovered his remains:

It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man’s grey suit. There were other bits of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter’s badge with the name of the old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893, some cards with the name “Edwin M. Lillibridge”, and a paper covered with pencilled memoranda.

Buried in the East Greenwich Cemetery about 15 miles SW of Providence is a family with the last name Lillibridge including “Edwin Lillibridge b. 1895 d. 1895.” It seems quite possible that HPL on one of his many long walks or rambles about the countryside of Rhode Island came upon this tombstone and decided to use the name of the unfortunate child as the name of his unfortunate reporter who died exploring the abandoned church in 1893.

ancestors.familysearch.org/en/MN1W-WD4/seth-edwin-lillibridge-1856-1910

In the story, Orrin B. Eddy is person referenced in the paper found on Lillibridge's body:

“Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret language of their own.”

There was in reality an “Orrin B. Eddy” who was born August 15th, 1850 and died October 17th, 1852, and may be the source of the name of character in the story. His father “Hearse” Eddy (June 14, 1817-March 2, 1892) had a birthplace listed as Glocester, RI. They were descendants of Samuel Eddy, born in Kent, England May 15, 1608 and buried in Swansea, Bristol, Massachusetts, November 12, 1687. Could these have been relatives of HPL’s Providence friend, C. M. Eddy? Orrin’s younger brother who survived to adulthood was Thomas John Eddy, born September 11, 1853 in Glocester, RI, and died October 23, 1934 at the age of 81. He could certainly have been a relative of C. M. Eddy, Jr., born January 18, 1896 in Providence and died November 21, 1967 in Providence. Glocester is a small town west of Providence and not too far east of where HPL and C. M. Eddy, Jr. once searched for and did not find the “Dark Swamp” in 1923 (it really exists and is just northwest of Ponaganset Reservoir). Clifford Martin Eddy (Sr.) was born July 13, 1873 in Providence and died 1937. His father was James Francis Eddy, born in 1837 in Swansea, Bristol, Massachusetts and died 1919.

The word Shaggai appears twice in this story.

Yaddith is a planet from the story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" and described as "a dim, fantastic world whose five multi-coloured suns, alien constellations, dizzy black crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating cylinders."

[More to come... This is really the draft of a scholarly article I've been working on for a long time... I am completely going down the rabbit hole on this short story, and I have more annotations on it than have ever been done before, plus I will add more photos]

P. S. I also made a video once, showing many of the sites discussed in this article. It will need to be updated:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgZruaOfcpE

[GRWelsh]

Providence is calling to me, even though there is no NecronomiCon this year... I just may have to fly up there for a weekend. My sight-seeing and walking tours take up a lot of time, which I usually don't have enough for when I'm attending the convention. I need to take more photos, as well. I haven't yet been to Blackstone Park, Swan Point Cemetery, and the Ladd Observatory, and then there are some places outside of Providence proper that I'd like to visit such as the Temple to Music, Quinsnicket at Lincoln Woods State Park, Pawtuxet Oxboes Park (likely fictional location of Curwen's country house) and the "Dark Swamp."