As soon as I moved to Rhode Island, I discovered Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
He was a local author, who died back in 1937; he wrote fantasy and horror
stories and novels, often with Rhode Island / New England settings. Sometimes
he used real locations (there are a couple of stories set in Providence); in
other stories, he used New England settings, but gave them assumed names. (If
you’re a follower of the Batman saga, and the “Arkham Sanitarium” means
anything to you, you should know that Arkham was Lovecraft’s alias for Salem,
Massachusetts – “witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham.”
In Lovecraft’s story “The
Haunter of the Dark,” a man on the East Side of Providence (where I live)
sees an oddly-shaped building on Federal Hill in the distance. He walks over to
see it – and awful things ensue.
In “The
Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a New Englander takes a bus to a little
Massachusetts coastal town and finds that its inhabitants are not quite human.
In “The
Dunwich Horror,” some professors from Miskatonic University (whose campus
is, of course, in witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham) seek out a horrible invisible
presence somewhere in central/western Massachusetts.
Lovecraft believed in something he called “cosmicism.” In brief: the universe
is utterly incomprehensible to human beings, and is in fact mostly inimical to
them. Almost all of his stories show human beings as foolish pawns, always on
the verge of total destruction.
My favorite Lovecraft stories involve the Great Old Ones. They’re
kind of hard to explain, because they’re supposed to be mysterious, but anyway:
the Great Old Ones are extra-dimensional beings lingering right off to one side
of our reality. They are very powerful, and they are just waiting to get back
into our world. One is Cthulhu,
a gigantic horrible octopoid god-monster; another is Yog-Sothoth, a mass of
glowing lights. There are many others, like Hastur and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth
(who “blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”). It’s only a
matter of time before they reassert themselves here, and once they do – that’s
all, folks.
So, kids, repeat after me, before it’s too late:
(It probably won’t help, but it couldn’t hurt.)
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