Thirty-one Days of Lovecraft: Day Nine

I did a lot of reading to get back on track and learned that Lovecraft did NOT like New York. Like, at all. He did like twisted tales of horror though, so perchance it evens out? Read on for some Lovecraft analysis and a poem of my own!


One of the common themes in two of the stories that I read today was the horror of New York. Lovecraft was a Providence lad. He moved to Brooklyn and got married and apparently, this did not go well. In He, Lovecraft writes through his narrator, "My coming to New York had been a mistake." Joshi writes in his introduction of that story this is an admission that "his marriage to Sonia and his move to the big city were catastrophic error." That gives He a bit of sadness, though if we read He's narrator as being Lovecraft, he seems to find happiness at the end as the story ends with, "...I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening." Admittedly, this reading ignores the feelings of Sonia, but at least Lovecraft found some happiness.

That said, He and The Horror at Red Hook both explore the hidden horrors that the big city has to offer. Lovecraft makes parallels between the alleys and backstreets and skyscrapers and the labyrinth mazes that make up ancient cities. For Lovecraft, it was just as easy to get lost in New York as it might be to get lost in Egypt.

Of course, there's more than a tinge of racism in these stories. The Horror at the Red Hook talks about a ghetto, where the worst fears Lovecraft can bestow upon immigrants and minorities are realized. They fall to crime, worship the Devil, and worse. The Horror at the Red Hook underscores that Lovecraft didn't like the big city of New York partially because of its size (Thomas Malone develops a fear of large buildings) but also of who was there. For Lovecraft, there was definitely a bad side of town, one he may have found himself in a time or two, and perhaps it was his xenophobia that inspired some paranoid writings about them.

The Horror at the Red Hook isn't as racist as The Street, though that isn't saying much. Perhaps, it is just as racist as The Street, and Lovecraft is being a bit more, well not subtle about it, but not as blatant.

The most fun I had reading in this section was "Under the Pyramids". Apparently Harry Houdini claimed to have a such an adventure. Lovecraft heard the tale, decided he was full of crap, and wrote his own version. In Lovecraft's tale, Houdini is taken on a tour of Cairo. He is lured to the pyramids at night, is kidnapped, taken underneath the Great Sphynx and learns that the Sphynx is modeled off something real. The tale has a lot of twists and turns, and is simply fun.

My other favorite  was "Cool Air" in which the narrator explains why he hates the cold. Turns out that he had experience with a reanimated person, and when a pump that had been keeping certain rooms below freezing, ends up disintegrating.  Gross!

Assorted musings: My junior high students are learning poetry, and exploring different forms of poems. I shared some of mine today, which included a Lovecraft inspired Tanka.

The void beckons me

Swirling amongst the madness

Unspeakable things

Drive me to sanity’s brink

Oh my God, what have I done?

Up Next: The one that I've been looking forward to since I began this project: The Call of Cthulhu.