I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

by S.T. Joshi

It would take Lovecraft nearly a year—and several more trips to Marblehead—to internalise his impressions and transmute them into fiction; but when he did so, in “The Festival” (1923), he would be well on his way to revivifying Mater Novanglia in some of the most topographically and historically rooted weird fiction ever written. He had begun haltingly to head in this direction, with “The Picture in the House”; but New England was still relatively undiscovered territory to him, and it would take many more excursions for him to imbibe the essence of the area—not merely its antiquities and its history, but its people and their intimate and centuried relations with the soil—and render it fit for fictional use. And it would also take those two years away from New England to make him realise how much he really was moulded of its flesh, so that he could express both the terror and the wonder of this ancient land.