Lovecraft retained a passionate fondness for Massachusetts and its colonial heritage, finding wonder and pleasure in the towns of Marblehead, Salem, and Newburyport, and the wild rural terrain of the western part of the state. But the heritage of religious freedom in Rhode Island, and the contrasting early history of Puritan theocracy in its northeasterly neighbour, caused Massachusetts to become a sort of topographical and cultural “other”—attractive yet repulsive, familiar yet alien—in both his life and his work. It is not too early to stress that many more of Lovecraft’s tales are set in
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