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

by S.T. Joshi

And if the above description sounds autobiographical, it is by design; for “He,” while much superior to “The Horror at Red Hook,” is as heart-wrenching a cry of despair as its predecessor—quite avowedly so. Its opening is celebrated: I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me. The power of this passage, of course, does not depend upon knowledge of Lovecraft’s biography; but that knowledge will lend it an added poignancy in its transparent reflexion of Lovecraft’s own mental state.