COMPLETE GUIDE
HP LOVECRAFT
would keep him safe. In this way he would
get to be both right and wrong and that’s
always a more interesting journey for any
reader to take. But, of course, Lovecraft rarely
had characters that complex in his work,
and certainly none of them was ever going
to be a Black man from Harlem. So by
introducing such a character, it required others
to change as well. None more so than Robert
Suydam, whose motivations in the original
story, ‘The Horror At Red Hook’, strike me as
dull and generic. I fi gured I could do better
by Suydam.”
Lovecraft was at the centre of a supportive
literary circle, the Kalem Club – named for
the fact that all its members had surnames
beginning with K, L or M – during his time
in New York, yet his distorted perception of
the city as a place of threat and corruption
poisoned his outlook. “The great thing about
his description of New York is that it’s almost
complete nonsense,” LaValle says. “Lovecraft’s
descriptions keep Red Hook at arm’s length
and, as a result, it’s not really a place, it’s only
a snapshot of Lovecraft’s fear and distaste.
Thus, it was easy to overrule him, write around
him, because he didn’t know a damn thing
about New York. That said, it’s no mistake that
I didn’t try to rewrite his New England stories.
I don’t know a damn thing about Providence,
or those small seaside towns, and I have the
humility to understand that he knows them a
hell of a lot better than me.”
LaValle isn’t the only literary admirer with
whom Lovecraft’s been blessed. Another fan,
and frequent correspondent, was the young
Robert Bloch, whose contribution to 20thcentury horror would prove to be second-
to- none, as Poole notes: “Bloch, like many
of Lovecraft’s small, young, devoted group of
admirers (the ‘Lovecraft Circle’), fell utterly in
love with his work. Not only did much of his
early fi ction show that tendency among young
authors to directly copy their idol, so much
so that some of his early work almost seems
like Lovecraft fanfi c. Beyond this, he did someextraordinary artwork that seems to have
been some of the fi rst attempts to visualise
Lovecraft’s terrifying universe.
“Bloch eventually moved beyond Lovecraft
to write works like Psycho in which the
supernatural elements are sublimated into
tales of violence and psychosis. I’d note that
in the novel Psycho (in which Norman Bates
is very different from the character we meet
in the fi lm) the murderer keeps a collection of
occult books, including the works of Margaret
Murray on witchcraft. This seems to be an
homage to Lovecraft who accepted many
of Murray’s suspect historical conclusions. It
appears to be the only be fan-folklore that
Bates has a copy of (not the Necronomicon,
Lovecraft’s fi ctional grimoire), by the way.”
When it comes to determining Lovecraft’s
own infl uences, the picture is less clear, in
Poole’s view. “I suppose what made me rethink
all that’s been said about Lovecraft’s infl uences
simply came from noticing, fi rst, how much
Lovecraft praised the work of Edgar Allan
Poe combined with how often he and Poe’s
work have been linked, when even a cursory
reading of the works of each reveals almost
no real infl uence. It seemed to me that too
many writers on Lovecraft had taken what he“HE CREATED
STORIES THAT HAD
NO RESEMBLANCE
TO POE”
W SCOTT POOLERe-Animator took...
some liberties.