"It's the most wonderful time of the year"

Every year, starting about the second week in October, I feel the tinge of my favorite holiday coming on. It's probably because I live in Western Massachusetts, where, as Lovecraft once said "...the hills rise wild...", and the second week on October is right about when the hills start rising, and the trees start changing.

Ah, Lovecraft.... Old H.P. has been a part of my life for nearly as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, my parents bookshelf had a corner devoted to a bunch of ragged black paperback books. Most of them had broken spines, and had obviously been well-thumbed over the years. When I would pull them down and look at them, I was always shocked, disturbed, and fascinated by the covers. For example, here's one of my favorites:

I mean, seriously--what the hell are you supposed to make of that? Even now, decades later, it's still a haunting cover image. Who the hell is that guy? Why is he wearing an eyepatch? Why is his other eye about to fall out of his head?

When I was in the seventh grade, I finally started reading those paperbacks. And by read, I mean devour. I think they had maybe 6 or 7 originally, and I probably worked through those in a matter of weeks. And I read them again, and again, and again.

At the same time that all this was going on, my parents would make semi-frequent trips to New England. We had friends out there, and my dad would find a way to do military shows to coincide with mom's and my vacation time, so we would usually spend a week or two stomping around western massachusetts with our friends. At some point, I made the connection that Lovecraft was writing about the places that we were going, and describing them in a way that drew me even further into the landscapes through which we travelled.

From "The Dunwich Horror":

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

...When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned. Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

And if you've ever been to New England, especially western and central Massachusetts near the Quabbin reservoir, you can sense some of this. Most of the houses are incredibly old, with crumbling stone walls, and trees that seem to just keep growing over your head with no regard for order or shapeliness. Needless to say, if I wasn't hooked before, once I came to New England, I fell more in love with Lovecraft's writings, and New England. I won't say it's the only factor, but it definitely made me want to be out here, so much so that I ended up going to college in Boston, and graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, nestled in those wild-rising hills on the banks of the Connecticut River.

Granted, Boston is not known for its rising hills, but Lovecraft did include it in his mythologies. One story in particular, called "Pickman's Model" (you can read it here, but I wouldn't necessarily bother--it's not very good) is set in the north end of Boston, which, for those of you who don't know, is one of the oldest sections of the city, home to its Italian community, a number of winding cobblestone streets, and Copp's Hill Burying Ground, the second oldest cemetary in the city, which figures into the story, and which is a "must-visit" if you ever find yourself in Boston. Every Halloween, I used to get out my copy of Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft , take the Orange line T over to North Station, cross the intersection, and work my way into the heart of the old neighborhood. I would then open the book up to "Pickman's Model", and trace the route of the story through the dark evening streets of the North End, past Copp's Hill and the Old North Church, feeling enlivened and quick of breath with every step. Honestly, I would get so wrapped up that encountering anyone else on the streets made jump. Actually, the worst time was when I took my Scary Songs Tape with me and damn near took some poor sap's head off who passed me on the sidewalk from behind. Sigh....

Now I live in Hadley, on the floodplain of the Connecticut River Valley, in the heart of Lovecraft Country, within easy drive of the Quabbin Reservoir, created in part to destroy the Colour Out of Space , within the area of the shockwaves generated by the destruction of the brother of Wilbur Whateley, also known as the Dunwich Horror, and near enough to the coast that I can visit ill-fated Innsmouth, where, in 1923, a series of shocking and horrifying events events predicated the government destroying half the town and scattering the deformed and abnormal inhabitants.

When my parents decided to move to the Czech Republic, the first thing that I grabbed was their collection of Lovecraft Paperbacks that I first saw on the corner shelf. Now they sit on my bookshelf, and I have spent the last week (and will probably spend another week) pulling them down at random, sitting in my living room with windows open onto the dark Hadley floodplain, and using the text to situate myself in Lovecraft country.

Maybe it's a way to feel like a kid again, when all I cared about was scaring the shit out of myself late at night and looking up words like "ichor", "gibbous", and "cyclopean". Maybe it's the world that's terrifying now, and I want to make where I live someplace that, while still terrifying, is so alien that I don't have to engage with it--unlike the Nov. 7th elections, which scare me for all kinds of reasons, and North Korea, and Iran, and a half-crazy president bent on getting everyone to serve his fickle whims. Stacked against that, the terror of great Cthulhu and the Deep Ones, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, and god knows what-else seem positively quaint, and so illusory that they'll never be able to harm me, even if they're just outside my window. I don't have any good answers to those questions, but then again, Lovecraft's whole corpus is predicated on the idea that the search for answers will lead us only to madness, or death--how many of his protagonists ended their lives in one of those two eventualities? Despite what I said in my last post, I think that kind of escapism can sometimes be okay, especially if we see it for what it is and keep it from controlling our lives.

So here's to another year of Lovecraft, Halloween, and sinking myself into Western Massachusetts, for better or worse.