H. P. Lovecraft’s "New York Exile" of 1924-26 was perhaps the unhappiest period of his entire life: living in a city whose giganticism and heterogeneity he loathed, unable to find work and forced to economize drastically on food and other necessities, and trapped in an uncongenial marriage, Lovecraft could only express his anger and despair in his work. This volume, which gathers the five stories he wrote during this period, shows how Lovecraft sought refuge by returning imaginatively to his native New England ("The Shunned House," "In the Vault"), lashing out at the many "foreigners" occupying the city ("The Horror at Red Hook"), seeking the antiquarian havens that still remained in the metropolis ("He"), or boldly confronting New York’s clangor and stridency ("Cool Air"). Editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz supply a lengthy biographical introduction as well as exhaustive notes to each story, supplying information on their background, influences, and use of the history and topography of New York City. As a result, these five stories present an underlying unity beyond their varied themes and locales: they show how Lovecraft came to terms with America’s only true megalopolis.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Manhattan Murder Mystery?,
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This review is from: From the Pest Zone: The New York Stories (Paperback)
It's always interesting the way genius deals with its surroundings: most writers go to Gotham to stoke the fires of imagination, leash a muse, and gain enough inspiration to unleash their literary Djinn.
America's Old Man of Providence and Grandmaster of Horror H.P. Lovecraft didn't: he despised New York. That is the central theme and unifying device of these five stories, written during H.P. Lovecraft's "New York period", and fleshed out by scholarly biographical notes and commentary by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. Even as he hated it, the great metropolis worked on Lovecraft's fevered imagination. His stories of star-spawned, ancient, slumbering Evil are choked with revulsion and loathing for the tired, huddled masses of teeming immigrants, and for the clanging of industry that accompanied them. Lovecraft saw them as alien agents busy swarming over and erasing the old gambrel-roof settlements of Brooklyn that so reminded Lovecraft of his own Puritan haunts. With that in mind, this a tight little collection comprised of the five stories most directly influenced by Lovecraft's years in New York, which Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi brands "the most miserable of his life". It is a startling observation, but one that jibes well with the undertones flowing like a Stygian underground river through Lovecraft's tales of gelatinous horror and ancient evil. For one thing, Lovecraft was hardly a reclusive rustic: some of his most pungent tales---"The Dunwich Horror", "The Colour Out of Space", and "The Picture in the House" all come to mind---take place in isolated backwaters, shrouded by forests and strange high hills, their antique villages cloaked in ignorance, cut off from civilization and plunged in a fever swamp of fear and superstition---all the better for star-spawned seeds of evil to take root and grow in nasty, throbbing good health. Lovecraft adored Boston and Providence. So why did he hate New York? The answers can be found in these choice little tales. His aversion to the swarms of immigrants, "dark and swarthy", chattering in their Babel of tongues and overrunning the stately purity and clean antiquity of an older, nobler Yankee America is most notable in "The Horror at Red Hook", a delicious little screed that makes today's concerned debate over open immigration seem quaint by comparison. "Cool Air" has always been one of my favorites, having nothing to do with Lovecraft's star-spawned Cthulhu Mythos but everything to do with the New York---and it all takes place about a block from where I used to live. Here we have riotous, teeming, clanging, steam-belching and smoke-snorting mortal industry side by side with ripe, rotting, putrescent mortality---even, as it turns out, helping the Decay pose as a living man. "He" is even better, and also has little to do with the Mythos. The nameless narrator---clearly Lovecraft---loves midnight constitutionals in the older quarters of the City; he loves combing the alleyways and antique Yankee squares of the Village. He falls in with a fellow night-walker and lover of the weird and antiquarian; accompanies the old fellow (dressed in cloak and tri-corner, even sporting a pig-tail) home, and the fun begins. Turns out those Manhattan aborigines weren't very happy with the pittance our Yankee ancestors paid them for the Island, and they come calling for payment in full---with interest. Brrr. Less compelling---from the standpoint of the collection, and only because Lovecraft penned them as "escapes" from the City to his beloved demon-haunted New England---are "The Shunned House" and "In the Vault" (the latter a nasty little morsel of American Gothic black humor). If you're a Lovecraft enthusiast, you have not only read all five of these tales a million times, but you probably have them in countless collections. So why pick up "From the Pest Zone"? For one thing, while it is delicious to encounter the stories on their own terms---any graveyard meeting with the Master is a treat---it's interesting to see Lovecraft's New York works grouped together thematically. Another reason: you get ample scholarship and a tasty biographical introduction by the erudite Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, supported by David Schultz. Read the stories themselves, then soak up all the ghoulish incunabula Joshi has provided on this strange and fertile, yet---according to the author---deeply despised period in Lovecraft's life. Oh, and points for the ghastly, luminously wicked cover: I have see few collection covers that so succinctly, so brilliantly, evoke the interstellar madness residing beneath the mundane that the Master conjured up in his prose. Yeah, it's still true: if you can make it *there*, you can make it anywhere. But that's only if you don't get eaten by a Shoggoth first.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ye Contents of Ye Booke,
By
This review is from: From the Pest Zone: The New York Stories (Paperback)
Sean Madden's cover illustration shews with imagination how HPL felt while living in New York -- that he was in some kind of pestiferous hell. This charming wee book collections Lovecraft's "New York" stories. It contains an extremely fascinating and lengthy introduction by the editors, photos of the Shunned House and other haunts, and the stories:
"The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air." As Appendix it includes "Preface to The Shunned House, by Frank Belknap Long, Jr." and "Little Sketches About Town" (from New York Evening Post, 29 August 1924). As a charming selection of what in most cases are thought of as Lovecraft's minor work (although "The Shunned House" and "Cool Air" are popular with many readers), this is a wonderful volume. The notes are plentiful and at times quite extensive, and it is the ability to include notes of length that makes these small editions of selected Lovecraft tales especially convenient and fascinating. One would like to see other such volumes, perhaps collecting tales from Lovecraft's "decadent" or "Dunsany" phase. None of these stories has had much influence on the Cthulhu Mythos -- which is perhaps a part of their singular charm -- and as such they shew that which may be called "Lovecraftian horror" in its pure form. For we who write beneath the shadow of Lovecraft's titan elbow, such a book and its contents has a clear and fabulous influence indeed. Highly recommended!
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