And apparently I wasn't wrong. In researching this post I did find an interview on CNN's website
Lovecraft, a man reclusive in nature, and who used the Encyclopaedia Britanica for many of his stories became the father of modern horror and inspired legions of authors who came after. He was a voracious reader and managed truly prodigious amounts of correspondence with his circle of friends, many of whom were writers themselves. He was no stranger to libraries and was a devoted lover of books. It is well documented that during his time in New York, he was a frequent visitor to the New York Public Library.
Although the first story I am going to reference was written by Caitlin R. Kiernan, it was written for the Lovecraft universe. Pickman's Other Model (1929) first appeared in print in 2008 and is a direct reference to the short story by Lovecraft, Pickman's Model. Interesting are the references to lost films and there is a mouth sewn shut! The story is available in The Black Wings of Cthulhu, edited by S. T. Joshi.
S. finds himself in a strange city in which the street lamps seem to make the building appear at odd angles; "this is a city of ancient and flawed geometries." (page 4)
And a little later we find a reference to deepness of time, "...all through the strata of civilizations..." that Lovecraft was so fond of. (page 10 of Ship of Theseus)
Anybody who knows Lovecraft, knows he like his buildings strange and alien; ancient and confounding.
From The Call of Cthulhu:
"It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable."
Although The Horror at Red Hook will never be considered Lovecraft's best work (in part due to its racism and in part due to its flawed magical constructs that were cribbed directly from an encyclopedia), there is a passage that I think is still relevant in this discussion.
"He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call 'Dickensian'...It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles."
And then we have Australia.
In his story, The Shadow out of Time begins with Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee who experiences an episode of amnesia which destroys his family and disrupts his life for a period of approximately 5 years and 4 months, May 1908 to September 1913. He comes to find out that he switched bodies with a member of an older race when he goes on a journey of discovery. His journey takes him to the Northwest quadrant of Australia. 22° 3' 14" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39" East Longitude, to be exact where he uncovers the secret of his amnesia.
Lost in a maze of dark corridors and rooms he is forced to flee for his life from a dark menace known by its strange footprints and whistling calls.
"Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it - and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.
Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too - not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.
There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath."
Peasless survives his ordeal, but is almost unhinged. He decides to document what he knows so that he can warn his son.
We know that the crew of the ship uses whistles to communicate and to coordinate their tasks. And perhaps even more relevant is the fact that S. "looks away whenever a crewman reaches for the whistle around his neck to plug it between his lips. The last thing a man needs with no memories is terrible new ones." (pp. 42-43)
Part 2 will feature Anarctica, strange colours and goo.
