But one thing that I'm surprised we don't see more of is H.P. Lovecraft.
In brief: Lovecraft was a writer of short horror stories, active in the first half of the 20th century. He lived in Providence, RI (with a slight, disastrous detour to Brooklyn for a failed marriage) but would come up to visit Salem once or twice a year. He loved Salem, going so far as to base his fictional town, Arkham, on it. If that name sounds familiar it's because you've watched a Batman movie recently - Arkham is the name of the asylum where Batman sends his insane rogues gallery (at least for a little while until they get out). Lovecraft's work went on to inspire others like Stephen King, H.R Giger, Guillermo Del Toro, and pretty much every other fan/creator of cosmic horror stories.
Lovecraft's work is definitely weird. We're talking about ancient godlike aliens that lay slumbering beneath the oceans waiting for the day when the stars come right again, twisted families of flesh eating ghouls or mutant fish people, dream voyages through lands unknown and barely imagined, and that's just the more popular of his works.
The dude had some other tics - he was a constant letter writer, loved cats, an admitted Anglo-phile, and, well, a xenophobe (if not downright bigot). Lovecraft didn't deal with change very well and the encroaching forces of modernity did not sit well with him. So no wonder he loved the decaying Colonial towns like Salem and Marblehead. He'd write to his friends following a visit - here's an excerpt from a letter to Frank Belknap Long from 1923:
At last I reached bleak Boston-Street on the western rim of the town, and walkt north toward Gallows-Hill. Here the houses were grayer and more uncommunicative, and the cold wind made sounds I had not before notic’d. A very old man told me where to find the approach to Gallows-Hill, and hobbled beside me a while as if knowing that I was, like himself, in some way strangely linkt to the spectral past. When the ascent became steep he left me, but not without hinting that Gallows-Hill is not a nice place to visit at night. On and on I climb’d, crunching under my heavy overshoes the crushed, malignant snow. The wind blew and the trees tossed leafless branches; and the old houses became thinner and thinner. Some were not over a century and a half old, but others had overhanging gables and latticed windows which told me that they had been standing there when the terrible carts rattled with their doomed load from the gaol in Federal Street. Up .... up .... up .... Damn that wind—why can’t it sound less articulate? At last I was on the summit, where in the bed rock still lurk the iron clamps that held the witch gallows. It was getting on in the afternoon, and the light was reddish that glow’d over all the outspread town. It was a weird town in that light, as seen from that hill where strange winds moaned over the untenanted wastes on the westward. And I was alone on that hill in that sepulchral place, where the allies of the devil had swung ... and swing ... and hurled out curses on their executioners and their descendants. I recall’d a witchcraft judge (Major Bartholomew Gedney) in mine own maternal ancestry, and thought of certain imprecations of the dead in fact and fiction..... “God shall give them blood to drink.” And at that moment, as God is my judge, I heard faintly but distinctly the clanking of chains in the wind....the chains of the gibbet which had not stood since 1693 .... and from that accursed wind came a shriek that was more than the shrieking of wind ..... a malignant, daemoniac sound that left in my ears the hideous echo of a syllable ... “-ire” .... which in turn brought up as if in shocking memory a crude couplet I never heard before or since: "We Swing Higher, You Feed the Fire!"
During that visit, Lovecraft pretty much followed a tour guide pamphlet he purchased from the Essex Institute. I have a copy of that somewhere and have harbored vague hopes of basing a walking tour of my own off it. It would combine historical sites, locations that inspired Lovecraft, and What-Ifs of Salem as Arkham - so many people come to town dressed up in horror costumes, why not let the city put on one of its own?
