On this day in 1890 horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft was born in his family home on Angell Street in Providence. Since his death at the age of 46, his work has been spun into countless movies, and inspired generations of writers, artists, and musicians. Just last summer this mural went up on the side of the Washington Park Library on Broad Street, the work of the AS220 Youth crew. It was while living in Providence that Lovecraft penned his classic “The Call of Cthulhu.”
It was at this time last year that local Lovecraft fan and scholar Niels Hobbs organized the first, and wildly successful, Lovecraft fan expo, NecronomiCon. No repeat, this year anyway, as marine biologist Hobbs is currently 200 miles out on the research vehicle Endeavor as part of a URI Pelagic Ecology class, collecting “as many weird critters as we can off the side of the continental shelf, from the surface to 1500 M depth.” So . . . an excused absence. (He may be at the Lovecraft Readathon this Saturday. More on that later.)
And yet there’s still no Lovecraft statue in Providence.