125 years of Lovecraft

Well, it's about that time again. Thursday, August 20th 2015 marks the one hundred and twenty fifth birthday of Providence's son Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and we who live here in the smallest state are gearing up for NecronomiCON 2015.

I'll be there, but unlike the con of two years prior, I shall not be covering press. I have no one to cover press for. I'll be in the dealers room with my friends Maddie and Crimson, who are representing NecroPress, my buddy Sam Gafford - at whose table I shall be lurking and selling some of my morbid creations alongside his books and magazines - and a shitload of other people.

Here's a complete roster:
Guests
Super Duper Famous-as-Shit Guests

Sam and I are hoping to get Ramsey Campbell to Minerva's for calzones and really shitty American beer, but other than that I'll be avoiding much of the star power. NecronomiCON 2013 didn't go so well for me, and was one of the primary reasons I quit the whole "horror movie critic" bullshit game.

But hey, fuck all that. Let's stick to the basics. It's Lovecraft's birthday, yo.

I love Providence. I moved here on November 1st of 2011, with nothing but the clothes on my back and the freaked out cats in their carriers. I moved here because I'd lost my job in September when Borders Books liquidated. I was sick of the ceaseless summers in Northern California's Sacramento valley. I'd been born in the San Francisco Bay Area, but California was not home. It had never felt like home, and felt less and less like home as the years dragged by and the economy faltered and the former bohemian cow country of Sacramento transformed into a soulless, streamlined yuppie pseudo-metropolis, overrun with dotcommers fleeing the overpriced suburbs of the Bay Area and driving the cost of living up for those of us who wanted nothing to do with the pretentiousness of the coast, where one could not hope to live unless one had a six figure salary. California had become one giant strip mall in a sea of petrol fumes and shimmering heat. I wanted to live by the ocean, but could not afford to do so on the west coast.

Wrong ocean, something inside my head whispered. So I looked east.

And here I am, uprooted and transplanted. I suffered mightily those first few months, sideswiped by culture shock, buffeted by the changing seasons, confronted with poverty, joblessness and despair. But I never regretted the decision to move here. I put myself through school, got a job, survived. And it's so beautiful here. Hope Street is a stationary gypsy caravan. Thayer Street is the 1990s forever. Wayland Square is ancient and homey and Minerva's Pizza is a beacon of comfort. North Providence is old world charming with its bakeries and shoe repair shops. Wickenden Street with its sea shanties, antique stores and gelato shops tastes like salt air and smells like art. There are so many houses here that look like Victorian party dresses, so many ghosts haunting the campus of Brown University. The Athenaeum is a church for the dark and the lost, Butler Hospital a looming specter tucked away safely in the hills behind Providence where it glowers and broods. This is where I will stay, and grow old and die.



Lovecraft left his mark on this city: a lonely, haunted mark. He loved Providence, and in the years since his death, the shadow over this city has grown. It's a comforting shadow, reaching out for the alienated and the lost. Providence, capital of Rhode Island, is a small, honeycombed city, easy to hide in, filled with dark corners and secret hiding places, stuffed full of books and dust and weird things. It's a city that encourages hermitage and introspection. There's no need to be ostentatious here, no push to be flamboyantly wealthy. It's enough to be a Rhode Islander, complaining about the road work in the summer and the sand shortages in the winter, bragging about Awful Awful's and Waterfire and Del's Lemonade. It's the little things here: coffee milk, Dunkin Donuts, crab cakes. And Lovecraft, whose posthumous fame is stupendous everywhere but here. Nobody much fusses over him here. He was allowed to live in the anonymity he chose, and sleeps now within it as well. Hollywood can churn out big budget blockbuster movies inspired by his squamous monsters and eldritch nightmares, but Providence lets him rest. Swan Point Cemetery is blissfully quiet. Conventions come and go, tourists visit and leave, and Providence sits gracefully like the grand dame of a tea party, letting them all come to her and leave when they wish, never encouraging or discouraging, always politely obliging.