reading some Lovecraft, wooee. fascinating, unsettling stuff. unsettling? I think I mean alarming. I've read about 12 stories, so I'm not fully possessed of his work, but even in those 12, a consistent impression of an oozy, obscene, subterranean world persists. calls to mind Poe's tour-de-force craziness Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with its ultimate vision of a primordial underworld. Lovecraft fits right in line with Hawthorne's puritan weirdness and Poe's hyper sensitivity. he's poetic in a gripping, surreal way, perhaps as Rimbaud was. Jung would have a heyday with with these visions that seem to come directly from the unconscious. I say seem because Lovecraft is a technically skilled writer, his stories aren't simply the rantings of a psychotic. not that he wasn't, let us say, a bit touched. as who aint... I'm reading the Library of America edition, nice to see they're willing to publish the likes of Lovecraft, tho I think he certifiably rates as one of them pure products that Williams was on about. there was a period when I read a fair bit of horror. I'm not really into creepiness, but the sort of possession that occurs with horror interests me. I think it compares with Rimbaud en enfer, as a for instance, tho I don't mean that horror = poetry. a lot of horror is hokum. and you have writers like Stephen King (cripes, I read 11 of his novels one summer), who have moments that touch of the mysterious and unconscious, but then they slick it up for the cheap seats. King particularly is prolix, his books rattle on beyond the point where intensity can survive, all for the sake of summer reading. anyway, the book's chronology notes HPL roaming around New England and New York. I was surprised that he found his way to Athol, Massachusetts, an out of the way and run down factory town in the center of the state. a good place, I suppose, tho, for the Recluse Press, which published a bit of his work.