Lovecraft
So I've started this project detailing Salem through the eyes of H.P. Lovecraft. Salem is the basis for his fictional town of Arkham (from which we get the Asylum, so that means Batman totally visited my new town) and HPL spent a lot of time visiting, perhaps once a year or so.
Here's HPL writing about a walk he took down a street that's around the corner from my house:
I now went to Mall-Street, where Mr. Hawthorne for some time dwelt; and doubling around venerable Bridge-Street, essay’d to return to the Common down Williams-Street. (So named from Rev. R. Williams, founder of the Providence-Plantations, who dwelt in Salem before 1636.) Here I was destin’d to encounter a very agreeable shiver of spectral horror, for I had not walkt far when I came upon a very antient house of unknown date, but certainly standing prior to the witchcraft of 1692. It was now abandon’d and condemn’d, and when I went up to one of the tiny, small-pan’d windows to peer into the black interior, I saw that the main floor had mostly fallen thro’ into the cellar, whilst the second floor was sagg’d down nearly to where the main floor shou’d be. There were doors leading farther into the interior, and amidst the dusk I cou’d see fallen plaster, gaunt walls, empty doorways, and quantities of mould, discolouration, and water in stagnant pools. It was not a nice place to peer into late in the afternoon, for it is not good to look upon midnight and death when the sun shines. None the less I peer’d again and again; till at last I saw more than I had seen before, being aided by the eye of sinister fancy. From every door-frame hung a corpse in some state or other of decay; a few skeletons, and a few with purple putrescence left. They were all aged, and drest in rags, and were both men and women. And when I lookt down toward the floor I saw there was not any floor, but only a black unfathomable abyss, into which straggled vainly the lurid phosphorescence of the corpses. And I stared in fascination till a workman passing by on the sidewalk brush’d against me and reminded me of the proper dignity of an old gentleman, who shou’d not be standing in a publick street staring into bleary windows and subject to the passing contact of plebeians. And I saw a cat on that street. A tiger cat.
The eventual goal is to create a guidebook to Salem-as-Arkham, so that the reader could follow it and walk through Salem, but instead of getting "facts" about a real "city" they instead get driven mad.
Here's HPL writing about a walk he took down a street that's around the corner from my house:
I now went to Mall-Street, where Mr. Hawthorne for some time dwelt; and doubling around venerable Bridge-Street, essay’d to return to the Common down Williams-Street. (So named from Rev. R. Williams, founder of the Providence-Plantations, who dwelt in Salem before 1636.) Here I was destin’d to encounter a very agreeable shiver of spectral horror, for I had not walkt far when I came upon a very antient house of unknown date, but certainly standing prior to the witchcraft of 1692. It was now abandon’d and condemn’d, and when I went up to one of the tiny, small-pan’d windows to peer into the black interior, I saw that the main floor had mostly fallen thro’ into the cellar, whilst the second floor was sagg’d down nearly to where the main floor shou’d be. There were doors leading farther into the interior, and amidst the dusk I cou’d see fallen plaster, gaunt walls, empty doorways, and quantities of mould, discolouration, and water in stagnant pools. It was not a nice place to peer into late in the afternoon, for it is not good to look upon midnight and death when the sun shines. None the less I peer’d again and again; till at last I saw more than I had seen before, being aided by the eye of sinister fancy. From every door-frame hung a corpse in some state or other of decay; a few skeletons, and a few with purple putrescence left. They were all aged, and drest in rags, and were both men and women. And when I lookt down toward the floor I saw there was not any floor, but only a black unfathomable abyss, into which straggled vainly the lurid phosphorescence of the corpses. And I stared in fascination till a workman passing by on the sidewalk brush’d against me and reminded me of the proper dignity of an old gentleman, who shou’d not be standing in a publick street staring into bleary windows and subject to the passing contact of plebeians. And I saw a cat on that street. A tiger cat.
The eventual goal is to create a guidebook to Salem-as-Arkham, so that the reader could follow it and walk through Salem, but instead of getting "facts" about a real "city" they instead get driven mad.