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Library of Lovecraft Mythos in Miskatonic University

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H.P. Lovecraft Wikipedia

Lovecraft Mythos. Forbidden Knowledge.

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Boston

An imagined Boston brick alley descends toward harbor fog beside a dim studio and shadowed cellar.
Places

Boston

Boston appears in Lovecraft’s fiction as a city of art, concealed antiquity and remembered beauty. Pickman’s Model contrasts the North End with fashionable artistic life, while The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath makes Boston part of Randolph Carter’s recovered attachment to the waking world. The city can open both downward into horror and inward into the sources of dream.

4 min read · 801 words

Characters

Francis Wayland Thurston

Francis Wayland Thurston is the Boston narrator who assembles the evidence in The Call of Cthulhu. His investigation begins with the papers of his grand-uncle George Gammell Angell and expands through interviews, travel and Johansen’s maritime manuscript. He does not directly see Cthulhu. His terror comes from recognizing that independent records appear to describe different parts of the same event.

5 min read · 1,035 words

A petrified observer before the shadow beneath Yaddith-Gho.
Entities & creatures

Ghatanothoa

Ghatanothoa is the being beneath Mount Yaddith-Gho whose appearance inflicts a petrification more terrible than ordinary death in Out of the Aeons. Its victims retain living brains inside immobilized bodies. The tale connects an ancient priest’s attempt to defeat this power with a mysterious museum specimen in twentieth-century Boston. Ghatanothoa acts through the danger of being seen, the authority of its priests and an image preserved across an almost inconceivable span of time.

6 min read · 1,216 words

A ghoul community in passages beneath an old burial ground.
Entities & creatures

Ghouls

Lovecraft’s ghouls are corpse-eating, dog-featured beings associated with graveyards, tunnels and the boundary between human and nonhuman life. Pickman’s Model presents them as a terrifying reality behind an artist’s work, while The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath develops their language, friendships, political cooperation and capacity to assist a human traveler.

7 min read · 1,413 words

Characters

Herbert West

Herbert West is the physician whose experiments in chemical reanimation give his name to Lovecraft’s six-part Herbert West—Reanimator. His outwardly controlled manner conceals a progression from controversial research to grave robbery, murder and experiments on separated body parts, followed by the return of subjects he has failed to destroy.

4 min read · 840 words

West and his student collaborator prepare a secret reanimation experiment.
Literature

Herbert West—Reanimator

Herbert West—Reanimator is a six-part sequence tracing a physician’s attempts to restore movement and consciousness after death. First serialized in Home Brew from February to July 1922, it follows West and his unnamed assistant from medical school through a factory-town practice, wartime surgery and a final confrontation with the surviving products of their work.

8 min read · 1,659 words

An imagined old coastal settlement beneath immense storm clouds, with woodland, a church and dark Atlantic water.
Places

New England

New England is the principal regional framework of Lovecraft’s fiction: a landscape of old towns, seaports, farms, woods, libraries and remembered homes. Real places such as Providence and Boston coexist with Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport. The region can offer belonging and beauty, while its buildings and local records open onto histories that overwhelm their human scale.

5 min read · 925 words

An imagined chamber of old volumes and forbidden learning, lit in amber.
Literature

Out of the Aeons

A mysterious mummy in a Boston museum becomes the focus of publicity, occult investigation and fatal attempts to reach its display case. The records connect it with T’yog, an ancient priest who climbed a forbidden mountain to challenge Ghatanothoa. Written by H. P. Lovecraft for Hazel Heald, Out of the Aeons turns the preservation of a body into the possibility of consciousness trapped across almost unimaginable time.

9 min read · 1,729 words

Pickman works beside the brick well in his hidden Boston studio.
Literature

Pickman’s Model

Pickman’s Model follows an admirer of an ostracized Boston painter into a studio where artistic realism acquires a literal and terrifying explanation. Told as a nervous conversation after the painter’s disappearance, the story gradually turns criticism of disturbing pictures into evidence of a concealed nonhuman world.

8 min read · 1,579 words

Characters

Richard Upton Pickman

Richard Upton Pickman is a Boston painter whose portraits of ghouls prove to have living models. Pickman’s Model recounts his disappearance through the testimony of an admirer; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath finds him in ghoul form, still able to remember a human friendship and organize assistance for Randolph Carter.

6 min read · 1,077 words

Carter’s feline allies rescue him beside a black galley on the moon.
Literature

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Randolph Carter searches the Dreamlands for the gods who can explain a city he has seen only at sunset. His journey crosses trading ports, the moon, subterranean kingdoms and the frozen north, gathering allies whose frightening appearances conceal loyalties more dependable than the assurances of a god.

17 min read · 3,432 words