Faig

This newest volume of Ken Faig’s extraordinary researches into the personal interactions of H. P. Lovecraft exhibits all the qualities that Faig has displayed over a lifetime of scholarship: a thorough canvassing of documentary sources (including census records, city directories, and the like); a sensitivity to the nuances of Lovecraft’s life and work; and an expansive understanding of the historical context in which Lovecraft lived and wrote.

Here we find essays on Lovecraft’s relatives (his uncle Franklin C. Clark; his second cousin, Ethel Phillips Morrish, who could remember Lovecraft when he was four years old); the principal of his elementary school, Abbie A. Hathaway, along with his private tutor, Arthur P. May; the Black servant, Delilah Townsend, who worked at 454 Angell Street and continued to run errands for Lovecraft and his aunt in later years; and Mariano de Magistris, the tenant who worked the quarry that Lovecraft’s family owned.

Other essays probe Lovecraft’s relations with the Irish (including a trio of brothers, the Banigans, who were Lovecraft’s neighbors when he was a boy); the first editor of Weird Tales, Edwin Baird; and the people who occupied the boarding houses at 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn and 10 Barnes Street in Providence. Comprehensive essays on Lovecraft’s travelogues of his ancestral region of Foster, R.I., and on his 1937 diary are among the insightful studies in this book.

Ken Faig has been doing high-level scholarship on Lovecraft since 1970, and this volume is a testament to his lifelong research on every aspect of the life, work, and thought of the Dreamer from Providence.