THE HORROR AT CLINTON STREET HP LOVECRAFT IN BROOKLYN
Readers of HP Lovecraft’s disturbing weird fiction are often transported to some dangerous and disconcerting locales. There is, for example, Kadath in the Cold Waste, or the inaccessible Plateau of Leng, and perhaps most troubling – and unpronounceable – sunken R’lyeh, lost beneath the waves of the South Pacific, where sits, brooding and ominous, the unspeakable squid-faced Cthulhu. But in Lovecraft’s own short life – he died of cancer of the intestines in 1937 at the age of 46 – the most terrifying place he ever visited was somewhere altogether more mundane. Its location is well known and it is easily accessible via public transport, unlike most destinations on the Lovecraftian map. And aside from the trouble-makers and riff raff that can be found in any town, its inhabitants are, for the most part, human. I’m referring to the largest borough of New York City, USA: Brooklyn.
For years, among locals, Brooklyn was the butt of many jokes. Its reputation even includes the ignominy of having its baseball team relocate to Los Angeles; who these days remembers the Brooklyn Dodgers? But in recent decades, Brooklyn’s profile has had a facelift. This was due in no small part to the rents in Manhattan skyrocketing to nosebleed heights, pushing out practically everyone who didn’t enjoy a six-figure annual income. Parts of Brooklyn itself began experiencing the same gentrification, which often sent the hip and low-earning across Manhattan and the Hudson to the inhospitable shores of New Jersey, where the present writer grew up. Oddly enough, one patch of Brooklyn that has been so transformed is the neighbourhood where Lovecraft lived for a brief time in the 1920s.
Although his knowledge and appreciation of his fellow writer Franz Kafka – creator of horrors of a different kind – was most likely non-existent, the anxiety and despair that overcame Lovecraft during his time in Brooklyn Heights seems, to me at least, to warrant the appellation Kafkaesque. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlothotep and HPL’s other cosmic creatures are indeed chilling, but the kind of angst that descended on Lovecraft while residing at 169 Clinton Street was of an existential, not extraterrestrial stamp. Terrors from beyond space were mother’s milk for him. But when it came to humans, specifically non-white ones, of which, in Lovecraft’s time, his neck of the Brooklyn woods was particularly full, his call was not of Cthulhu, but something closer to that of Joseph: “The horror, the horror.”
