“Some Lingering Influence in the Shunned House”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Three Invitations to Dark Tourism

Sturgis, Amy H.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_2

Amy H. Sturgis⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ((PSCHC))

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Abstract

This chapter explores the idea of virtual dark tourism by investigating how Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” not only leads reader-tourists virtually through the dark space of Providence, Rhode Island (to the physical site of the real shunned house) and the dark time of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England (through folklore to grisly evidence of belief in vampires), but also relates its own fictional story of dark tourists who grapple with the legacy of evil in the shunned house.

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Notes

1.
Fritz Leiber, “A Literary Copernicus,” in Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark, ed. Ben J. S. Szumskyj and S. T. Joshi (Rockville: Wildside Press, 2004): 282–291, 282.
2.
H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark (November 4–5, 1924), in H. P. Lovecraft, Letters from New York, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, Lovecraft Letters, Vol. 2 (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2005): 78–86, 82.
3.
S. T. Joshi , I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Vol. 1 (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 525.
4.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” in More Annotated Lovecraft, ed. S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (New York: Dell Publishing, 1999): 83–122, 86.
5.
Ibid., 83.
6.
Joshi , I Am Providence, 529.
7.
Timothy E. Evans, “A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft,” Journal of Folklore Research 42, no. 1 (2005): 99–135, 113.
8.
H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark (November 17, 1924) in Lovecraft, Letters from New York: 91–96, 93.
9.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 83–84.
10.
Ibid., 85.
11.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, revised and updated, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012), 55–56.
12.
Ibid., 59.
13.
Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm, “Cosmic ‘Usher’: Lovecraft Adapts His ‘God of Fiction’,” in Poe, “The House of Usher” and the American Gothic, by Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 63–81, 70.
14.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 84–85.
15.
Ibid., 85.
16.
Ibid., 84–85.
17.
Ibid., 87.
18.
Ibid., 90.
19.
Ibid.
20.
Ibid., 88.
21.
R. Boerem, “Lovecraft and the Tradition of the Gentleman Narrator,” in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1991): 257–272, 268.
22.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 90.
23.
Philip A. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 94.
24.
Charles M. Skinner , Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia and London: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1896), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6615/6615-h/6615-h.htm (accessed July 21, 2016).
25.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 98.
26.
Evans, “A Last Defense,” 116.
27.
Skinner , Myths and Legends.
28.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 93.
29.
Ibid., 93–94.
30.
Ibid., 97.
31.
Ibid., 98.
32.
Ibid., 99.
33.
Faye Ringel Hazel, “Some Strange New England Mortuary Practices: Lovecraft Was Right,” Lovecraft Studies (Fall 1993): 13–18, 14.
34.
Hazel , “Mortuary Practices,” 13.
35.
Ibid., 13.
36.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 100.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid., 94.
39.
Ibid., 106.
40.
Ibid., 104.
41.
Ibid., 105–106.
42.
John Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1873), https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fiske/john/f54m/index.html (accessed June 29, 2016).
43.
Ibid., 106–107.
44.
Ibid., 107.
45.
Ibid., 109–110.
46.
Ibid., 110–111.
47.
Ibid., 117–118.
48.
Ibid., 118.
49.
Ibid., 119.
50.
Ibid., 120.
51.
Ibid., 120–121.
52.
Joshi , I Am Providence, 528.
53.
Ibid., 527.
54.
Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” 121.
55.
H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002), 74.
56.
Kenneth Hite, Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales (Alexandria: Atomic Overmind Press, 2008), 51.
57.
Ibid., 122.
58.
Ibid., 121–122.
59.
Ibid., 91.
60.
Ibid.

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Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory, NC, USA
Amy H. Sturgis

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Amy H. Sturgis
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Department of History, Marietta College, Marietta, OH, USA
Kathryn N. McDaniel

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Sturgis, A.H. (2018). “Some Lingering Influence in the Shunned House”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Three Invitations to Dark Tourism. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_2
Published: 24 April 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74686-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74687-6
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