The Boston Globe‘s “Star Watch” astronomy column has a charming column today on Lovecraft…

“Around 1893, when the poet and horror-story writer H.P. Lovecraft was a very young child, his mother took him at sunset to a bridge in Newton’s Auburndale district spanning the train tracks where the Massachusetts Turnpike now roars. The golden scene of the town’s Victorian roofs and tree-covered hills, under fantastic cities of clouds stretching to unknown glowing dreamlands, imprinted the precocious writer with a sense of wonder, expectancy, and mystical longing that, he said, drove his work for the rest of his life.”

Possibly this sunset was made especially intense by an unknown volcanic eruption…

“The erupting volcanoes that were responsible for the small atmospheric disturbances of 1890 and 1893 have never been definitely identified” — Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 101.

Perhaps his mother remembered the spectacular skies that resulted after the great eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, and jumped at the chance of having her son experience a similar spectacular sunset.