Hippocamus has dated and priced an interesting sounding bit of book-length Lovecraft geographia. David Goudsward’s book H.P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley. It ship out in July at $15. The book looks at a…

    “fascinating aspect of Lovecraft’s life which has been explored only lightly in the past—his association with the Merrimack Valley and fellow amateur journalists Charles W. “Tryout” Smith (1852–1948), Myrta Alice (Little) Davies (1888–1967), and Edgar J. Davis (1908–1949), who lived there or nearby for most of their lives.”

Don Gorvett, “Mill on the Merrimack”.

    “by the 1930s […] entire regions like north-eastern Connecticut and the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire and Massachusetts appeared to be left behind by history, and the sight of abandoned factories was as common as that of deserted farms” […] “the rural hinterlands seemed to be largely populated with inbred, degenerated retards” [and newspapers pictured] “them as a bunch of mutated dwarfs, giants, and idiots.” (Bernd Steiner, “The Decline of a Region”, H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of the Fantastic, 2007, p.33).