This week, a postcard to accompany the recent Voluminous podcast reading of “I Am Home”. The letter being Lovecraft’s ecstatic recounting of his returning to Providence by rail, from what he had come to think of as the ‘pest-zone’ of New York City. As the train sped through Westerly he finally felt he was coming home…

Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air — nobler roofs and steeples, with the train rushing airily above them on its lofty viaduct — Westerly — in His Majesty’s Providence of RHODE-ISLAND & PROVIDENCE-PLANTATIONS! GOD SAVE THE KING!!

Interestingly there was a “Wolf’s Den” at or near Westerly (often mis-named as “Westerely”), though he may never have visited it.

The best is can get is …

We’ll have to investigate Chauncey. Westerly coaches pass through Hope Valley (so do the New York Greyhounds), but the fare is probably rather formidable.” — letter to Morton, January 1933.

But perhaps he never made it there. Poverty led him to write to Morton in June 1930 that…

I fear desperately that I can’t quite make the Westerly jaunt.

There seems no other evidence he visited. Perhaps Westerly remained always a tantalising stop on the train line to Providence, at which he never alighted? A local place that, like Block Island, he should have visited but didn’t?