This week on my regular Friday ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, new pictures of Pascoag and Chepachet. Readers will recall these places provide the opening to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”…
Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section [of stores etc], had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. […] A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.” (The Horror at Red Hook)
The map and the Lovecraft’s “turn to the left” both suggest that police detective Malone was walking via the Putnam Pike west out of Pascoag, and then up the Reservoir Road alongside the northern and eastern part of the giant Pascoag Reservoir (expanded c. 1860).
As he approached the urban centre he would have encountered places that looked similar to this…
But then one of the plain brick “modest business blocks” in Pascoag reminds him of Brooklyn and triggers his terror…
The taller central building was the Music Hall.
Overpainted version of the above, people removed.
Lovecraft knew Pascoag by September 1923 and he visited again in September 1926. For him it recalled — despite its red-brick “touch of the urban” — the “half-forgotten, beautiful simple America” that still existed away from the populous centres.
This area was touched on in Lovecraft’s journey to find the mysterious Dark Swamp…
The tavern lyes on the main Putnam Pike; but shortly after quitting it and passing the reservoir we turn’d south into the backwoods, coming in proper season to Squire Reynolds’ estate. He told us, that we had better take the right fork of the road, over the hills to reach the Dark Swamp…
And finally here are two pictures of the smaller magazine-less Chapachet, with its obviously rather sleepy Post Office and bridge, out of which detective Malone was venturing in “Red Hook”…
