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In From the Pest Zone, a recent offering from Hippocampus Press, H.P. Lovecraft scholars S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz collect the five stories Lovecraft wrote during the two year stint in New York City that he would later refer to as his "New York exile." Lovecraft arrived in New York from his beloved Providence in 1924 with high hopes for his new marriage and his future as a writer. He left the city two years later, wifeless, penniless and filled with an abiding loathing for the metropolis that would accompany him the rest of his short life.

"To the very end of his days," his friend W. Paul Cook would write, "he hated New York with a consuming passion." The source of Lovecraft's hatred, however, appears to have been rooted in more than the simple fact that the city was the setting for his financial and marital misfortunes. Prior to moving to New York, on the basis of previous short visits, Lovecraft would proclaim its skyline to possess a Dunsanian "ethereal beauty," and divide the city, according to his own personal aesthetics, into the "Georgian New York of the ground" and the "elfin, heaven-scaling New York of the air."

Once Lovecraft moved to the city, however, he was disappointed to find that the XIXth century architectural elements that so moved his antiquarian soul were rapidly disappearing, victims of a philosophy of progress that cared little for preserving the past. New York also brought Lovecraft into contact with the phenomenon of mass immigration, to which he developed a near phobia. Although Lovecraft's views would become more progressive toward the end of his life, for most of it he was a keen believer in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The contrast between Lovecraft's white, genteel Providence and modern New York, teeming with hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals from all corners of the Earth could not have been more pronounced, and traces of the psychic dislocation it produced can be documented from his letters and stories of this period -- a reference to New York as a "dead city of squinting alienage" is typical.

The five stories collected in the volume were all written while Lovecraft lived in New York, but only three of them are set in the city. The remaining two, "The Shunned House" and "In the Vault," take place in the author's native New England. "The Shunned House" is a haunted house tale which begins with a steady accumulation of historical evidence about the peculiarly high mortality rate among the structure's dwellers. The buildup works to create a convincing atmosphere of anxiety and impending misfortune, but the story's later revelations are unconvincing, involving a strained attempt to add vampire and werewolf elements into what might have otherwise remained a perfectly adequate ghost story. (The editors note dryly that "[i]t does not appear to have troubled HPL that an apparent werewolf would be the ancestor of a vampire.") In addition, the story's ending, which involves the narrator's triumph over the malignant entity by means of "ether radiations" from a "Crookes tube," a scientific device which the editors inform us involves "an electrical discharge between two electrodes," seems by today's standards contrived, if not a tad hokey. Nevertheless, there remain sufficient suspenseful elements in "The Shunned House" to make it a worthwhile read and, together with Lovecraft's mastery of style, to make it an enjoyable one.

The other tale set outside New York, "In the Vault," is the story of a careless undertaker on whom one of his former clients takes revenge when he becomes locked in a cemetery vault. It's a clever and gruesomely ironic tale of supernatural vengeance with more than a hint of the French conte cruel. Although frequently anthologized, it is not particularly representative of Lovecraft's broader style and themes.

The editors call "Cool Air," one of the three stories set in New York, Lovecraft's "best realized New York tale." The story is set in a boarding house on West 14th Street where the narrator meets a Spanish doctor who requires that his living quarters be kept at artificially low temperatures for mysterious reasons that become apparent only when the cooling equipment malfunctions. It's a story that on first reading appears to owe a great deal to Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," but it is a well structured and suspenseful tale in its own right.

Although "Cool Air" takes place in New York, the setting is not particularly vital to the story and (assuming the narrator's difficulty in locating a plumber in an emergency are universal) it could likely have been set in any large city. Not so with the two remaining stories, "He" and "The Horror at Red Hook," in which New York City is an organic presence. In "He" the narrator wanders through the nocturnal dreamscape of a Greenwich Village in search of the few remaining examples of an older historical New York until he encounters a seemingly immortal magus who vouchsafes him glimpses of the past and future of the city. The story ends with the magus pursued and overtaken by the spirits of local natives he originally cheated in his attempt to gain immortality. Unlike the other stories in the volume and despite the rather violent ending, it is not plot-driven but more of an oneiric mood piece, containing strong personal elements. The narrator is clearly a stand-in for Lovecraft himself, the peripatetic lover of old architecture who spent his nights wandering through the city in search of any surviving niches of the past. In a letter to Lillian Clark, Lovecraft speaks of the narrator of "He" as one who comes to New-York "as to a faery flower of stone & marble, yet finds only a verminous corpse," a phrase that could just as easily have applied to Lovecraft himself. Moreover, the images revealed to the narrator correspond to Lovecraft's own feelings and fears. At one point the magus shows to the narrator a vision of New York's far future, an opportunity which Lovecraft employs to take literary revenge on the city by spinning one of his trademark images of pithy bizarrerie:

"I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, and the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen."

Gabe Mesa is the assistant editor at s1ngularity. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter and 4,000 books.