Outside Providence A new graphic novel paints a disturbing picture of H.P. Lovecraft BY SAM PFEIFLE

It’s not uncommon for literary writers of the past century to be closely associated with the cities in which they worked: Poe with Baltimore (their football team is even called the Ravens); Longfellow with Portland, Maine (people still lunch in his back garden); Kerouac with Lowell, Massachusetts (their festival in his honor gets better every year). But horror/sci-fi master H.P. Lovecraft’s affinity for Providence ran so deep as to leave the city and his soul intimately linked.

In fact, Lovecraft once declared he couldn’t write anywhere else, fleeing Brooklyn, New York, to return to his hometown in 1926, so that he could embark on the most prolific decade of his writing career before he died of intestinal cancer in 1937. And though it took a while — Lovecraft gained most of his popularity after his death, and Providence isn’t known for its sentimentality — his hometown has made sure to cement his legacy.

The Lovecraft Memorial was dedicated in 1990. Located near his final residence, 10 Barnes Street, it is now a standard part of Providence tourist material, along with Lovecraft’s gravesite in the Swan Point Cemetery. Providence’s Lovecraft Draft Cider is a more ironic nod — the writer was a supporter of Prohibition and detested mind-altering substances (in direct opposition to his hero, Poe). It might be something akin to sacrilege that www.lovecraft.com is used to promote the Great International Beer Festival. But Providence’s relationships have always been a bit strained, no?

A new hardcover release from Vertigo, the intellectual arm of DC Comics, brings this author/city dynamic into bright and vivid color, detailing as it does Lovecraft’s formative years in Providence. Lovecraft (144 pages, $24), penned by screenwriter Hans Rodionoff with help from comics veteran Keith Griffen (the inventor of Lobo) and painted by Argentinean artist Enrique Breccia (who might be recognizable from his work on Batman Black and White), is an interesting evolution of the graphic novel. It bridges the gap between standard fictional works like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and standard non-fiction works like Spiegelman’s Maus series by presenting a sort of fictional biography of Lovecraft, where the true facts of his life are made to dance with the imagination of Rodionoff and Giffen.

In the introduction, director John Carpenter puts it this way: "The story is strengthened because the details of Lovecraft’s life are all dutifully followed in this tale. The insanity, the peculiar upbringing, the failed relationships, are all based on fact. The only liberties taken were with the reasons for the insanity and the failed relationships." Which is all very well and good until you find that the "reasons" are all bound up in one central fiction: that the Necronomicon, a mystical tome Lovecraft used as a plot device in many of his stories, actually exists, and that Lovecraft’s reading of it opened him up to attack from other-dimensional demons (real or imagined — we have some meta-imagination going on here), drove him insane, and caused the failure of his relationships.

The book even posits that the Necronomicon, not syphilis, drove Lovecraft’s father insane before him. This is a large leap, and further stokes the very-prevalent belief (check out the Internet) that the Necronomicon is a historic and important mystical text, and not just a figment of Lovecraft’s genius.

Thus, the very real Butler Hospital, where Lovecraft’s father and mother really did meet their ends, is transposed against their time in the fictional Arkham Asylum, which, for some reason, is in Arkham, Massachusetts — that’s where Lovecraft placed it in his stories, but for the purposes of this graphic novel, it’s difficult to understand why, every time Lovecraft steps into another dimension, he finds himself 100 miles or so to the northwest.

Regardless, this device allows at least for a wonderful visual stunt from Breccia. The book’s Providence and New York scenes are rendered in a very exacting crosshatching style, colored with muted brown-yellows, blue-greys, and pale-pinks; the world of Arkham (or Lovecraft’s mind) is without pen, a swirling chaos of the brightest, most-primary watercolors; and when one world invades the other, we are tipped off by the combination of the two artistic styles. Further, particular points of passion — Lovecraft’s loss of virginity to wife Sonia Green, the descent into insanity of Lovecraft’s mother, his search for her in Arkham — are made even more stark by their depiction in oil on canvas.

But whatever the artistic style, from panel to panel Breccia and Rodionoff combine to creep the reader out in a fashion incredibly loyal to Lovecraft’s aesthetic. Lovecraft himself is about as ugly as could be (worse even than that sepia-tinted photo you may have seen), particularly when he’s a child, dressed up in girl’s dresses thanks to his mother’s peculiar desires.

Dude’s got one seriously big head.

The monsters that his reading of the Necronomicon call to haunt him are equally disconcerting: arms and tentacles writhe and grab, toothy maws rest in concentric circles of fleshy lips, slitted eyes populate lumpy heads, and ragged dog-like animals skin unsuspecting kittens alive. (In a hint of humor, Lovecraft in one scene names his cat Necroman.) Lovecraft’s childhood tormenters are eaten bloodily, he fends off an otherwordly assassin during his first foray to New York by braining him repeatedly with his first typewriter, Sonia makes his acquaintance after finding him lying, throat torn, in a garbage-strewn alley.

She is inexplicably drawn to him, possibly with a touch of Florence Nightingale syndrome, and comes to find him after he has returned to Providence following the New York visit to meet the Weird Tales publisher who gave him much of his early work. She draws him out of his shell in a believable and touching courtship, fascinated by his hyperrealistic horror tales, playing the sexual aggressor to his shy formality (a noted Anglophile, Lovecraft was the epitome of prim and proper).

"What a lot of perfectly good attention to waste on a mere cat, when a woman might highly appreciate it," she prods.

"How could any woman love a man like me?" Lovecraft stammers.

"A mother has. And one not yet a mother would not have to try very hard," Sonia coos back, straddling him. Their subsequent lovemaking, paired with the particularly gruesome cat-killing, Lovecraft’s orgasmic grimace paired with a fantastical creature’s primal scream, unsubtly hints at the oedipal issues Rodionoff clearly feels contributed to Lovecraft’s insanity and depression. In another instance, his lovemaking is paired with a depiction of his mother’s brutal rape by an imagined evil doctor in a psych ward.

These insights into how Lovecraft’s relationships with the two prominent women in his life affected his career are Lovecraft’s strongest points. He moves to Brooklyn with Sonia, but can’t write, nor can he satisfy her need for love and affection.

"I’m frightened, Sonia," he says. "Frightened of the silence, of you . . . this life. Everything seems so perfect. I feel as if all the horrible things I used to see are still there . . . waiting."

"The only thing that’s waiting for you," Sonia replies, "is me."

If she was hoping to be allowed to enter Lovecraft’s tortured world, this tome’s authors imagine he did let her in, taking her on a tour of Arkham, which is actually one of the book’s weaker segments, indulging their typical comic book interests as they do by setting up a battle scene between Lovecraft and his prime demonic tormentor.

However, if Sonia was waiting to become the equal to Lovecraft’s love for his work, it was not to be. She and Lovecraft divorced, and this book’s authors imagine that she exited for Cincinnati (where she did, indeed, open a clothing boutique) while Lovecraft returned to continue his love affair with Providence. "Providence is part of me," he explains.

"I am Providence."

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle[a]phx.com.