Only in Boston by Duncan J.D. Smith

103 Downtown & Chinatown–Leather District mon’s Frog Pond towards his now-demolished birth- place, accompanied by a raven and a trail of pages spilling from his suitcase. The other horror writer associated with Boston is H. P. Lovecraft (1890– 1937). Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he was a reclusive child plagued by sleep paralysis and ob- sessed with Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the stories of Poe. As a freelance journal- ist his own first short story The Alchemist , a dark tale concerning a family curse, was published in 1916. Shortly after his moth- er’s death in 1921, Love- craft attended a journal- ists’ convention in Boston, where he met and later married Sonia Greene, a widow and successful mil- liner. In 1924 they relo- cated to New York, where Lovecraft began writing stories such as The Horror at Red Rock and The Call of Cthulhu for the pulp magazine Weird Tales . Another story was Pickman’s Model , an unnerving tale about some- thing nasty in the cellar of a missing artist, which uses Boston’s North End as its backdrop. Even the Boylston Street Subway gets a mention as being where “vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor”! When Lovecraft’s wife’s business collapsed in 1926 and she sought work elsewhere, he returned permanently to Providence. He continued writing there but died young and in poverty. Other locations nearby: 44, 45, 47, 69 The Edgar Allan Poe statue features a raven