H. P. Lovecraft's Megaliths

The Unknown in plain sight.



It is a little-known fact that Rhode Island's best-known author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the writer of tales of horror and fantasy, was personally familiar with a great many of the mysterious megalithic (large-stone) structures of New England. Even though Lovecraft's connection to the megaliths was advanced in Arkham House publication, The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966), by researcher Andrew Rothovius, the small circulation of that book did not make much of an impact on the understanding of how the megaliths contributed to what Lovecraft wrote. In his essay, "Lovecraft and the New England Megaliths," Rothovius stated that "Howard Phillips Lovecraft appears to have had an intimate knowledge of these rock structures, and to have employed them as key props in many of his most powerful narratives" (8-9).

In recent years, those antiquarians and researchers interested in the whereabouts of these large-stone structures have turned to Lovecraft's stories for guidance. So careful a worker was Lovecraft that even though he substituted fictional names for those of the New England anomalous artifacts that he visited, researchers have been able to use Lovecraft's fiction as a guide to the sites and have been able to locate a number of the stone circles and stone crypts that were so fundamental to his terrifying world-building.