San Francisco is a city in California that appears in a handful of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and is the setting for Cthulhu Mythos stories by other writers.
Originally the home of the indigenous Yelamu people, San Francisco was founded as a Spanish mission in 1776. Claimed by the United States in 1846, it expanded rapidly following the Gold Rush of 1849. Its excellent harbor made it a central port for trade with Asia and the Pacific. The city survived a devastating earthquake in 1906, becoming the cultural center of Northern California with a strong Bohemian (and, later, LGBTQ) tradition. Its population was 506,676 in 1920, rising to 873,965 by 2020.
In Lovecraft's Fiction[]
The Lovecraft story that features San Francisco most prominently is the 1928 revision tale "The Last Test," a reworking of Adolphe de Castro's "A Sacrifice to Science." The character Alfred Clarendon and his sister Georgina live in "the gloomy old Bannister place near Goat Hill, overlooking the bay...a rambling, French-roofed relic of mid-Victorian design and gold-rush parvenu display." Goat Hill is today better known as Potrero Hill, a neighborhood on the east side of the city, south of 16th Street and east of U.S. Route 101.[1] The city is also mentioned in another story Lovecraft revised for de Castro, "The Electric Executioner," in which the narrator is "an auditor and investigator connected with the Tlaxcala Mining Company of San Francisco."
At the end of Lovecraft's story "Dagon" (1917), the narrator finds himself "in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean." An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia disputes the idea that the entity Dagon follows the narrator to the city, as "the notion of a hideous creature shambling down the streets of San Francisco is preposterous."[2]
In "The Call of Cthulhu," Francis Wayland Thurston passes through San Francisco on his way to Dunedin, New Zealand, to investigate the Emma's encounter with the Cthulhu cult.
Other Mythos Writers[]
"The Hunters from Beyond" (1932), by Clark Ashton Smith, takes place in San Francisco, featuring the fictional bookstore Toleman's and the studio of sculptor Cyprian Sincaul.
The recurring character of occultist Michael Leigh, who appears in Henry Kuttner's "The Salem Horror" (1937) and Kuttner and Robert Bloch's "The Black Kiss" (1937), is based in San Francisco.
Fritz Leiber's 1977 novel Our Lady of Darkness provides a detailed portrait of San Francisco.
Michael Shea's "Copping Squid" (2009) taking the reader on a journey through San Francisco, "down Sixteenth through the Mission," "under the freeway and down to the Bayside, hanging south on Third," and up into the hills that overlook the city. San Francisco is also home to Shea's Hyperion Hotel, where he set a number of stories.
In Ruthanna Emrys' The Litany of Earth, Innsmouth survivor Aphra Marsh tries to rebuild her life in San Francisco after being released from a government camp in Oklahoma. She works at a used bookstore owned by Charles Day, and is recruited by the FBI to investigate a cult in the city led by Oswin Wilder.
References[]
- ↑ Wikipedia, "Potrero Hill."
- ↑ An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Dagon," by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2004).