Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was famously fond of the Catskill Mountains -- at least, as a suitably chthonic backdrop in which to set his tales of inbred backwoods mutants and ancient be-tentacled evils from beyond the stars. For instance:
Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learned at once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world’s notice. The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilisation once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition throughout the neighbouring villages; since it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade hand-woven baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot shoot, raise, or make.
And this:
His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.
If that isn't a loving paean, coming from the likes of H.P., we don't know what is. In honor of the holiday, please enjoy a couple of Lovecraft stories set in these here hills: "Beyond the Wall of Silence," and "The Lurking Fear."
Happy Halloween.
Image: Shoggoth at the Mountains of Madness, by Pahko. Published under GNU Free Documentation License; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
