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First heard about Lovecraft in The Dictionary of Imaginary places.
Dunwich- A village in Massachusetts, in the United States. When a traveller takes a wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury Pike, just beyond Dean's Corners, he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The fround gets higher, the trees seem too large and wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time, the planted fields appear singularly few and barren, while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor and dilapidation. Without knowing why, travellers will hesitate to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. When a rise in the road brings mountains into view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness increases. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort. Deep gorges and racines cut across the road, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again, there are stretches of marshland that travellers will instinctively dislike, where unseen whipoorwills cry and fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous piping of bullfrogs.
It is not reassuring to see that most of the houses along the way are deserted and falling to ruing,and that the broken steepled church now harbours slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. A gloomy bridge must be crossed and a faint malign odour will invade the traveller's nostrils with the mould and decay of many centuries. Afterwards, he will learn that he has been through Dunwich.
It was here that a horrible creature was born to a member of the Watheley family, a foul monster, said to be the image of his spectral father. Only once was this creature glimpsed- a kind of enormous egg with many legs and proboscises. It was killed when a single bolt of lightning shot from the sky. An indescribable stench hit the countryside; trees, grass and underbrush were whipped into a fury; the foliage wilted into a curious, sickly yelow-grey; and both field and forest were scattered with the bodies of dead birds. The stench left quickly but the stricken countryside around Dunwich was never the same again.
(Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", in The Outsider and Others, Sauk City, 1939)
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