Tour de Lovecraft - The Destinations

Tour de Lovecraft

by Kenneth Hite

Kenneth Hite guided readers through H.P. Lovecraft’s horror plots and themes in his earlier book Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. Now, expanding on his “Lost in Lovecraft” column in Weird Tales magazine, he conducts a second tour of Lovecraft’s settings: from Arkham to Antarctica, and from New York City to Hyperspace. Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations drives the hidden routes connecting seemingly unrelated tales. It follows Lovecraft’s tracks into the uncanny landscapes of his fiction, and reads the eldritch signs on the Master’s map.

Hite climbs the crags of Kingsport, delves into Deep Time, and shines a light under the shadows over Innsmouth. With Hite as your driver and Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations as your guidebook, you can’t get lost in Lovecraft even in the loneliest parts of the planet… unless you want to…

Genres: Nonfiction, Lovecraftian, Horror, Essays

301 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Kenneth Hite (born September 15, 1965) is a writer and role-playing game designer. Author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents role-playing games, Hite has been announced as the lead designer of the upcoming 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade.

Reviews

[Martin Rundkvist · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea behind this collection of essays is so good that it’s a wonder that nobody’s written this book before. Lovecraft famously described himself as an author focused on the sense of place. And here Kenneth Hite has written an essay each about every one of the most important places in Lovecraft’s fiction. The table of contents reads like poetry: “… Kingsport – Boston – Hyperspace – Miskatonic University – Outer Space – Oklahoma ...”

The execution is excellent too. Hite is well read both in Lovecraft and in the critical literature. Here are many original insights and apt nods to previous commentators.

The writing is strong, succinct, meaty and funny. But it suffers a little from the availability of e-texts: Hite is able to word-search the entirety of HPL's fiction, and though not every mention of Poughkeepsie is necessarily germane to the argument, Hite often dutifully enumerates every mention.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a follow up to Tour de Lovecraft - The Tales, this volume continues to critically explore the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this time by focusing on the locations that appear in them.

While possibly not the intention of the author, the two volumes of Tour de Lovecraft allow fans of the Mythos to explore the works of Lovecraft without actually having to read the works of Lovecraft. Given the problematical nature of some of those works, this is not a terrible thing.

[Phil Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here games designer and Lovecraft scholar Ken Hite reviews the locations appearing in the horror writings of HP Lovecraft. The destinations within the book range from fictional locations in New England to terrain types such as woods and underground. There is also a selection of real-world destinations, including all too few pages about the British Isles.

Hite’s academic style did not make for easy reading, but he packed a lot of information into a small space. Each stop on the tour referenced multiple stories and letters by Lovecraft, along with samplings of scholarship and Hite’s own insights. As well as providing helpful hints for how to run horror games in the reviewed locations, Tour de Lovecraft also made me want to return to Lovecraft’s short stories.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book a great deal more than its companion piece by the same author. Both books are Lovecraftian criticism, but written by a well-educated and devoted blogger rather than a stuffy, humorless academic. The other book, subtitled The Tales, runs through every piece of fiction that Lovecraft ever wrote and gives brief summaries of each with the author's personal take on each of them. I complained in that review that each segment was well written but felt underfed. That is not a problem here.

This book tackles the iconic locations within Lovecraft's works, ranging from specific cities or countries such as Arkham and Kadath to broader, more conceptual locales like Hyperspace or the various Apocalypses (most of which don't even come to pass) in the Old Gent's works. The entries are still short but in this they run at least a few pages each, as compared to the few paragraphs given to each entry in the other book. I was a bit on the fence in regards to Hite's writing in the other book, but here it has room to breathe and really shows off Hite's abilities.

Once again the editing is a bit sloppy but the writing is enjoyable all throughout. This book also really clarifies why I found this duo among supplemental books for the Call of Cthulhu table top RPG at my favorite local game store. In the other volume Hite made several mentions as he wrote about threads from Lovecraft's works that would help aspiring Keepers (the official name given by the game to those who run campaigns) find inspiration for their writing. He doesn't really do that in this book, and he doesn't need to as his expounding on all these iconic settings for Lovecraft's stories are incredible resources unto themselves. This is a must read for Lovecraft fans and for those who want to write their own campaigns for Call of Cthulhu.

[Tony Ciak · Rating 5 out of 5]

FUN