New Orleans

New Orleans is the largest city in Louisiana, a state in the Southern United States. It is notable for its French heritage and for its vibrant Creole culture. The city and state feature as a setting in H. P. Lovecraft's fiction, and in other tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
New Orleans was for a time the home of Lovecraft's correspondent E. Hoffman Price; Lovecraft visited Price there in the summer of 1932.
== In Lovecraft's Fiction ==
=== "Call of Cthulhu" ===
Louisiana features prominently in Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" as a center of Cthulhu Cult activity. Inspector John Raymond Legrasse, a New Orleans Inspector of Police, tells the American Archaeological Society about a 1907 raid on "supposed voodoo meeting" in "the wooded swamps south of New Orleans". The cult gathering takes place in "a natural glade of the swamp", on "a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry." It features "a great granite monolith some eight feet in height", from which a figurine of Cthulhu is recovered.
The gathering raided by Legrasse involved more than 50 cultists, and more apparently escaped into the swamp. They were responsible for some ten human sacrifices.
Legrasse hears reports that further into the swamp there is "a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes.... [B]at-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight."
Before turning to the American Archaeological Society, Legrasse seeks the advice of "authorities at Tulane University", a private school in New Orleans, about the Cthulhu Cult. They are of no help.
Legrasse lives at 121 Bienville Street--an actual street in New Orleans, though in the 21st century, at least, the address appears to be a parking lot.Google Maps, "121 Bienville Street, New Orleans, LA".
=== "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" ===
New Orleans appears again in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", co-written in 1932-33 by E. Hoffman Price, who was living in New Orleans at the time. The story is set in "the New Orleans home of this continent’s greatest mystic, mathematician, and orientalist," Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. De Marigny is described in the story as Creole, a word signifying descent from those born in the French (and later Spanish) colony of Louisiana. Creoles are often of mixed racial heritage, though they may be of any ethnicity.NewOrleans.com, "Creole History in New Orleans".
When de Marigny makes a cameo appearance in the revision tale "Out of the Aeons", he is described as "the famous New Orleans mystic".
=== "Medusa's Coil" ===
Though set in Missouri, the revision tale "Medusa's Coil", written with Zealia Bishop in 1930, makes repeated reference to New Orleans and Louisiana. The story's interlocutor, Antoine de Russy, comes from "an ancient, powerful, and cultivated line of Louisiana planters." He went to "a good school in Louisiana," and in 1885 marries "a distant cousin in New Orleans."
His son Denis's closest friend, Frank Marsh, comes from New Orleans; he is a decadent habitue of Black Masses, and introduces Denis to Marceline Bedard.
== Other Writers ==
Robert Bloch sets his story "The Secret of Sebek" in New Orleans. The narrator is there during Mardi Gras,See TV Tropes, "It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans". and encounters the cream of New Orleans' occult circles in the Coffin Club, whose members include Henricus Vanning, Professor Weildan the Egyptologist, and de Marigny himself. 
August Derleth's ''The Gorge Beyond Salapunco" is set in part in New Orleans; it is protagonist Claiborne Boyd's hometown.
== References ==
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Structures