New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It has been repeatedly used as setting for Cthulhu Mythos stories.
==In Lovecraft's Fiction==
H. P. Lovecraft visited New Jersey repeatedly; when he lived in New York City, he toured the nearby towns of Elizabeth (in October 1924 and again in June and August 1925) and Paterson (in August 1925). He returned to Paterson, where his friend James F. Morton was curator of the Paterson Museum, in May 1928. In the summer of 1931, he went with Frank Belknap Long to Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore; in summer 1934, he and the Longs returned to Asbury Park and the adjacent Ocean Grove.
But New Jersey features only incidentally in Lovecraft's fiction. One of the unfortunate residents of "The Shunned House" (written in October 1924) is William Harris, Jr., who served during the American Revolution as "a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell." In 1780, "he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown," whom he brought back to Providence and his cursed abode in 1781. Lovecraft was inspired to write "The Shunned House" by a house in Elizabeth, which he described in a letter:On the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Elizabeth Avenue is a terrible old house — a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds — with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, and an outside flight of stairs leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed.Selected Letters 1.178, H. P. Lovecraft. In "The Call of Cthulhu" (written in 1926), Francis Wayland Thurston happens upon a report of the rescue of Gustaf Johansen while Thurston is "visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note." (This is a tip of the hat to Morton, who had amassed a renowned mineral collection at the Paterson Museum.)
Dr. Thomas Slauenwite, the narrator of the revision tale "Winged Death," was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on April 12, 1885.
== Other Mythos Writers==
===Frank Belknap Long===
Frank Belknap Long never specified the state that includes Partridgeville, the setting of his stories "The Space-Eaters" (1928) and "The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929); it's on a seacoast near New York City, which suggests Jersey, but could potentially be Connecticut or even Long Island, New York.
Long's novel The Horror from the Hills (1931), however, definitely has its climax in New Jersey, when Algernon Harris pursues Chaugnar Faugn from Asbury Park (where it committed a massacre) to Atlantic City before cornering it in the Jersey marshlands and dispelling it with an entropy machine.
===C. Hall Thompson===
C. Hall Thompson, whose career as a Mythos writer was cut short by the objections of August Derleth, sketched the beginnings of his own version of Lovecraft Country in New Jersey, similar to what Ramsey Campbell did (with Derleth's blessing) in England's Severn Valley. Thompson set "The Spawn of the Green Abyss" in Kalesmouth, an "antiquated village sprawled on a forlorn peninsula off New Jersey’s Northeastern coast," which waslittle more than a sprinkling of cottages with a single general-store and a population in the low fifties. The small white houses are scattered along a narrow finger of sand-and-rock land that juts defiantly eastward into the sea. There is water on three sides and a single highway to the mainland.Its most prominent landmark is an ancient mansion called Heath House, a "misty hulk" with "straggling, mossy embattlements." 
Thompson's "The Will of Claude Ashur" is likewise set in Inneswich, a town on the "lifeless, Atlantic-clawed stretches of the Northern New Jersey coast." He wrote that "people who know that part of the country give wide berth to Inneswich and the legends that hang like a slimy caul over the ancient coastal village." Its main point of interest is Inneswich Priory, an "infamous" structure "that lies on the northernmost edge of Inneswich"; the town's main social establishment is the Tavern at Inneswich.
==Milestones==
Several real-world people associated with the Cthulhu Mythos had life events in New Jersey, including:
*Henry S. Whitehead, born in Elizabeth on March 5, 1882.
* Abraham Merritt, born in Beverly on January 20, 1884.
*James Blish, born in East Orange on May 23, 1921.
*Brian McNaughton, born in Red Bank on September 23, 1935.
*F. Paul Wilson, born in Jersey City on May 17, 1946.
*Robert Weinberg, born in Newark on August 29, 1946.
* A. A. Attanasio, born in Newark on September 20, 1951.
*Darrell Schweitzer, born in Woodbury on August 27, 1952.
*Wilfred Blanch Talman died in Ridgewood on February 28, 1986.
*Lin Carter died in Montclair on February 7, 1988, after spending the last years of his life in nearby East Orange.
==References==
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Regions/Territories