S02E32 Pickman's Model by H P Lovecraft

Pickman's Model by H P LovecraftThis story was written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 edition of Weird Tales.  The narrator opens by disclosing that he is frightened to go underground, into the subway or even into a cellar. Then he explains why. It's to do with Pickman, an artist with an unsavoury reputation. There are hints that Pickman, whose ancestor was a witch, is related in some sense to the ghouls. Pickman's ancestor was a Salem witch and in the painting where the changeling is being read to by the Puritan, the narrator suggests that the changeling's ghoulish features are reminiscent of Pickman's own.  This suggestion of cursed ancestry is also found in other Lovecraft stories like the case of Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft's ghouls appear in other stories as well. The ghouls honeycomb the hills of Boston are like the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In this story, which was written later, we find Pickman the artist now a fully-fledged ghoul. These ghouls come up through wells and into cellars and basements. Ghouls in Arabic folklore haunt the graveyards and feed on the newly dead. In The Music of Erich Zann, an artist can summon the creatures of this devilish world that underlies our reality. There is something about the super-sensitive artist who can see into more rarefied worlds than ours. Erich Zann was trying to drive out the evil things from other worlds while Pickman welcomes them, or at least tolerates them. He feels himself superior to them I think because he takes his pistol to one of them at least.  In the Music of Erich Zann the narrator cannot find the house again, and this is so in this story. These strange parts of modern cities lurk like shadows, over a river, or in a little-visited and hazardous neighbourhood. Boston's North End is like Brooklyn's Red Hook. These neighbourhoods are populated with foreigners and honeycombed with tunnels. These edge places are clearly manifestations of Lovecraft's Shadow. These monsters come from