NecronomiCon 2024 Travel Log
Sharing a bit about my trip to Providence and experiencing NecronomiCon for the first time
From Thursday the 15th to Sunday the 18th, I joined over 2,000 fellow fans of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Weird Fiction, and Horror for a weekend filled with panels of experts on esoteric knowledge, journeys through the ancient streets of Providence, and more mind-boggling artefacts and tomes than could every be imagined. NecronomiCon Providence is a biennial convention hosted by the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council in the capitol city of Rhode Island, beloved home of H.P. Lovecraft himself. This year was the first time I had the ability and pleasure of attending NecronomiCon and exploring Providence a little more extensively since I had been there only once before while looking for undergraduate schools.
Going to NecronomiCon 2024 was a very spur-of-the-moment decision since I hadn’t been able to attend Howard Days this year and in general had not done much traveling during the summer. I was very lucky to have fellow Lovecraft fan and writer, Erin Rose Latta of
join me in this adventure in our favorite writer’s hometown and celebration of his works with other dedicated fans.Thursday, August 15th
I arrived in Providence around noon and checked for the convention at the Graduate Hotel, receiving my badge and program for the events. I did some light exploration of the nearby venues, stopping by the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences gift shop in the Providence Arcade and generally navigating this new city. I would have gone to some of the Thursday evening programming, but Miss Latta was flying in from the storm-shadowed Pacific Northwest and I had to contend with nightmarish Bostonian traffic to pick her up from the airport. Afterwards, we coasted back into Providence as night fell and got some shut-eye before our highly anticipated eldritch pilgrimage.
Friday, August 16th
Our first full day of NecronomiCon started bright and early with an 8 am panel about one of Lovecraft’s chief influences—Edgar Allan Poe—on the 17th floor of the Graduate Hotel. Some experts on the master of American gothic literature discussed the nature of Poe’s works and how his visits to Providence may have informed his poetry, a form of literature which he regarded as the highest form of art.
Following that, our next panel took us nextdoor to the Omni Hotel. Here, we received some insights from independent game designers that have written for game systems like Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, APOCTHULHU, and designed their own games in digital and tabletop mediums. Before our next panel, we stepped downstairs into the maddening market that was the vendor hall, which peddled several libraries’ worth of tomes holding unspeakable knowledge and terror-inducing garments.
For lunch we got some Korean Fried Chicken.
Our next set of panels included an overview of Michael Moorcock’s works and how his multiverse remains a wildly successful example of intertextuality; some more game design insights from veteran writers including Chaosium’s Mike Mason and Paul Fricker, and Trail of Cthulhu’s Kenneth Hite in a panel moderated by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s co-founder Sean Branney; and a discussion on how the Cthulhu Mythos influenced heavy metal artists from as early as Black Sabbath to more recent, underground groups.
As the sun set, Rose and I went away from the Graduate and filed into AS220’s Black Box Theater around a tiny stage simply set with a stuffed velvet chair, a lamp on a low table along with a decanter of whisky and a glass, and a stand with a thick yellow candle. Once the clock struck 6:30 pm, the house lights dimmed and a sharply-dressed gent stepped onstage, sat down and launched into a seamless recitation of M.R. James’ ghost story “A Warning to the Curious”. The entire audience was captivated by the tale right to the very end, which was punctuated with the snuffing of the candle.
Our entertainment for the evening was not quite over as we returned to the Graduate where a long line formed outside the doors of the second-floor ballroom in anticipation for the next event. At 7:40 pm, the doors opened and everyone took their seats for a special live presentation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” adapted by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society for their Dark Adventure Radio Theater series. The show celebrated the 100th anniversary of the story’s publication and included audience participation as we were tasked with making the “Foley” sound effects. Having listened to several episodes of DART, it was exciting to see the HPLHS members plus some guest actors present a live reading of this weird horror story set right in Providence.
For a late dinner, we grabbed some fancy dressed French fries from Friskie Fries on the street behind the Graduate.
Saturday, August 17th
Our Saturday morning started with some more sage advice from Chaosium designers Paul Fricker, Mike Mason, Matt Ryan, and Rick Meintz on creating fictional pantheons for game worlds. Since two of Chaosium’s product lines, Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, involve fictional pantheons and gods’ direct influence in roleplaying campaign worlds, the ideas shared by lead writers in the company were invaluable for the many writers and gamers in the audience.
Immediately following the game design panel was a packed discussion on the aspects of cosmic horror in Herman Melville. Moby Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener” are the only Melville stories I have read, but revisiting them at this panel left no doubt in my mind that Lovecraft was directly inspired by New England’s most famous maritime writer. I really appreciated the number of excerpts the panelists read (many of whom were on the Edgar Allan Poe panel the day before), which illustrated the dark, cosmic beauty Melville utilized in his stories.
Our main event of the afternoon was a Lovecraft Walking Tour of Providence. We joined our guide Rory Raven and a host of other con-goers on a trek up College Hill to a collection of sites related to Lovecraft’s life, direct influences on his stories, and Providence’s own history. Here, we got to see a few of the houses Lovecraft lived in over his lifetime, some places he would frequent for inspiration, the “shunned house” itself, and memorials of the man.
Speaking of memorials…before our evening events, we would have not had a proper pilgrimage to Providence without visiting the man who started it all. Following the tour, we drove out to Swan Point Cemetery and, after a bit of time trying to decipher the map, we were led by a helpful patrolman to Lovecraft’s grave. His headstone was surrounded by his family members’ and covered with some offerings. Not wanting to pollute the area, we only left some words of thanks to him for inspiring our writing journeys before heading back to Providence.
Back at the Graduate, we were entreated with another one of the HPLHS’ live Dark Adventure Radio Theater productions, this time showing one of their original stories—“The Temple of Jupiter Ammon”, released in 2023. With the help of more audience Foley, and some hand puppets, the performers managed to bring us a rollicking desert adventure tale injected with a healthy dose of Mythos horror.
As the sky dimmed, Robert Lloyd Parry (who recited the M.R. James story the night before) took the stage with Chris Bozzone for a special reading of “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant. Bozzone’s synths served the perfect background for the narrator’s growing madness as he dealt with a seemingly unkillable, invisible terror that sought to drink and claim his very life.
Sunday, August 18th
Our last day in Providence rose gloomily, but we determined to make the most of it as we set out into town. We were in for a treat early that morning since our very first panel was on the correspondence between Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Experts on both writers headed the discussion and provided insight on how the two went at it in arguments on barbarism versus civilization, where “true” American gothic came from, and how each viewed the craft of writing. One thing that’s been added to my reading list following this panel is Hippocampus Press’ A Means to Freedom, a two volume collection compiling Howard and Lovecraft’s correspondence with each other.
The last panel we attended was on John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse” trilogy, which consists of his films The Thing, The Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness. The filmmakers and movie scholars heading the panel discussed each installment and compared the themes in them to Lovecraft’s own works and the general themes of cosmic horror.
Before leaving the convention and Providence, we got in some short films inspired by Lovecraft, cosmic horror, and weird fiction. We couldn’t stay for much longer, however, since Boston traffic was still something we had to contend with. We left Providence, however, very happy and with high hopes to come again when NecronomiCon returns in 2026!
Be sure to check out Rose’s Substack, The Midnight Blue Sea, and show her some support! She’s been in the process of writing about Lovecraft’s rise in popularity following his death and also shares her original poetry.
Also, refer your friends to Senchas Claideb and receive access to special rewards, including a personalized Gaelic phrase and a free, original short story!
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You really had a full weekend of activities that I know you so enjoyed! Great! It was nice that you had your friend there to enjoy it with.
This sounds like it was a very informative and entertaining convention. Glad you had such a good time and learned so much about so many aspects of literature and Lovecraft's contributions to it.