he is planning to use the "Outsiders", perhaps "occult Outsiders"—whom he is on the trail of across New England—as a metaphor for social outsiders. Perhaps for his kind of social outsider. He's looking for a metaphor but what he finds is far from metaphorical (laughs). He also starts to question the notion of what a "real" outsider might be.

The idea of the outsider was, I think, fairly central in Lovecraft's fiction, and also in his image of himself. I think he saw himself as a stranger in the 20th century, as an outsider. Probably not the same kind of outsider as the decomposing ghoul in the story of that name, but probably not a million miles away from it. Now, I would question whether Lovecraft really was anlot of that.

Having situated Robert, I worked out where he'd come from, that he'd come from Milwaukie, in Wisconsin. That for various reasons he'd felt dissatisfied or hemmed in by his upbringing and he had wanted to go to the big city. Where he could pursue, amongst other things, his career as a journalist. That must've been a fairly common story back then, at the start of the 20th century when everybody had such hopes for it, and for themselves, before Prohibition happened. When people still believed that, "No, no, no they'll never enforce Prohibition. Everybody likes a drink too much; it'll never happen".

This was before the time when the First World War concluded, and when everybody kind of worried that the Versailles Treaty would stir up trouble