A fascination with the cartographies of the unreal almost seems as if it might be an intrinsic predisposition within ‘typical’ geek psychology. Of course, the modern progenitor of the trend of mapping fantastic realms (or at least the person who popularised it) is Tolkien - although I think prior to this Lovecraft and Howard had already been informal sketching out the topographies of their worlds; even so, since the Tolkien explosion of the 60s and 70s, it seems to be an unspoken rule that, for any work of epic fantasy to be considered complete, it has to come with a map.
This trend has, perhaps, been less the case with sci-fi and horror: in the former instance, due in part to the vast scope of the fictive space often surveyed; in the latter instance, perhaps as a result of the seeming banality of the real/everyday world upon which horror eventually intrudes (and in both cases - as with the best fanasy [M. John Harrison’s work being a case in point] - there may be more of an interest in charting the complex interiorities of the protaganists rather than those of their physical environment).
In addition to which, the literature of horror does not often lend itself to the extended develoment of a world or locatin in the same way that multi-volume works of epic fantasy do. Lovecraft is, of course, an exception to this - especially where the imaginary New England of his Cthulhu mythos is concerned. Even so, Lovecaftian cartographies are rarely included in published volumes of Cthulhu mythos fiction; however, the one place where such cartographies are present is gaming products. Hence today’s offering: a map of the rural region Dunwich found in Chaosium’s supplement of the same name for the Call of Cthulhu rpg.
For my own part, I have a particular fascination with collecting maps of Lovecraftian realms, and I’m hoping to direct this interest down a more scholarly route - perhaps by way of developing an academic project focusing on imaginary cartographies and world-building in geek culture...
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