Alan Moore's The Courtyard - H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu Mythos Connections

H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu Mythos Connections

The tale is filled with references to the works of H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos including:

• The setting is Red Hook. This area is the scene (one of Lovecraft's few exclusively urban settings) for most of the action in "The Horror at Red Hook". The Club Zothique, itself named for the creation of Lovecraft correspondent and original Cthulhu Mythos author Clark Ashton Smith, is in the same former church mentioned as a centre of cult activity in Lovecraft's story.

• Aklo is mentioned several times in Lovecraft's work (for example, "The Dunwich Horror") as a language, although it is actually a borrowing from the earlier works of Arthur Machen.

• The bands that play at Club Zothique are the Yellow Sign and the Ulthar Cats, fronted by the female singer Randolph Carter. Lovecraft wrote an early fairytale style story, "The Cats of Ulthar," a place visited by his recurring self-projecting character Randolph Carter. The Yellow Sign was created by Robert W. Chambers. It was used once by Lovecraft in The Whisperer in Darkness and more commonly by other members of the Cthulhu Mythos. In a Lovecraftian in-joke, the Ulthar Cats' support band The Yellow Sign are derided as "pussies" for not using Aklo.

• The Yellow Sign's encore song is called "Leng", a place frequently referenced by Lovecraft, most notably in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and At the Mountains of Madness.

• One of the Ulthar Cats' songs is "Zann's Variations", a reference to "The Music of Erich Zann," and the lyrics specifically mention his address, the Rue d’Auseil.

• The Aklo dealer offers to sell the protagonist a cock ring from Innsmouth and some of Pickman's Necroticia. The seaport of Innsmouth recurs frequently in Lovecraft's work and the artist Pickman appears in both "Pickman's Model" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath."

• The blacked-out information faxed to the protagonist from the FBI corresponds to the events of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

• The blatant racism of the protagonist mimics the inherent racism of Lovecraft's original "Red Hook" tale.

• The fax booth that Sax uses has graffiti sprayed on it that says "In Madness You Dwell," a lyric from Metallica's song "The Thing That Should Not Be," which is based on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.