Robert Harrison Blake - A Trinity of Mythos Authors

A Trinity of Mythos Authors

Robert M. Price believes that Robert Blake is not merely a counterpart to Robert Bloch, but is actually a combination of three different people: Bloch, Lovecraft himself, and Clark Ashton Smith. As one example, Price notes that the dwelling that Blake occupies in Providence parallels Lovecraft's own apartment. Furthermore, Blake, like Smith, is a skilled painter and produces bizarre "studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes." Lovecraft sometimes mentioned Smith's art in his own stories whenever he wanted to feature a weird setting or the reproduction of one. In the "The Haunter of the Dark", however, Price believes that Lovecraft took the notion one step further and depicted Smith himself as one of the three aspects of Robert Blake.