In the East Village, around the corner from a pub called the Dorian Gray, is a new bar inspired by the teetotalling horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. It’s plenty atmospheric: illuminated vats of bubbling water, ancient books, murals of tentacled women, coppery portholes to nowhere. The drinks have names like Zounds! and Dropsey. On a recent evening, a woman tried an off-menu concoction, recommended by the bartender, made with carrot-chai-infused vodka poured from an apothecary bottle. It had a pleasant, gingerbready taste. “A hearth vibe,” he said. “Less like the shadow over Innsmouth than the campfire that casts it.” Another patron, a Lovecraft expert, ordered a Green God: absinthe, poured over a sugar cube and lit on fire, doused with lemon water and bitters, bright and eerie in the glass. “Looks eldritch,” the expert said, pleased. He’d begun his study of Lovecraft as a “socially awkward teen-age boy,” finding the “secret world of overwhelming awfulness” appealing—“like you go to Narnia and it just kills you instantly. Growing up in New York in the early eighties, I figured, That makes sense.” The bar began to fill up, and a young man in a T-shirt inspired by the 1988 John Carpenter movie “They Live” pounded his fist on the bar. “I’d like to order a Reanimator, please,” he said. That didn’t exist. He thought for a minute. “O.K., then—an Elysian.” ♦
