the same name we met in 'Pickman's Model', though he is ostensibly the same person." He suggests that the portrayal of Pickman in Dream-Quest is influenced by the character of Tars Tarkas in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. Thurber: The narrator, who gets to know Pickman while working on "a monograph about weird art", describes himself as "fairly 'hard-boiled'", as well as "middle-aged and decently sophisticated". He is apparently a World War I veteran: "I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I'm not easily knocked out." Given this description, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia finds Thurber's horror at Pickman's paintings "implausible ... strained and hysterical". Thurber is one of several Lovecraft characters to develop a phobia as a result of his horrific experiences; his fear of subways and other underground spaces resembles that of the narrator of "The Lurking Fear", who "cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering". Eliot: The character that Thurber tells his story to, is effectively the story's audience surrogate. While none of his lines are printed, his questions and interjections are implied by Thurber's dialogue. Setting Like the Brooklyn neighborhood portrayed in Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook", Boston's North End is depicted as a rundown section inhabited by immigrants and honeycombed by subterranean passageways. Pickman declares: Prince Street, like Henchman Street, Charter Street, and Greenough Lane, are actual North End streets. Though the story is vague about the precise location of Pickman's studio, it was apparently inspired by an actual North End building. Lovecraft wrote that when he visited the neighborhood with Donald Wandrei, he found "the actual alley & house of the tale utterly demolished, a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down". Inspiration Pickman's aesthetic principles of horror resemble those in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1925–1927), on which he was working at the time the short story was composed. When Thurber, the story's narrator, notes that "only the real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness", he is echoing Lovecraft the literary critic on Poe, who "understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness". Thurber's description of Pickman