The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. The intense darkness oppressed and stifled me so that I struggled for breath.Having been condemned to death by the Spanish Inquisition, the narrator descends into a kind of hell. Dizzy with weakness...
In "The Masque of the Red Death" Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors – of the deadly approach of a terrible pendulum, of the awful end of an ancient and noble house, and of the impossible beating of a...
Sailors kill a 50 foot creature at sea after a lengthy battle. The creature bears strange anatomical irregularities such as a single large eye and rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral fins. After inspection by marine...
In the tale, an unnamed narrator relates the story of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar. "The Cats of Ulthar" was a personal favorite of Lovecraft's, who was an ardent cat lover.
"The Colour Out of Space" is a 1st-person narrative written from the perspective of an unnamed Boston surveyor. In order to prepare for the construction of a new reservoir in Massachusetts, he surveys a rural area that is to be flooded near...
The story begins with the narrator describing the effects of opium and the fantastical vistas it can inspire. The narrator then tells of his sole experience with opium in which he was accidentally administered an overdose by a doctor during the...
"The Descendant" is a story fragment, believed to have been written in 1927. Lovecraft may have been referring to this attempt at a story when he wrote that he was "making a very careful study of London…in order to get background for tales...
According to the tale, more than 10,000 years ago, a race of shepherd people colonized the banks of the river Ai in a land called Mnar, forming the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (not to be confused with Kadath), which rose to great...
Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found-a pile of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly...
In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy's arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the...
The short story is actually an excerpt from a letter Lovecraft wrote. It begins in the attic of an ancient house. The narrator’s companion refers to the former owner of the house and the presumably violent end that befell him. He advises the...
The story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island and revolves around the Church of Starry Wisdom. The cult uses an ancient artifact known as the Shining Trapezohedron to summon a terrible being from the depths of time and space.
A gentleman in New York begins renting an apartment one floor below an aged doctor, who insists on keeping his quarters very chilly. As the two become friends, the old doctor's health begins to deteriorate in a particularly Lovecraftian fashion.
The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who plans to commit suicide over an incident that occurred early on in World War I when he was a merchant marine officer.
A university student is forced, by his lack of funds, to take the only lodging he can afford. In a strange part of the city he had never seen before, on a street named "Rue d'Auseil", he finds an apartment in an almost empty building. One of the...
"The Nameless City" is a horror story written by H. P. Lovecraft. The story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and is older than any human civilization.
Some of H. P. Lovecraft's most fascinating work came from a time in his life that he was forced, by economic survival, to ghostwrite, collaborate and revise the work of others in the field.
The Terrible Old Man is a strange elderly man "so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name". He lives alone in an ancient house on Water Street in the town of Kingsport.
Thomas Olney, a "philosopher" visiting the town of Kingsport, Massachusetts with his family, is intrigued by a strange house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It is unaccountably high and old and the locals have a generations-long dread of the...
Barzai the Wise, a high priest and prophet greatly learned in the lore of the "gods of earth", or Great Ones, attempts to scale the mountain of Hatheg-Kla in order to look upon their faces, accompanied by his young disciple Atal. Upon reaching...
The story traces the history of the eponymous street in a New England city, presumably Boston, from its first beginnings as a path in colonial times to a quasi-supernatural occurrence in the years immediately following World War I.
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a short novel about a weird hybrid race of humans and creatures resembling a cross between a fish and a frog, which lives in the seaside village of Innsmouth.
H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.
The story follows Walter Gilman, who takes a room in the Witch House, an accursed house in Akham, Lovecraft's fictional New England town. The house once harbored Keziah Mason, an witch who disappeared mysteriously from a Salem jail in 1692....
The story is narrated as a "found manuscript" penned by Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, a Lieutenant Commander in the Imperial German Navy during the days of World War I. It documents his untimely end at the bottom of the ocean.
A lone traveler seeks shelter from an approaching storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find that it is occupied by a "loathsome old, white-bearded, and ragged man."
The story begins by describing the ancestors of Sir Arthur Jermyn, a British nobleman. His great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, had been an early explorer of the Congo region, whose books on a mysterious white civilization there had...
"Ex Oblivione" is a prose poem.It is written in first person and tells of the dreams of a presumably dying man. In his dreams, the man is walking through a valley and encounters a vine-covered wall with a locked bronze gate therein. He longs to...
The story is told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator and details his experiences with a scientist named Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast creates an electronic device that emits a resonance wave, which stimulates an...
Randolph Carter discovers, at the age of 30, that he has gradually "lost the key to the gate of dreams." As he ages, he finds that his daily waking exposure to the more "practical", scientific ideas of man, has eventually eroded his ability to...
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft which tells of a traumatic event in the life of Randolph Carter, a student of the occult loosely representing Lovecraft himself.
Daniel Upton, the story's narrator, begins by telling that he has killed his best friend, Edward Derby, and that he hopes his account will prove that he is not a murderer.
The story focuses around the narrator and his friend St. John, who have a deranged interest in robbing graves. They constantly defile crypts and often keep souvenirs of their nocturnal expeditions. Since they reside in the same house, they have...
The narrator, hearing tales of a "lurking fear" upon Tempest Mountain in the Catskills, takes two men with him to investigate. They camp inside the deserted Martense mansion as a lightning storm approaches, and feeling strangely drowsy, they all...
The unnamed narrator describes the final fate of his good friend, Denys Barry, an Irish-American who reclaims an ancestral estate in Kilderry, a fictional town in Ireland. Barry ignores pleas from the local peasantry not to drain the nearby bog,...
The story is about a golden-haired youth who wanders into the city of Teloth, telling tales of the great city of Aira, where he was prince. While Iranon enjoys singing and telling his tales of wonder, few appreciate it. When a disenfranchised...
The story tells of an unnamed narrator, who has moved from New England to New York City and greatly regretted it. One night, while wandering an older part of Greenwich Village, he happens upon a man strangely dressed in garments from the...
The story involves a mine that uncovers a very deep chasm, too deep for any sounding lines to hit bottom. The night after the discovery of the abyss the narrator and one of the mine's workers, Juan Romero, venture inside the mine, drawn against...
Hypnos is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an unnamed character living in Kent, England. The narrator writes that he fears sleep, and is resolved to write his story down lest it drive him further mad, regardless of what...
Carter, a weird fiction writer, meets with his close friend, Joel Manton, in a cemetery near an old, dilapidated house on Meadow Hill in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. As the two sit upon a weathered tomb, Carter tells Manton the tale of an...
It is a recording of a dream, where the main protagonist is a Roman military official in the Basque country near Pompelo. The countryside is, every year, ravaged by terrible hill people who kidnap citizens and perform cruel rituals at a Sabbath....
Millenia ago, the Old Ones ruled our planet. Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive sea tremor brings the ancient stone city of R'lyeh to the surface once more, the Old Ones awaken at last.
A lighthouse keeper named Basil Elton engages upon a peculiar fantasy in which a bearded man piloting a mystical white ship is found sailing upon a bridge of moonlight. Elton joins the bearded man on this ship, and together they explore a...
At a gathering to decide the fate of Randolph Carter's estate which has been held in trust since his disappearance the mysterious Swami Chandraputra, who wears curious mittens and enveloping robes, tells Carter's acquaintances of his ultimate...
An undertaker finds himself trapped in the vault where coffins are stored during winter for burial in the spring, and is mysteriously injured when he escapes.
The story revolves around a Bostonian painter named Richard Upton Pickman who creates horrifying images. His works are brilliantly executed, but so graphic that they result in his membership in the Boston Art Club being revoked and himself...
The story begins with the narrator describing the night sky as observed over long sleepless nights from his window, in particular that of the Pole Star, Polaris, which he describes as "winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives...