Cosmic horror, alien life, dreams, and dangerous discoveries.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he spent most of his life there. He published stories in magazines including Weird Tales and earned money revising and ghostwriting work for other authors. He also wrote essays, poetry, and thousands of letters to friends and fellow writers. After his death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House to publish his work.
His stories often take the form of reports, letters, and personal accounts of disturbing discoveries. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” a man examines documents linking a cult, strange dreams, and a sailor's account. “The Colour out of Space” concerns changes on a New England farm after a meteorite falls nearby. His cosmic horror presents people confronting forces they cannot understand or control. His racist views also appear in his fiction, particularly in his depictions of ancestry, immigrants, and nonwhite people.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
After a meteor lands on a New England farm, the soil, animals, and family begin to change in ways that local science cannot explain.
A scholar links a dead professor's papers, a global cult, and a sailor's account to the same ancient being beneath the Pacific.
An impoverished student becomes obsessed with the strange nightly music of a mute viol player on a street missing from every map.
A self-proclaimed 228-year-old gentleman recalls evenings with Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and their sharp-tongued London circle.
A young asylum doctor tests a homemade telepathic device on a violent sleepwalker whose dreams describe worlds far beyond Earth.
A penniless London dreamer searches night after night for Celephaïs, the timeless city he first entered in childhood.
A struggling writer befriends a reclusive doctor who can survive only in a refrigerated room, then learns why the cold is essential.
Escaping a wartime prison ship, a sailor wakes stranded on a newly risen ocean floor marked by signs of an ancient marine civilization.
A dying man escapes waking life's monotony through dreams of enchanted gardens and a bronze gate said to open onto a final realm.
A young scholar traces his family's troubled history from a decaying English estate to a ruined city deep in the Congo.
A scientist activates a machine that reveals forms of life hidden beside us, trapping his former friend in the experiment.
A homesick poet follows an eighteenth-century stranger through hidden New York streets to a house erased from modern maps.
A sculptor and a brilliant stranger use drugs to cross the boundaries of sleep until one reaches a place neither can safely revisit.
A famous escape artist accepts a midnight invitation at Giza and wakes bound in a chamber far beneath the pyramids.
A traveling showman arrives with electrical marvels and visions that draw a restless city toward a night of collective terror.
An art critic visits a missing painter's secret studio and learns why his monsters look more convincing than ordinary imagination can explain.
A sleepless man dreams of an ancient polar city where his sharp eyes earn him a military watch on which an entire people depends.
A solitary count faces a family curse as his thirty-second birthday nears and hidden rooms in his ruined château reveal an old revenge.
When an orphan’s kitten vanishes in Ulthar, every cat in the village leaves home for the same night.
A man follows a family summons to a silent New England town, where a Christmas gathering leads beneath the local church.
A horror writer enters an abandoned church, studies a strange crystal, and begins to feel watched by something that cannot survive light.
A Brooklyn detective traces disappearances and occult meetings to a scholar whose sudden return to society conceals a deeper threat.
Two bored collectors steal an amulet from a centuries-old grave, then hear a hound closing in across the night.
A self-styled investigator of horrors climbs Tempest Mountain to uncover what has been killing whole families near an abandoned mansion.
An Irish landowner plans to drain a bog that local villagers refuse to disturb, then replaces every worker who leaves.
A scholar climbs a forbidden mountain to see the gods of Earth, certain that his learning can protect him from their anger.
A lonely man escapes the lightless castle where he has always lived and searches for other people under the full moon.
Caught in a storm, a genealogist takes shelter in an isolated New England farmhouse whose ancient owner studies a gruesome engraving.
A young singer crosses many lands searching for the beautiful city he remembers, hoping to find people who understand his songs.
An American heir restores his family’s ruined English priory, where only he and his cats can hear rats moving inside the walls.
A doctor and his nephew investigate a Providence house where generations of residents have weakened, gone mad, or died.
Randolph Carter, cut off from the dream worlds of his youth, follows an inherited silver key toward his childhood home and a possible way back.
Randolph Carter recounts the night his occult-minded friend descended into a hidden crypt with only a telephone line between them.
A ruthless U-boat commander loses control of his submarine and drifts toward ruins on the Atlantic floor.
Three robbers target an isolated former sea captain whose house contains bottles that answer when he speaks.
A sheltered poet marries a skilled occultist and begins to fear that she can force his mind out of his own body.
A solitary young man becomes convinced that an abandoned family tomb contains the life and identity meant for him.
Two men debate whether any horror is truly beyond description while sitting beside the grave linked to a local legend.
A lonely lighthouse keeper boards a white ship under the full moon and sails through dreamlike lands of beauty, mystery, and danger.
