Showing results by author "H.P Lovecraft" in All Categories

"The Silver Key" is a fantasy short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in 1926, it is considered part of his Dreamlands series. It was first published in the January 1929 issue of Weird Tales. It is a continuation of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", and was followed by a sequel, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", co-written with E. Hoffmann Price. The story and its sequel both feature Lovecraft's recurring character of Randolph Carter as the protagonist.

Basil Elton, a lighthouse keeper, engages in a peculiar fantasy in which a bearded man in robes is piloting a mystical white ship which appears when the moon is full. Elton walks across the water on a bridge of moonbeams, joins the bearded man on the ship, and together they explore a mystical chain of islands unlike anything that can be found on Earth. They travel past Zar, a green land where "dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten", then the majestic city of Thalarion, "City of a Thousand Wonders", where frightful demons dwell.

"The White Ship" is a horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was first published in The United Amateur (Volume 19), November 1919, and later appeared in the March 1927 issue of Weird Tales. Basil Elton, a lighthouse keeper, engages in a peculiar fantasy in which a bearded man in robes is piloting a mystical white ship which appears when the moon is full. Elton walks across the water on a bridge of moonbeams, joins the bearded man on the ship, and together they explore a mystical chain of islands unlike anything that can be found on Earth.

"The Tree" is a macabre short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in 1920, and published in October 1921 in The Tryout. Set in ancient Greece, the story concerns two sculptors who accept a commission with ironic consequences. Lovecraft wrote "The Tree" early in his career. He was dismissive of the story in a 1936 letter. Such stories, he said, "if typed on good stock make excellent shelf-paper, but little else."

"The Tree" is a macabre short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in 1920, and published in October 1921 in The Tryout. Set in ancient Greece, the story concerns two sculptors who accept a commission with ironic consequences. Lovecraft wrote "The Tree" early in his career. He was dismissive of the story in a 1936 letter. Such stories, he said, "if typed on good stock make excellent shelf-paper, but little else."

"The Thing on the Doorstep" is a horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos universe. It was written in August 1933, and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Due to lack of funds, a student studying metaphysics abroad is forced to take up lodging in a cheap apartment building on a street named the "Rue d'Auseil". The street is not far from his university and is bordered by a river, dark warehouses and a large wall, giving the street an appearance of being on a cliff. The student cannot see what lies on the other side of the wall, as only a single window on the top floor of his building looks over it. Along with the building's disabled landlord, Blandot, one of the few other tenants is an old German man named Erich Zann.

"The Lurking Fear" is a horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in November 1922, it was first published in the January through April 1923 issues of Home Brew.

In the story, 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 village in Ireland. Barry ignores pleas from the superstitious local peasantry not to drain the nearby bog, with unfortunate supernatural consequences.

The unnamed narrator of the story goes into the middle of the Arabian Peninsula to seek out and enter a lost city. After hearing a clanging seemingly coming from deep inside the earth, the narrator inspects mysterious carvings and ruins until nightfall. The next day, the narrator discovers a cliff riddled with low-ceilinged buildings, unfit for human use. While he attends to his suddenly nervous camel, the narrator discovers a somewhat larger temple, with altars, painted murals, and a small staircase going down.

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 peak, Barzai at first seems overjoyed until he finds that the "gods of the earth" are not there alone, but rather are overseen by the "other gods, the gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!" Atal flees, and Barzai is never seen again.

"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5-9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales. It was the last written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".

"The Evil Clergyman" is an excerpt from a letter written by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft in 1933. After his death, it was published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales as a short story. The story was later adapted into the unreleased 1987 anthology film Pulse Pounders. The letter, to his friend Bernard Austin Dwyer, recounted a dream that Lovecraft had had. Although Lovecraft frequently based stories on his dreams, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes that " is difficult to say how HPL would have developed this conventional supernatural scenario.

"History of the Necronomicon" is a short text written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1927, and published in 1938. It describes the origins of the fictional book of the same name: the occult grimoire Necronomicon, a now-famous element of some of his stories. The short text purports to be non-fiction, adding to the appearance of 'pseudo-authenticity' which Lovecraft valued in building his Cthulhu Mythos oeuvre. Accordingly, it supposes the history of the Necronomicon as the inspiration for Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, which concerns a book that overthrows the minds of those who read it.

"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird 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 intellectual and mercantile prowess. Craving more land, a group of these hardy people migrated to the shores of a lonely and vast lake at the heart of Mnar, founding the city of Sarnath.

"The Tomb" tells of Jervas Dudley, a confessed daydreamer. While still a child, he discovers the padlocked entrance to a mausoleum belonging to the Hyde family, whose nearby mansion had burnt down many years previously. Jervas attempts to break the padlock, but is unable to. Dispirited, he takes to sleeping beside the tomb. Eventually, inspired by reading Plutarch's Lives, Dudley decides to patiently wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb.

"The Descendant" is a story fragment by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, believed to have been written in 1927. It was first published in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. Inspiration: 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 involving richer antiquities than America can furnish."

"The Temple" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1920, and first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales #24 in September 1925. 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. Altberg begins by declaring that he has decided to document the events leading up to his untimely end in order to "set certain facts" before the public, aware that he will not survive to do so himself.

Celephaïs was created in a dream by Kuranes (which is his name in dreams his real name is not given) as a child of the English landed gentry. As a man in his forties, alone and dispossessed in contemporary London, he dreams it again and then, seeking it, slowly slips away to the dream-world. Finally knights guide him through medieval England to his ancestral estate, where he spent his boyhood, and then to Celephaïs.