Title: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Stories.
Author: H.P. Lovecraft.
Genre: Fiction, literature, short stories, novellas, horror, thriller, mystery, vampire fiction, fantasy, occult, animals, zombie fiction, mental health, alien fiction, art.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date:Summary: A collection of
18 stories, 3 novellas, 1 poem, and 1 essay.
The Haunter of the Dark (1935), a story in the Cthulhu Mythos, is about a young man who explores a cursed church and finds an artifact that summons a great and horrible being. In
Polaris (1918), a part of the Dream Cycle, a man is haunted by a dream of a city and a people he believes himself to belong to, until he is convinced his waking life is actually a nightmare he cannot wake from.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1920), a part of the Dream Cycle, tells of a people who inhabited the city of Sarnath thousands of years ago, and who destroyed all the Moon-originated, Pagan, lizard-like inhabitants of a neighbouring city, with disastrous consequences.
The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920) is a testimony of one of Lovecraft's recurring characters, Randolph Carter, who attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren, by telling of how the two men searched for a portal to an underworld in an ancient graveyard's tomb, and of what followed when they found it. In the tale of
The Cats of Ulthar (1920), a part of the Dream Cycle, an unnamed narrator relates the story of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar. In
Celephaïs (1920), a part of the Dream Cycle, a man named Kuranes, alone and dispossessed in contemporary London, dreams again and again of a mysterious city called Celephaïs, until he begins to slip away to the dream-world entirely. In
The Other Gods (1921), a part of the Dream Cycle, a high priest and prophet attempts to scale the mountain of Hatheg-Kla in order to look upon the "Great Ones'" faces, and upon reaching the peak finds an unexpected horror. In
Herbert West - Reanimator (1921), an unnamed narrator describes his many years of working with Herbert West, a doctor obsessed with re-animating corpses, with horrifying and tragic consequences as West's experiments become equally more unethical and successful. In
The Unnamable (1923), Randolph Carter meets with his friend Joel Manton, and as the two sit upon a weathered tomb, Carter tells Manton the tale of an indescribable entity that allegedly haunts the house and surrounding area. In
The Shunned House (1924), the protagonist and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, have nurtured a fascination with an old, abandoned house For many years, tracking the mysterious, yet apparently coincidental sickness and death of many who have lived in the house for over one hundred years.
The Horror at Red Hook (1925) describes the story of how Detective Malone acquired his terror of heights, by investigating a stint of kidnappings and disappearances, and uncovering a monstrous hellish landscape in the basement of a cult in Brooklyn.
Pickman's Model (1926) revolves around a Bostonian painter named Richard Upton Pickman, who creates brilliant but horrifying images, and the narrator who discovers a chilling secret of the artist's inspirations for his ghouls and monsters. In
The Silver Key (1929), a part of the Dream Cycle, Randolph Carter discovers, at the age of 30, that he has "lost the key to the gates of dreams," but when his dreams help him find it again, he gets his wish, with a twist. In
The Strange High House in the Mist (1926), a part of the Dream Cycle, Thomas Olney visits a mysterious house on the top of an inaccessible cliff, the front door of which opens to a sheer fall, and meets the inhabitant of the house, as well as some of his both invited and uninvited guests. In the
novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927) (unpublished in Lovecraft's lifetime), a part of the Dream Cycle, when Randolph Carter's prayers to the dream gods to allow him to reach a beautiful city he only glimpses from afar in his dreams go unanswered, he sets out on an epic quest to find the Great Gods that takes him through most of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle lore, and meets many monsters and unexpected friends alike among the way (many of whom are characters previously mentioned in Lovecraft's works, Dream Cycle, and Randolph Carter stories).
The Colour Out of Space (1927) is a tale in which an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the "blasted heath" in the wild hills west of Arkham, Massachusetts, which was hit by a mysterious asteroid which subsequently spread a strange illness.
The History of the Necronomicon (1927) is a very short work describing the fictional occult grimoire
Necronomicon, an infamous element used and reference back to in several Lovecraft stories.
Fungi from Yuggoth (1929-1930) is a
poem, or a series of
36 sonnets. The first three poems concern a person who obtains an ancient book of esoteric knowledge that seems to allow one to travel to parallel realities or strange parts of the universe, but later poems deal more with an atmosphere of cosmic horror, or create a mood of being shut out from former felicity, and do not have a strong narrative, though they often reference other stories and themes in the Lovecraft universe. In
The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931), a
novella that is part of the Cthulhu Mythos, the narrator investigates a mysterious town called Innsmouth that has a sordid history of human sacrifice, mating with, and sometimes becoming fish-like humanoids known as the Deep Ones. In
The Dreams in the Witch House (1932), a part of the Dream Cycle, Walter Gilman rents an attic apartment rumoured to curse its inhabits with premature death, previously belonging to an accused Salem witch who disappeared without a trace, and after visiting different dimensions and having horrible visions, the house eventually reveals the horrors it hides and the reasons behind them. In
The Thing on the Doorstep (1933), another story in the Cthulhu Mythos, Daniel Upton is approached by his friend who is convinced his wife is using his body to allow her evil father-in-law to possess it, and the man's behaviour as things progress quickly indicates something sinister indeed.
The Shadow Out of Time (1936) is a
novella that indirectly tells of the Great Race of Yith, an extraterrestrial species with the ability to travel through time by switching bodies with any given species and studying it, while the displaced mind inhabits the alien's home and body. The story is told through the eyes of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who gets possessed by a creature for a length of a few years during which he falls into an "amnesia," and after waking up from it is haunted by fragmented but persistent and realistic dreams, or, as he begins to suspect, memories, from when his mind inhabited a different body during the earth's ancient undocumented past.
Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) is an
essay in which Lovecraft examines the beginnings of weird fiction in the gothic novel, and traces its development through its biggest and most influential writers and works, discussing why they were good or not, and how they had influenced the development of the genre.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:( The Haunter of the Dark and Other StoriesCollapse )
