"The Hound" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in September 1922 and published in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. It contains the first mention of Lovecraft's fictional text the Necronomicon,
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 opportunity to set up a sort of morbid museum in their basement. Using the objects they collect from the various graves they have robbed, they organize the private exhibition. The collection consists of headstones, preserved bodies, skulls, and several heads in different phases of decomposition. It also included statues, frightful paintings, and a locked portfolio bound in tanned human-skin.

interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in hoary Kent.

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments- inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told- for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space- things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses,

"Herbert West: Reanimator" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written between October 1921 and June 1922. It was first serialized in February through July 1922 in the amateur publication Home Brew. The story was the basis of the 1985 horror film Re-Animator and its sequels, in addition to numerous other adaptations in various media.

The story is the first to mention Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University. It is also notable as one of the first depictions of zombies, as corpses arising, through scientific means, as animalistic, and uncontrollably violent creatures.

Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an influential author best known for his science fiction, horror and fantasy stories, and among those stories his best known ones are those that combine elements of all three. Through that mixture, Lovecraft became the most celebrated author of a genre known as “weird fiction”, especially with his works on the the monster Cthulhu , which has continued to be the subject of other writers’ works. Today, an entire mythos centers around Cthulhu, bringing together all of the different stories from all of the different writers.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism.

The Nameless City of the story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and is older than any human civilization. In ancient times, the Nameless City was built and inhabited by an unnamed race of reptiles with a body shaped like a cross between a crocodile and a seal with a strange head common to neither, involving a protruding forehead, horns, lack of a nose, and an alligator-like jaw. These beings moved by crawling; thus, the architecture of the city has very low ceilings and some places are too low for a human being to stand upright. Their city was originally coastal, but, when the seas receded, it was left in the depths of a desert. This resulted in the decline and eventual ruin of the city.

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 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 .

The story is narrated by an unnamed seeker of strange horrors who is investigating the massacre of a community of some six dozen backwoods degenerates in an obscure region of the Catskills, a massacre which occurred during a particularly violent electrical storm and seems to have been perpetrated by an unidentified clawed beast. The narrator soon discovers that the most sinister legends of the region center around the abandoned Martense mansion, and he decides together with two companionsto spend the night in the big old house...

a selection from the beginning of the story:

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.
Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must die, I reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford, a conception which carried with it more of tranquillity than of despair.
Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had gone mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be mine. My disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unknown to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and, wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my companions.
Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning, unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady, uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages as I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy and vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this point had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from this life.

"The Very Old Folk" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It is reportedly a recording of a dream, where the main protagonist is a Roman military official in Hispania. The countryside is, every year, ravaged by terrible hill people who kidnap citizens and perform cruel rituals at a Sabath. The narrator wishes to lead a military expedition to crush these hill folk, as a feeling of approaching evil has enveloped the countryside, due to a riot between the citizens and the hill people. These hill folk came to trade, yet some of these are killed and later, no disappearances occur before the time of the Sabath. The incursion is guided by a local-born son of Roman parents. As the Romans approach the seat of the Sabath rituals, something terrible attacks them and in an instant, horrible things come to

"He had killed himself when the horses screamed... He, who had been born and lived all his life in that region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge wings."

The story ends with the narrator waking up, offering one final word of

"Of the fate of that cohort no record exists, but the town at least was saved - for encyclop?dias tell of the survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pompelona..." .

A high priest and prophet greatly learned in the lore of the gods of earth attempts to scale the mountain of Hatheg-Kla in order to look upon their faces, accompanied by his young disciple. But the gods of the earth are not there alone.

Robert Blake - a young man with an interest in the occult - becomes fascinated by a large disused church set on a hill which he can see from his lodgings. His researches reveal that the church has a sinister history and is dreaded by the local inhabitants as being haunted by a primeval evil.

"The Rats in the Walls" is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Written in August–September 1923, it was first published in Weird Tales, March 1924.

The story is narrated by the scion of the Delapore family, who has moved from Massachusetts to his ancestral estate in England, known as Exham Priory. On several occasions, the protagonist and his cats hear the sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further, he finds that his family maintained an underground city for centuries and that the inhabitants of the city fed on human flesh, even going so far as to raise generations of human cattle, who eventually began to de-evolve due to their sub-human living conditions.

This comic short story is a parody of romantic melodrama, centering on Ethyl Ermengarde Stubbs and her relationships with villainous mortgage-holder Squire Hardman, would-be rescuer Jack Manly and fiancé Algernon Reginald Jones.

"The Cats of Ulthar" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. It belongs in the Dream Cycle series of tales and reads much like a fairy tale, explaining Ulthar's unusual law that "no man may kill a cat".

It was written June 15, 1920, and first published in the November 1920 issue of the amateur press journal Tryout. It was later reprinted in Weird Tales magazine in February 1926 and again in February 1933, then privately re-printed as a pamphlet for his friends in an edition of 42 copies, at Christmas 1935 - two years before Lovecraft's death.

The primary inspiration for the story is no doubt Lovecraft's well-known love of cats (as spelled out in his 1926 essay "Cats and Dogs", reprinted as the title essay in the 1949 Arkham House collection Something About Cats). Lovecraft seems to be speaking in his own voice in the story's introductory

For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungles lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

The story is considered one of Lovecraft's Dunsanian pieces the plot resembles the many revenge tales in Dunsany's The Book of Wonder (1912). The "dark wanderers" of Lovecraft's story recall the "Wanderers...a weird, dark tribe" in Dunsany's "Idle Days on the Yann" (1910).

Kalos and Musides are two Greek sculptors who are asked to sculpt statues for a competition. But while they are preparing their statues, something terrible happens – Kalos becomes ill. As the two of them are very good friends, the sickness of Kalos makes Musides very unhappy.

When Kalos is about to die, he asks Musides to bury olive branches with him. The result, however, is something beautiful and horrifying at the same time.



H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American horror writer. His best known works include ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘the Mountains of Madness’. Most of his work was originally published in pulp magazines, and Lovecraft rose into fame only after his death at the age of 46. He has had a great influence in both horror and science fiction genres.

"The Street" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in late 1919 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the Wolverine amateur journal.

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.

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 Descendant" is a story fragment by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, believed to have been written in 1927.[1] It was first published in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death.

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."