First published 1927
Something lands in Nahum Gardner's well field one autumn night outside Arkham, Massachusetts. The rock draws scientists from Miskatonic University, but their tests return no clear answers. The color it emits belongs to no spectrum anyone can name. Over the following seasons, the soil around the crater begins to change. Crops grow large and wrong. Animals go quiet, then go mad. Nahum's family starts to come apart in ways a doctor cannot explain and a neighbor cannot bear to watch. A surveyor arrives years later to assess the land for a new reservoir and finds only a grey, blasted waste the locals call the blighted farm. He pieces the story together from the one man still willing to talk about it. The more he learns, the less he wants to know. This collection also includes two further stories: in Vermont, a folklorist uncovers a correspondence that leads him toward creatures older than human memory, and a physicist wakes to find decades of his life have been borrowed by something vast and cold. All three stories sit in the same universe, ruled by the same principle: the universe holds things that do not care whether we understand them or not.
Genres: science-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, horror, gothic-horror, short-story-collection
Vibes: atmospheric, cosmic-terror, dread-filled, mysterious, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: frame-narrative, incomprehensible-threat, slow-burn-horror, unreliable-reality
Setting: Arkham, Massachusetts, Miskatonic University, Vermont
Period: 20th century
240 pages · Paperback · Penguin Classics
Content warnings: body-horror, death, mental-illness