First published 2010
Something vast and ancient waits beneath the surface of the world. In "The Call of Cthulhu," Francis Wayland Thurston pieces together his late uncle's notes and discovers a trail of madness, fever dreams, and a sunken city called R'lyeh where a cosmic entity lies dormant. In "The Dunwich Horror," a monstrous creature tears through the Massachusetts countryside and only a handful of scholars from Miskatonic University stand between it and catastrophe. Story after story in this collection returns to the same unbearable truth: the universe is indifferent, older than human thought, and populated by forces that dwarf every human ambition. Lovecraft writes with clinical precision, which makes the dread worse. His narrators are researchers, investigators, and academics who follow evidence until the evidence destroys them. The horror is never supernatural in a cozy sense. It is cosmological. These stories ask what a human life is worth against geological time and infinite space, and they refuse to answer kindly.
Genres: fiction, classic-literature, horror, psychological-horror, gothic-horror, short-story-collection
Vibes: atmospheric, cerebral, dread-inducing, existential, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: descent-into-madness, forbidden-knowledge, investigator-protagonist, unreliable-reality
Setting: R'lyeh, Dunwich, Massachusetts, Miskatonic University
Period: 20th-century
308 pages · Paperback · CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Content warnings: death, mental-illness