First published 2016
Wilbur Whateley grows up fast in the hill country around Dunwich, Massachusetts. Too fast. His grandfather raises him on books that no library should hold, and the family farm hides something enormous in a boarded-up barn. When Wilbur travels to Miskatonic University seeking a copy of the Necronomicon, librarian Henry Armitage reads enough of the boy's diary to understand what the Whateleys have been building toward. Wilbur dies before he can finish the work, but the thing in the barn does not die with him. It tears loose across the countryside, invisible, massive, flattening trees and emptying farms of every living thing. Armitage and two colleagues race to stop it before it reaches a populated area. The horror is not just what the creature does. It is what the creature is, and what that says about Wilbur, and about the human form itself. This collection pairs that story with six others, including a painter whose models are not human, a musician playing for an audience that should not exist, and a man who inherits a house along with everything his ancestors did inside it.
Genres: short-stories, classic-literature, collections, american-fiction, 20th-century, horror
Vibes: atmospheric, cosmic-dread, eerie, suspenseful, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: forbidden-knowledge, inherited-curse, man-vs-unknown, unreliable-reality
Setting: Dunwich, Massachusetts, Miskatonic University
Period: 20th century
128 pages · Paperback · Melville House
Content warnings: body-horror, death, gore