Hypnos

Written by H. P. Lovecraft

Narrated by Michael Troy

"Hypnos" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, penned in March 1922 and first published in the May 1923 issue of National Amateur.

"Hypnos" is a first-person narrative, written from the perspective of an unnamed character living in Kent and later London, England. The narrator writes that he fears sleep, and is resolved to write his story down lest it drive him further mad, regardless of what people think after reading it.—The narrator, a sculptor, recounts meeting a mysterious man in a railway station. The moment the man opened his "immense, sunken, and widely luminous eyes", the narrator knew that the stranger would become his friend—"the only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before." In the eyes of the stranger, he witnessed important knowledge of the mysteries he always sought to learn...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Troy Audiobooks
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9783990587683

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.