The Cats of Ulthar

Written by H. P. Lovecraft

Narrated by Anastasia Bertollo

Howard Lovecraft is an American writer, who became famous for his works of horror fiction. Nowadays he is considered as one of the best 20th-century authors in his genre. "The Cats of Ultar" is a story of one city, where it was forbidden to kill cats. It was first published in the journal Tryout in 1920.

This tale was Lovecraft’s favorite as he was a cat lover. It is one of the most popular stories by the writer. There was an old couple in the city Ultar who liked to trap and kill their neighbors’ cats. Nobody knew exactly, why they did this, but it was a pleasure for them. Once a caravan of dark strangers came through the city. With the caravan came a boy orphan Menes. The only friend he had was a little black kitten.

One morning Menes didn’t find his precious kitten and villagers told him about the man and his wife and strange sounds heard the night before. The boy started to pray and the clouds in the sky started to take weird shapes.

What happened then? You will recognize when you read the story. But for sure the old couple got what they deserved.

A SmartTouch Media production.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SmartTouch Media
• Release date: Jan 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781467607148

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.