The Thing on the Doorstep

By H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Feb 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609773229

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was born in New England, a landscape that he turned into a stage of fiction. His stories inherited the tradition of gothic horror tales from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, but Lovecraft set his own standards. His first stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine. “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), a short story about a monstrous deity that inhabits the Earth, is the base of the myths related to the Cthulhu Mythos, a genre of horror fiction launched by Lovecraft. In its world, populated by beings of other dimensions, the laws of humanity are worthless. But man is incapable of understanding its insignificance in the face of the magnitude of the cosmos.

Book preview

I

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.

Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.

So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.

I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I was sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom.

At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we live—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.

As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward’s demoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected

Reviews for The Thing on the Doorstep

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"The Thing On The Doorstep" is a super creepy short story as only H.P. can do! It's a body/soul switching thing, steeped in mystery and the arcane arts that just freaks the reader out! Whew! But I did keep having one "weird" thought as the story progressed - did Edward and Asenath consummate their marriage? Eww...

[caanderson-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another great book. Fast pace, gripping story. Pulls you on the first page.

[briarthorn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Still need to read At The Mountains of Madness

[jefware · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A good old fashioned tale of that old time religion.

[sarahebear · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliantly written and often super scary collection of some of H.P.Lovecraft's best work. This collection includes "The Dunwich Horror" and my favourite Lovecraft short story "The Music of Erik Zahnn" (Apologies for the spelling there). A must for lovers of horror and the occult.

[rameau_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

And this completes my reading of Lovecraft. Highlights: the title story, The Dunwich Horror, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, his most terrifying work.

[grazianoronca_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

THE TOMB

An horror short story written in June 1917.

‘All things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them.’ (p. 1)

Jervas Dudley discovered the entrance to a mausoleum belonging to the Hyde family , whose house had burnt many years before.
Jervas attempts to enter in the tomb, but he is unable; so, inspired by an example of Plutarch’s Lives, he decides to wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb.

After several years, while Jervas is sleeping beside the mausoleum, he believes to see a light from inside the tomb. He finds the key to the tomb and inside the mausoleum Jervas discovers an empty coffin with the name of Jervas Hyde upon the plate.

Following again the example of Plutarch he starts to sleep inside the coffin, so to gain the name upon it.

Jervas is awoken by his father and discovers that he has never been inside the tomb.

A desire becomes dream, or nightmare: every person change with his consciousness the appearances of the things.