The Haunter of the Dark

By H. P. Lovecraft

The story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island and revolves around the Church of Starry Wisdom. The cult uses an ancient artefact known as the Shining Trapezohedron to summon a terrible being from the depths of time and space. (Goodreads)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otbebookpublishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9783962721350

H. P. Lovecraft

Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

Book preview

The Haunter of the Dark

H.P. Lovecraft

The Haunter of the Dark

I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim,

Where they roll in their horror unheeded,

Without knowledge or lustre or name.

Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church of Federal Hill — the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected.

For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city — a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he — had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.

Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake’s diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and — above all — the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple — the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake’s diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man — a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore — averred

Reviews for The Haunter of the Dark

[angharan-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In intelligent and discerning selection of Lovecraft's best and/or most important short stories, this is the best jumping on point I've found for anyone wanting to discover one of Horror's most influential authors. Certainly a better route than trying to wade through one of the many complete collections on the market.These stories deserve a place on the shelves of any horror fan.

[wenestvedt_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A collection of the gothic horror tales of New England's precursor to Stephen King. The scariest special effects are the ones in your imagination: Lovecraft simply calls everything "horrifying" or "soul-chilling" and lets your own mind fill in the worst things it can imagine. A neat trick and, if you let it work, these books are just...horrifying. I bought this book around age twelve, and I've never found much to match it in print.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space - to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.I have been reading the stories of H. P. Lovecraft one or two at a time, in more or less chronological order, as they came up in the H. P. Lovecraft Literary podcast. "The Haunter of the Dark" was the last of his stories to be covered in the podcast, so I have finally finished all three volumes of the omnibus. According to the introduction by August Derlath , the stories in the third volume are some of Lovecraft's best, and it does include one of my favourites, "The Color Out of Space", which features a truly alien extraterrestrial being, one that couldn't be played by an actor in a rubber suit.. Another of the stories I really enjoyed is "The Shadow Out of Time", with it's time-travelling, body-switching aliens. On the other hand I didn't really like The Thing on the Doorstep" , whose narrator tells the tale of his weak-willed friend's downfall at the hands of a scheming fellow-student.