The Festival

By Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Christmas with the family takes a dark turn in this chilling short story by the acclaimed author of “The Call of Cthulhu”.

Beckoned by his family, a man travels to a snowy, seaside Massachusetts town to observe an ancient festival. His family has long celebrated it since the days when it was forbidden. But when he arrives, he notices something is off about this community . . . little details that just don’t add up.

What the man witnesses at his family’s house does little to comfort him. Soon he is drawn into a world unlike any he has known, and its sights will haunt him for the rest of his life . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504078627

Howard Phillips 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).

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The Festival

H. P. Lovecraft

Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.

—Lactantius

The Festival

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know