“Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond The Wall of Sleep”
Maybe it was the “night gaunts” who terrorized his childhood dreams or his father’s psychosis and hospitalization in Rhode Island’s Butler Hospital when the younger Lovecraft was only three (the cause was actually syphilis) that inspired him. Whatever the reason, Good ol’ HP—Howard Phillips Lovecraft—believer in cosmic horror with his human-nullifying entities, magical rites and forbidden lore, churned out reams of darkness. He’s been called the E.A. Poe of the 20th Century. For those unfamiliar with the Lovecraftean abyss, we offer up a playful primer (just darling) as an introduction to his vision and a lovely list of his works from which to pick and choose.
1897: The Little Glass Bottle
1898: The Secret Cave or John Lees Adventure
1898: The Mystery of the Grave-Yard
1902: The Mysterious Ship
1905: The Beast in the Cave
1908: The Alchemist
1917: The Tomb
1917: Dagon
1917: A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
1917: Sweet Ermengarde
1918: Polaris
1918/19: The Green Meadow (with Winifred V. Jackson)
1919: Beyond the Wall of Sleep
1919: Memory
1919: Old Bugs
1919: The Transition of Juan Romero
1919: The White Ship
1919: The Doom That Came to Sarnath
1919: The Statement of Randolph Carter
1920: The Terrible Old Man
1920: The Tree
1920: The Cats of Ulthar
1920: The Temple
1920: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
1920: Poetry and the Gods (with Anna Helen Crofts)
1920: Celephaïs
1920: From Beyond
1920: Nyarlathotep
1920: The Picture in the House
1920/21: The Crawling Chaos (with Winifred V. Jackson)
1920/21: Ex Oblivione
1921: The Nameless City
1921: The Quest of Iranon
1921: The Moon-Bog
1921: The Outsider
1921: The Other Gods
1921: The Music of Erich Zann
1921: Herbert West—Reanimator
1922: Hypnos
1922: What the Moon Brings
1922: Azathoth
1922: The Horror at Martin’s Beach (with Sonia H. Greene)
1922: The Hound
1922: The Lurking Fear
1923 The Rats in the Walls
1923: The Unnamable
1923: Ashes (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)
1923: The Ghost-Eater (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)
1923: The Loved Dead (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)
1923: The Festival
1924: Deaf, Dumb, and Blind (with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)
1924: Under the Pyramids (with Harry Houdini)
1924: The Shunned House
1925: The Horror at Red Hook
1925: In the Vault
1926: Cool Air
1926: The Call of Cthulhu
1926: Two Black Bottles (with Wilfred Blanch Talman)
1926: Pickman’s Model
1926: The Silver Key
1926: The Strange High House in the Mist
1926: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
1927: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
1927: The Colour Out of Space
1927: The Very Old Folk
1927: The Thing in the Moonlight (spurious)
1927: The Last Test (with Adolphe de Castro)
1927: History of the Necronomicon
1928: The Curse of Yig (with Zealia Bishop)
1929: The Mound (with Zealia Bishop)
1930: Medusa’s Coil (with Zealia Bishop)
1930: The Whisperer in Darkness
1931: At the Mountains of Madness
1931: Discarded Draft of The Shadow Over Innsmouth
1931: The Shadow Over Innsmouth
late 1931: The Trap (with Henry S. Whitehead)
1932: The Dreams in the Witch House
1932: The Man of Stone (with Hazel Heald)
1932: The Horror in the Museum (with Hazel Heald)
1932: Through the Gates of the Silver Key (with E. Hoffmann Price)
1933: Winged Death (with Hazel Heald)
1933: Out of the Aeons (with Hazel Heald)
1933/35: The Horror in the Burying-Ground (with Hazel Heald)
1933: The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast (with R. H. Barlow)
1933: The Slaying of the Monster (with R. H. Barlow)
1934: The Tree on the Hill (with Duane W. Rimel)
1934: The Battle that Ended the Century (with R. H. Barlow)
1934: The Shadow Out of Time
1935: “Till A’ the Seas” (with R.H. Barlow)
1935: Collapsing Cosmoses (with R.H. Barlow)
1935: The Challenge from Beyond (with C. L. Moore; A. Merritt; Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long)
1935: The Disinterment (with Duane W. Rimel)
1935: The Diary of Alonzo Typer (with William Lumley)
1935: The Haunter of the Dark
1936: In the Walls of Eryx (with Kenneth Sterling)
1936: The Night Ocean (with R.H. Barlow)
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926
—Erin Orison, DEAD LOVE/the Daily Slice
“Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”