The Haunter of the Dark (Unabridged)

"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5-9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales (Vol. 28, No. 5, p. 538-53). It was the last-written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem «Nemesis». The story is a sequel to «The Shambler from the Stars», by Robert Bloch. Bloch wrote a third story in the sequence, «The Shadow from the Steeple», in 1950. In Providence, Rhode Island, Robert Blake, a young writer with an interest in the occult, becomes fascinated by a large disused church on Federal Hill which he can see from his lodgings on the city's Upper East side. His researches reveal that the church has a sinister history involving a cult called the Church of Starry Wisdom and is dreaded by the local migrant inhabitants as being haunted by a primeval evil.