американская классика

A gentleman in New York begins renting an apartment one floor below an aged doctor, who insists on keeping his quarters very chilly. As the two become friends, the old doctor's health begins to deteriorate in a particularly Lovecraftian fashion.

In the tale, an unnamed narrator relates the story of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar. "The Cats of Ulthar" was a personal favorite of Lovecraft's, who was an ardent cat lover.

As the title reveals, these stories are a collection of some of Mark Twain's more fanciful and eccentric works. They run the gamut from political commentary to our species' need to "be remembered" somehow. Taken as a whole the stories are "whimsical"…

This rousing sea adventure follows a New England boy, Pym, who stows away on a whaling ship with its captain's son, Augustus. The two boys, who find themselves repeatedly on the brink of discovery or death, witness many hair-raising events, including…

The narrative tells a fictionalized account in the first-person perspective of an allegedly true experience of escape artist Harry Houdini. Set in 1910, in Egypt, Houdini finds himself kidnapped by a tour guide, who resembles an ancient pharaoh, and …

An undertaker finds himself trapped in the vault where coffins are stored during winter for burial in the spring, and is mysteriously injured when he escapes.

The narrator, hearing tales of a "lurking fear" upon Tempest Mountain in the Catskills, takes two men with him to investigate. They camp inside the deserted Martense mansion as a lightning storm approaches, and feeling strangely drowsy, they all fall…

On a mountain which was a chosen haunt for the Greek God Pan is an olive grove, and a fearful, human-like olive tree within it.

"The Raven" is a narrative poem. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness.

"The Colour Out of Space" is a 1st-person narrative written from the perspective of an unnamed Boston surveyor. In order to prepare for the construction of a new reservoir in Massachusetts, he surveys a rural area that is to be flooded near Lovecraft…

"The Nameless City" is a horror story written by H. P. Lovecraft. The story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and is older than any human civilization.

The Call of Cthulhu, the tale of a horrifying underwater monster coming to life and threatening mankind, is H.P. Lovecraft's most famous and most widely popular tale, spawning an entire mythology, with the power to strike terror into the hearts of ev…

The story is recounted by the protagonist, Comte Antoine de C-, in the first person. Hundreds of years ago, Antoine's noble ancestor was responsible for the death of a dark wizard, Michel Mauvais. The wizard's son, Charles le Sorcier, swore revenge o…

"The Book" is an unfinished short story H.P. Lovecraft, believed to have been written in late 1933. It was first published in the journal in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. In the story fragment, the narrator is given an ancient book by a strange book…

An intern in a mental hospital relates his experience with Joe Slater, an inmate who died at the facility a few weeks after being confined as a criminally insane murderer.

According to the tale, more than 10,000 years ago, a race of shepherd people colonized the banks of the river Ai in a land called Mnar, forming the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (not to be confused with Kadath), which rose to great intelle…

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

The story is told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator and details his experiences with a scientist named Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast creates an electronic device that emits a resonance wave, which stimulates an affected per…

The story begins by describing the ancestors of Sir Arthur Jermyn, a British nobleman. His great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, had been an early explorer of the Congo region, whose books on a mysterious white civilization there had been r…

"Ex Oblivione" is a prose poem.It is written in first person and tells of the dreams of a presumably dying man. In his dreams, the man is walking through a valley and encounters a vine-covered wall with a locked bronze gate therein. He longs to know …