What do you think?
Rate this book
H.P. Lovecraft Short Stories
Lovecraft's terrifying tales have influenced generations of horror writers. His otherworldly visions of cosmic horrors, alien beings, and a world not quite our own remain immensely powerful and able to terrify even the most resolute readers. This collection spans the breadth of Lovecraft's literary career, from his early forays into the Dreamlands to his mature writings of the Cthulhu mythos. It features such cult classics as "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."
384 pages, Hardcover
Published March 15, 2018
26 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
About the author
H.P. Lovecraft
6,205 books19.4k followersHoward Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 4, 2025
What can you say that hasn’t been said? Lovecraft is towering figure whose depth and staggering imagination are still being plumbed today and actively being studied across a wide spectrum of mediums.
For his day and genre, no one else came close. He's been imitated but rarely, if ever, duplicated.
His stories are editorial and jaw droppingly complex, but his prose is simple, precise, and places the reader in the middle of the action with a glut of phantasmagoric anticipation.
The Call of Cthulhu and The Dunwich Horror (among other works) have generated a cult following and been the inspiration for.... well, a lot.
I also like that there are good audiobooks of most of his stories on YT, the best of which come from The Exploring Series channel. Have a look.
I wrote a review of The Shadow over Innsmouth that elaborates a bit more on Lovecraft's esoterica; you can read it here.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
For his day and genre, no one else came close. He's been imitated but rarely, if ever, duplicated.
His stories are editorial and jaw droppingly complex, but his prose is simple, precise, and places the reader in the middle of the action with a glut of phantasmagoric anticipation.
The Call of Cthulhu and The Dunwich Horror (among other works) have generated a cult following and been the inspiration for.... well, a lot.
I also like that there are good audiobooks of most of his stories on YT, the best of which come from The Exploring Series channel. Have a look.
I wrote a review of The Shadow over Innsmouth that elaborates a bit more on Lovecraft's esoterica; you can read it here.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
May 31, 2020
Excellent monsters, awful racism
May 23, 2024
Call of Cthulhu: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The whisperer in Darkness: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The thing on the doorstep: ⭐️
The lurking fear: ⭐️⭐️
The shadow over Innsmouth: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Shunned House: ⭐️⭐️
From Beyond: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Pickman's model: ⭐️⭐️
The nameless city: ⭐️⭐️
The Dreams in the Witch House: ⭐️⭐️
I really need to stop reading books written before like 1980. The premises of all of the stories were really cool, but I felt like an idiot trying to read this. Way too many big words and the way people wrote back then is just so hard to understand. I really wanted to like this book because I've heard so many good things about Lovecraft, and the themes were really interesting. I just couldn't understand anything he was saying lol.
The whisperer in Darkness: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The thing on the doorstep: ⭐️
The lurking fear: ⭐️⭐️
The shadow over Innsmouth: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Shunned House: ⭐️⭐️
From Beyond: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Pickman's model: ⭐️⭐️
The nameless city: ⭐️⭐️
The Dreams in the Witch House: ⭐️⭐️
I really need to stop reading books written before like 1980. The premises of all of the stories were really cool, but I felt like an idiot trying to read this. Way too many big words and the way people wrote back then is just so hard to understand. I really wanted to like this book because I've heard so many good things about Lovecraft, and the themes were really interesting. I just couldn't understand anything he was saying lol.
February 27, 2025
(3/5) Some of these short stories were so good but most were just too boring to feel satisfied with. Shoutout to The Whisperer In Darkness, The Thing On The Doorstep, From Beyond, and Pickman’s Model
January 12, 2026
I had heard of the iconic work in the science-fiction and horror genres of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. My university even had a sci-fi fan club called (mocking a certain Evangelical organization) Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, but both working and taking classes I had no time to participate. Now I have read Lovecraft firsthand for the first time. What a wild ride! I see how richly earned is his reputation.
Jules Verne gave us the first prehistoric life still living in a hidden place, and the first moon shot. H. G. Wells gave us time travel and the alien invasion. Each of Lovecraft's ten stories in this collection contains an idea that similarly has become a staple of sci-fi/horror:
"The Call of Cthulhu" introduces us to the elder gods who once ruled the earth and are best left to sleep (as the 2011 film "The Cabin in the Woods" more recently reminded us).
"The Whisperer in Darkness" gives us the brain in a beaker. Space aliens are involved.
"The Thing on the Doorstep" has the transference of minds between bodies (as later happened to Captain Kirk in 1969's "Star Trek" episode, "Turnabout Intruder"). Here, too, is the fictional Arkham Sanitarium, later to figure in the stories of a certain Caped Crusader.
"The Lurking Fear" has mole men (approximately the sort of beings confronted by Superman in 1951, and by archaeologists in a 1956 film that entertained me as a kid when it was run on the Saturday afternoon TV show "Terminus, the Theater of Science-Fiction" on WFLA Channel 8 in Tampa). The action takes place at aptly-named Tempest Mountain, which affords the stormy backdrop beloved of Gothic horror.
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" reminds us that the sea contains mysteries, in this case a global underwater mer-people civilization with whom fisherfolk in a Massachusetts town have struck a bad bargain, and who expect in time to dominate the surface, too. (A comparable good read is Mira Grant's 2017 novel, "Into the Drowning Deep.)
"The Shunned House" has a ghost hunt with scientific instruments, in a house built over a burial site, and of course the investigators are there on a stormy night.
Before "The Outer Limits," "From Beyond" gives us a laboratory in which a physical and metaphysical researcher has found the physics to open a view into a phase of existence, and life-forms, coterminous with our own.
"Pickman 's Model" begins like Poe's "The Telltale Heart" as the first-person narrator asks, do you think me crazy? An artist of the macabre draws not from his imagination but paints from life using most uncommon models.
In "The Nameless City," an antiquarian exploring a lost city in the Arabian desert finds it was constructed not for humans, but for a reptilian race that may not have vanished after all.
"The Dreams in the Witch House" brings back the theme of parallel worlds in "space-time continua" - we have that actual phrasing - as a student of mathematics (non-Euclidean calculus) and quantum physics (Planck, Heisenberg), and of esoteric folklore as well (the perfect double-major for this adventure, rather like Tillinghast in "From Beyond"), finds that the odd geometry of the room he is renting is a portal to a realm of elder things who require sacrifice. This takes place in "the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham," that locus of madness.
Lovecraft's stories often cite fictional occult texts invented by other fantasy and horror writers; a sort of homage? And who could not yearn to delve into the secrets of Lovecraft's own "Necronomicon," of which we here have only tantalizing hints? Lovecraft's language, a pleasure in itself, is a literary register using a palate of adjectives and adverbs uncommon in today's (and maybe even its own day's) English, evoking the sense of the uncanny. The stories are replete with New England local color, Lovecraft's native region and the usual setting of his stories. There is also a period feel in the technology and transportation, and references to historical persons more likely to have been familiar to his original readers than to us in the 21st century. The tales teem with a sense of humankind on the edge of danger, that we are but a cipher in a larger, indifferent, or even malevolent (to us), cosmic scheme; the world really isn't ours. (But then, that is what religions have always taught.)
Jules Verne gave us the first prehistoric life still living in a hidden place, and the first moon shot. H. G. Wells gave us time travel and the alien invasion. Each of Lovecraft's ten stories in this collection contains an idea that similarly has become a staple of sci-fi/horror:
"The Call of Cthulhu" introduces us to the elder gods who once ruled the earth and are best left to sleep (as the 2011 film "The Cabin in the Woods" more recently reminded us).
"The Whisperer in Darkness" gives us the brain in a beaker. Space aliens are involved.
"The Thing on the Doorstep" has the transference of minds between bodies (as later happened to Captain Kirk in 1969's "Star Trek" episode, "Turnabout Intruder"). Here, too, is the fictional Arkham Sanitarium, later to figure in the stories of a certain Caped Crusader.
"The Lurking Fear" has mole men (approximately the sort of beings confronted by Superman in 1951, and by archaeologists in a 1956 film that entertained me as a kid when it was run on the Saturday afternoon TV show "Terminus, the Theater of Science-Fiction" on WFLA Channel 8 in Tampa). The action takes place at aptly-named Tempest Mountain, which affords the stormy backdrop beloved of Gothic horror.
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" reminds us that the sea contains mysteries, in this case a global underwater mer-people civilization with whom fisherfolk in a Massachusetts town have struck a bad bargain, and who expect in time to dominate the surface, too. (A comparable good read is Mira Grant's 2017 novel, "Into the Drowning Deep.)
"The Shunned House" has a ghost hunt with scientific instruments, in a house built over a burial site, and of course the investigators are there on a stormy night.
Before "The Outer Limits," "From Beyond" gives us a laboratory in which a physical and metaphysical researcher has found the physics to open a view into a phase of existence, and life-forms, coterminous with our own.
"Pickman 's Model" begins like Poe's "The Telltale Heart" as the first-person narrator asks, do you think me crazy? An artist of the macabre draws not from his imagination but paints from life using most uncommon models.
In "The Nameless City," an antiquarian exploring a lost city in the Arabian desert finds it was constructed not for humans, but for a reptilian race that may not have vanished after all.
"The Dreams in the Witch House" brings back the theme of parallel worlds in "space-time continua" - we have that actual phrasing - as a student of mathematics (non-Euclidean calculus) and quantum physics (Planck, Heisenberg), and of esoteric folklore as well (the perfect double-major for this adventure, rather like Tillinghast in "From Beyond"), finds that the odd geometry of the room he is renting is a portal to a realm of elder things who require sacrifice. This takes place in "the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham," that locus of madness.
Lovecraft's stories often cite fictional occult texts invented by other fantasy and horror writers; a sort of homage? And who could not yearn to delve into the secrets of Lovecraft's own "Necronomicon," of which we here have only tantalizing hints? Lovecraft's language, a pleasure in itself, is a literary register using a palate of adjectives and adverbs uncommon in today's (and maybe even its own day's) English, evoking the sense of the uncanny. The stories are replete with New England local color, Lovecraft's native region and the usual setting of his stories. There is also a period feel in the technology and transportation, and references to historical persons more likely to have been familiar to his original readers than to us in the 21st century. The tales teem with a sense of humankind on the edge of danger, that we are but a cipher in a larger, indifferent, or even malevolent (to us), cosmic scheme; the world really isn't ours. (But then, that is what religions have always taught.)
Read
February 3, 2022Loved these short stories. I've always known that Lovecraft is an icon of the horror genre, but it was fascinating to read the material myself. The stories are latent with a feeling of inevitability. You know how it will end, but you are engrossed in the revelations as they come upon the characters in such a way that you feel just as surprised as they are.
The suspense in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Whisperer in the Darkness" really add a tenseness that makes you press on, despite their length. Definitely recommend for someone who likes horror as a genre, and has never given Lovecraft a try.
It's only natural that due to its age, there will be unfamiliar vocabulary and sentence structure at times. In spite of this, the writing is largely comprehensible to the modern reader, with a few, easily-googled exceptions.
The suspense in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Whisperer in the Darkness" really add a tenseness that makes you press on, despite their length. Definitely recommend for someone who likes horror as a genre, and has never given Lovecraft a try.
It's only natural that due to its age, there will be unfamiliar vocabulary and sentence structure at times. In spite of this, the writing is largely comprehensible to the modern reader, with a few, easily-googled exceptions.
February 25, 2023
It’s a good collection of works from Lovecraft. Many recommended short stories are included. These are great for people who want to start reading Lovecraft.
There are better alternatives, and this is not a complete collection, but it’s overall good!
There are better alternatives, and this is not a complete collection, but it’s overall good!
February 20, 2023
If I were to be presented with eldritch horrors beyond my comprehension I would simply not allow my countenance to become unbalanced. but im just built different i guess. some of these are quite good and many of them are Extremely Racist
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 21, 2018
The Call of Cthulhu ⭐
The Whisperer In Darkness ⭐⭐⭐
The Thing on the Doorstep ⭐⭐⭐
The Lurking Fear ⭐⭐
The Shadow Over Innsmouth ⭐⭐⭐
The Shunned House ⭐⭐
From Beyond ⭐
Pickman's Model ⭐
The Nameless City ⭐⭐
The Dreams In The Witch House ⭐
I had no idea, going in, that there would be.. ahem.. "dated" language. Lovecraft is downright racist at times 😬 I don't excuse historical figures for racism.
I'm going to bite my tongue on most of my criticisms. I did enjoy myself. I can see why Lovecraft's work has become classic, and I do appreciate what he contributed to literature.
(Finishing this book was a slog though...)
The Whisperer In Darkness ⭐⭐⭐
The Thing on the Doorstep ⭐⭐⭐
The Lurking Fear ⭐⭐
The Shadow Over Innsmouth ⭐⭐⭐
The Shunned House ⭐⭐
From Beyond ⭐
Pickman's Model ⭐
The Nameless City ⭐⭐
The Dreams In The Witch House ⭐
I had no idea, going in, that there would be.. ahem.. "dated" language. Lovecraft is downright racist at times 😬 I don't excuse historical figures for racism.
I'm going to bite my tongue on most of my criticisms. I did enjoy myself. I can see why Lovecraft's work has become classic, and I do appreciate what he contributed to literature.
(Finishing this book was a slog though...)
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews