On this very day, 77 years ago, H.P. Lovecraft died in a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island at age 46. His horror stories, more popular now than when he was alive, created dark, rancid, hopeless worlds where humans were stalked and overtaken by evil other-worldly spirits. Lovecraft's fictional entities tortured their victims psychologically rather than physically, making them more cryptic, more terrifying, more thought provoking.
His stories create a sinister, stifling atmosphere where beings lurk in the dark and dwell in the deepest chambers of our brain while they wait for us to let our guard down. He drives imaginations wild and takes readers on a terrifying journey that starts with a sliver of normalcy and ends at the brink of insanity. Lovecraft's stories make people die of fear, yet never let them know what exactly killed them.
Here is an excerpt from one of Lovecraft's scariest short stories called "The Book" courtesy of Dagonbytes.com, a site that offers free online stories that will scare the shit of you. Read it if you dare.
The Book by H.P. Lovecraft (excerpt)
My memories are
very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for
at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while
at other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point
in a grey, formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating
this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression
that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear
what I say to the points where I wish to be heard. My identity, too,
is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock- perhaps
from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible
experience. These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I found it- in a dimly lighted place near the black, oily river where the mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never learned its title, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling.
There was a formula- a sort of list of things to say and do- which I recognized as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key- a guide- to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed. No printing-press, but the hand of some half-crazed monk, had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.
I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long afterwards did I guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow, winding, mist-cloaked waterfront streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity- as if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls and over-hanging gables of mildewed brick and fungoid plaster and timber- with eyelike, diamond-paned windows that leered- could hardly desist from advancing and crushing me . . . yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away.
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