“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” When H. P. Lovecraft wrote this sentence in his horror masterpiece, “The Call of Cthulhu,” he captured the essence of what all weird fiction strives to do: describe the indescribable and articulate the unspeakable. Lovecraft’s own tales of cosmic horror challenge the reader to engage with them on the terms that define his unique approach to the fantastic: conjuring horrors that explode the boundaries of the known and give expression, however imperfectly, to the vastness of the unknown. The fifteen stories collected in this volume include a number of Lovecraft’s greatest works: The Music of Erich Zann. Did the mad music of the violinist open a door to the horrors of the void—or did it hold them at bay? The Lurking Fear. The fall of the house of Martense should have been the end of that family’s degenerate legacy. Then how to explain the horrors that crept around Tempest Mountain in storm and darkness? Pickman’s Model. Richard Upton Pickman’s canvases were regarded as grotesque obscenities by his peers and the public, and they raised an uneasy question: what were his models? The Colour out of Space. The meteorite that plowed into Nahum Gardner’s farm appeared a short-lived phenomenon at first—but the strange days that followed hinted at the inconceivably malignant influence it had brought. The Dunwich Horror. The Whateleys dabbled in the unthinkable, and their handiwork brought not only the monstrous, but the even more monstrous to the world. The Dreams in the Witch House. When student Walter Gilman discovers the intersection between higher mathematics and the occult, all hell breaks loose. The Haunter of the Dark. The neglected church where Robert Blake found the strange, shining artifact showed how the holy could be put to unholy uses.
