H. Lovecraft - Dagon and Other Macabre Tales

The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus

2

and Other Macabre Tales

Cover Page

Title Page The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2

Introduction

Dagon

The Tomb

Polaris

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

The Doom that came to Sarnath

The White Ship

Arthur Jermyn

The Cats of Ulthar

Celephais

From Beyond

The Temple

The Tree

The Moon-bog

The Nameless City

The Other Gods

The Quest of Iranon

Herbert West – Reanimator

The Hound

Hypnos

The Festival

The Unnamable

Imprisoned with the Pharaohs

He

The Horror at Red Hook

The Strange High House in the Mist

In the Walls of Eryx

The Evil Clergyman

Early Tales

Four Fragments

Supernatural Horror in Literature

About the Author

Praise

By the same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The stories in this collection are for the most part secondary to H. P. Lovecraft’s major fiction. They represent every vein that Lovecraft made his own, and many of them are certainly among the best short stories of the macabre written in the twentieth century. An equal number belong to a group which Lovecraft himself frequently deprecated in his letters to his correspondents, over and above the habitual modesty with which Lovecraft looked upon his work. At least two of them – Herbert West: Reanimator and the ghost-written piece for Houdini, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs – were written to order, which was a rare departure from Lovecraft’s customary writing habits.

These stories are arranged here chronologically, based on the following complete chronology set down by Lovecraft with the fragmentary story, The Evil Clergyman, which was part of a letter not intended for publication, appended.

Dagon, 1917

The Tomb, 1917

Polaris, 1918

Beyond the Wall of Sleep, 1919

The Doom That Came to Sarnath, 1919

The Statement of Randolph Carter, 1919

The White Ship, 1919

Arthur Jermyn, (The White Ape), 1920

The Cats of Ulthar, 1920

Celephais, 1920

From Beyond, 1920

The Picture in the House, 1920

The Temple, 1920

The Terrible Old Man, 1920

The Tree, 1920

The Moon-Bog, 1921

The Music of Erich Zann, 1921

The Nameless City, 1921

The Other Gods, 1921

The Outsider, 1921

The Quest of Iranon, 1921

Herbert West: Reanimator, 1921-1922

The Hound, 1922

Hypnos, 1922

The Lurking Fear, 1922

The Festival, 1923

The Rats in the Walls, 1923

The Unnamable, 1923

Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, 1924

The Shunned House, 1924

He , 1925

The Horror at Red Hook, 1925

In the Vault, 1925

The Call of Cthulhu, 1926

Cool Air , 1926

Pickman’s Model, 1926

The Silver Key, 1926

The Strange High House in the Mist, 1926

The Colour out of Space, 1927

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 1927-1928

The Dunwich Horror, 1928

The Whisperer in Darkness, 1930

The Shadow over Innsmouth, 1931

At the Mountains of Madness, 1931

The Dreams in the Witch-House, 1932

Through the Gates of the Silver Key, 1932

The Thing on the Doorstep, 1933

The Shadow out of Time, 1934

In the Walls of Eryx, 1935

The Haunter of the Dark, 1935

The Evil Clergyman, 1937

Even a casual examination of the chronological list indicates that Lovecraft did not work exclusively in one vein and then grow into another. Though early given to Dunsanian tales, this vein persisted well after the first stories in the Cthulhu Mythos had been written, and the New England horror fiction was subsumed into the Mythos. Undeniably, the period of his most consistent quality in fiction was the decade from 1925 through 1935, and it is evident that death came to him in March, 1937 at the height of his creative power.

To the stories in this collection has been added Lovecraft’s outstanding work in non-fiction, the long essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction, written in 1926-1927, and first published in W. Paul Cook’s The Recluse in 1927. It was subsequently revised in large part, and was being reprinted as a serial in The Fantasy Fan from 1933 through February 1935, when the magazine was discontinued, and Lovecraft’s revision of the work lapsed. It is a scholarly study that will afford readers some index to Lovecraft’s judgment of authors and their works in the genre of the macabre before and of his time.

AUGUST DERLETH

Sauk City, Wisconsin

1 March 1965

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastness of unbroken blue.

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.