The Raven Post

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born August 20, 1890 and died March 15, 1937. He was a prolific writer and author and is now best known for popularizing the weird fiction genre, as well as creating the Cthulhu mythos in collaboration with several of his contemporaries.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life on the East Coast, particularly in New England. In 1893, his father was institutionalized for symptoms resulting from syphilis (a diagnosis the writer seemingly denied until his own death), and after his grandfather’s passing in 1904, Lovecraft and his family frequently struggled with financial instability.

He began penning critical essays and, eventually, pulp fiction for various magazines in his young adulthood. Over time, he earned his place as a pivotal figure in pulp-fiction publishing—especially for his appearances in the magazine Weird Tales—and eventually began a literary group known as “The Lovecraft Circle” with several of his peers. In the ensuing decades, he produced some of his most enduring work, such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and “At the Mountains of Madness.” He died in 1937 from intestinal cancer at the age of forty-six.

Modern scholarship on Lovecraft praises his undeniable influence on cosmic horror fiction while simultaneously criticizing his biased and, many would argue, bigoted views, which unavoidably (indeed, some would say purposefully) wormed their way into his writing. Lovecraft notably held many marginalized groups, such as people of color, women, and individuals of Jewish descent, in low regard, and as a result, the subtext of his bibliography is almost entirely concerned with the perceived cultural dissolution of white identity and white maleness. Those hoping to engage with his work may find these elements off-putting, and thus, readers of The Raven Post should note that any of the works listed below may—either overtly or with great subtlety—contain objectionable material.

Below is a selection of Lovecraft’s most notable short stories. Read on at your own discretion—and please, enjoy.

Short Stories by H. P. Lovecraft

The Alchemist (1916)
The Beast in the Cave (1918)
Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
Dagon (1919)
The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1920)
The Cats of Ulthar (1920)
Celephaïs (1922)
Azathoth (1922)
The Rats in the Walls (1924)
The Festival (1925)
In the Vault (1925)
The Colour Out of Space (1927)
Pickman’s Model (1927)
The Descendant (1927)
Ibid (1927)
The Call of Cthulhu (1928)
Cool Air (1928)
The Dunwich Horror (1929)
The Dreams in the Witch House (1933)
The Evil Clergyman (1933)