Plot
The narrator, Oscar Fitzalan, a composer, is hired by Richard Pride to assist him at his estate and study at Mordance Hall. Here, he meets Hough, Pride's secretary; Miriam, Pride's wife; the Prides' daughter Janet; and their dog Tod, a German hound. They are later joined by Ramón Del Prado, one of Pride's employees. Also in the household are two black servants, old Mamie and her fourteen-year-old daughter Sally.
Pride brings Fitzalan to play music in order to awaken his memories. However, the household is devastated: Janet, Oscar's first love interest, elopes with Del Prado, and Pride's secretary, Hough, commits suicide. The dog becomes extremely aggressive and then his wife, Miriam, commits suicide as well.
In the end, Pride is reduced to a dirty and ruinous state from the memory therapy, and he finally leaves the house, letting the winds destroy his files regarding the recovered memories. He goes off into the night and there, when his daughter returns and elopes with the narrator, he is found dead, along with his dog in the woods - both having killed each other.
Arkham House is an American publishing house specializing in weird fiction. It was founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to preserve in hardcover the best fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The company's name is derived from Lovecraft's fictional New England city, Arkham. Arkham House editions are noted for the quality of their printing and binding. The colophon for Arkham House was designed by Frank Utpatel.
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895.
Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine founded by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger in late 1922. The first issue, dated March 1923, appeared on newsstands February 18. The first editor, Edwin Baird, printed early work by H. P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom would go on to be popular writers, but within a year the magazine was in financial trouble. Henneberger sold his interest in the publisher, Rural Publishing Corporation, to Lansinger and refinanced Weird Tales, with Farnsworth Wright as the new editor. The first issue under Wright's control was dated November 1924. The magazine was more successful under Wright, and despite occasional financial setbacks it prospered over the next fifteen years. Under Wright's control the magazine lived up to its subtitle, "The Unique Magazine", and published a wide range of unusual fiction.
Tsathoggua is a supernatural entity in the Cthulhu Mythos shared fictional universe. He is the creation of American writer Clark Ashton Smith and is part of his Hyperborean cycle.
Averoigne is a fictional counterpart of a historical province in France, detailed in a series of short stories by the American writer Clark Ashton Smith. Smith may have based Averoigne on the actual province of Auvergne, but its name was probably influenced by the French department of Aveyron, immediately south of Auvergne, due to the similarity in pronunciation.
"The Colour Out of Space" is a science fiction/horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in March 1927. In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the "blasted heath" in the wild hills west of the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The narrator discovers that many years ago a meteorite crashed there, poisoning every living being nearby; vegetation grows large but foul tasting, animals are driven mad and deformed into grotesque shapes, and the people go insane or die one by one.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. John Clute defines weird fiction as a "Term used loosely to describe Fantasy, Supernatural Fiction and Horror tales embodying transgressive material". China Miéville defines weird fiction thus: "Weird Fiction is usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic often featuring nontraditional alien monsters ." Discussing the "Old Weird Fiction" published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock says, "Old Weird fiction utilises elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy to showcase the impotence and insignificance of human beings within a much larger universe populated by often malign powers and forces that greatly exceed the human capacities to understand or control them." Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction. Weird fiction is sometimes symbolised by the tentacle, a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, and H. P. Lovecraft. Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to say that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous. Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, the term has also been increasingly used since the 1980s, sometimes to describe slipstream fiction that blends horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
Sunand Tryambak Joshi, known as S. T. Joshi, is an American literary critic, novelist, and a leading figure in the study of H. P. Lovecraft and other authors of weird and fantastic fiction. Besides having written what critics such as Harold Bloom and Joyce Carol Oates consider to be the definitive biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Joshi has prepared several annotated editions of works by Ambrose Bierce. He has also written on crime novelist John Dickson Carr and on Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James, and has edited collections of their works, as well as collections of the best work of numerous other weird writers.
"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales. It was the last-written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".
Hippocampus Press is an American publisher of fantasy, horror and science fiction, and specializes in "the works of H. P. Lovecraft and his literary circle." As of 2017, it has issued over 200 publications, including editions of the complete fiction, essays, and poetry of Lovecraft, and thirteen volumes in the ongoing series of Lovecraft's Collected Letters.
Philip Hastane is a fictional author created by Clark Ashton Smith, in many ways an analog of his creator. He too lived in a cabin in Auburn, California, and wrote poetry and weird fiction. He also associated with a large number of artists and dilettantes whom he met through letters and conferences.
The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. The story also introduces the Mi-go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.
Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday, editing 179 issues from November 1924-March 1940. Jack Williamson called Wright "the first great fantasy editor".
Edgar Hoffmann Price was an American writer of popular fiction for the pulp magazine marketplace. He collaborated with H. P. Lovecraft on "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
Marginalia is a collection of Fantasy, Horror and Science fiction short stories, essays, biography and poetry by and about the American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was released in 1944 and was the third collection of Lovecraft's work published by Arkham House. 2,035 copies were printed.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire was a writer of horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His works typically were published as W. H. Pugmire and his fiction often paid homage to the lore of Lovecraftian horror. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi has described Pugmire as "the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have," and "perhaps the leading Lovecraftian author writing today."
