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    The Thing on the Doorstep
    The Thing on the Doorstep
    The Thing on the Doorstep
    Ebook43 pages58 minutes

    The Thing on the Doorstep

    By H. P. Lovecraft

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateFeb 10, 2014
    ISBN9781609773229
    Author

    H. P. Lovecraft

    Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

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    Reviews for The Thing on the Doorstep

    4.5/5

    9 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A good old fashioned tale of that old time religion.
    • 5/5
      Brilliantly written and often super scary collection of some of H.P.Lovecraft's best work. This collection includes "The Dunwich Horror" and my favourite Lovecraft short story "The Music of Erik Zahnn" (Apologies for the spelling there). A must for lovers of horror and the occult.
    • 4/5
      This collection is part of a series of six volumes of Penguin Horror selected by film director Guillermo Del Toro who as Series Editor provides an introduction which covers the entire series while Lovecraft biographer S. T. Joshi acts as Editor providing an introduction as well as commentary on each story along with extensive endnotes. Lovecraft has a unique style which definitely creates an enveloping atmosphere and sense of dread. His stories of the fantastic frequently feature doomed characters, always male, confronting cosmic horrors that even when they survive with their lives are left broken in mind and spirit. If the telling and the tales get a bit repetitive I was still glad to have finally experienced the chills of Lovecraft's doom-laden oeuvre. I look forward to returning to his Arkham along the Miskatonic River and answering the call of Cthuhlu.
    • 5/5
      "The Thing On The Doorstep" is a super creepy short story as only H.P. can do! It's a body/soul switching thing, steeped in mystery and the arcane arts that just freaks the reader out! Whew! But I did keep having one "weird" thought as the story progressed - did Edward and Asenath consummate their marriage? Eww...
    • 5/5
      Another great book. Fast pace, gripping story. Pulls you on the first page.
    • 4/5
      Still need to read At The Mountains of Madness
    • 5/5
      And this completes my reading of Lovecraft. Highlights: the title story, The Dunwich Horror, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, his most terrifying work.
    • 4/5
      THE TOMB An horror short story written in June 1917.‘All things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them.’ (p. 1)Jervas Dudley discovered the entrance to a mausoleum belonging to the Hyde family , whose house had burnt many years before.Jervas attempts to enter in the tomb, but he is unable; so, inspired by an example of Plutarch’s Lives, he decides to wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb.After several years, while Jervas is sleeping beside the mausoleum, he believes to see a light from inside the tomb. He finds the key to the tomb and inside the mausoleum Jervas discovers an empty coffin with the name of Jervas Hyde upon the plate.Following again the example of Plutarch he starts to sleep inside the coffin, so to gain the name upon it.Jervas is awoken by his father and discovers that he has never been inside the tomb. A desire becomes dream, or nightmare: every person change with his consciousness the appearances of the things.

    Book preview

    The Thing on the Doorstep - H. P. Lovecraft

    I

    It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror—that thing on the doorstep.

    Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.

    So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.

    I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I was sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom.

    At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we live—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.

    As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward’s demoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected

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