The Outsider And Others
''The Outsider and Others'' is a collection of stories by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was released in 1939 and was the first book published by Arkham House. 1,268 copies were printed. It went out of print early in 1944 and has never been reprinted. The volume takes its name from the Lovecraft short story " The Outsider"; ''The Outsider and Other Stories'' was Lovecraft's preferred title for a short story collection considered, but never issued, by Farnsworth Wright. The stories for this volume were selected by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. The dust jacket art was a montage of drawings by Virgil Finlay for ''Weird Tales'' magazine, of which only one or two had originally illustrated Lovecraft stories. E. F. Bleiler describes the collection's publication as "the beginning of serious specialist publishing of fantastic fiction in America".E. F. Bleiler, ''The Guide to Supernatural Fiction'', Kent State University Press, 1983. p. 320-22 Genesis In late 1937, the deat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Virgil Finlay
Virgil Finlay (July 23, 1914 – January 18, 1971) was an American pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator. He has been called "part of the pulp magazine history ... one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative art work for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time."Collins, Charles M. "Charles Collins Reviews Fables of Heroic Fantasy and Eldritch Horror". ''Castle of Frankenstein'' no. 6 964 While he worked in a range of media, from gouache to oils, Finlay specialized in, and became famous for, detailed pen-and-ink drawings accomplished with abundant stippling, cross-hatching, and scratchboard techniques. Despite the very labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of his specialty, Finlay created more than 2600 works of graphic art in his 35-year career. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Finlay in 2012. Biography Virgil Warden Finlay was born and raised in Rochester, New York; his father, woodworker ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Statement Of Randolph Carter
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in December 1919, it was first published in ''The Vagrant'', May 1920. It tells of a traumatic event in the life of Randolph Carter, a student of the occult loosely representing Lovecraft himself. It is the first story in which Carter appears. Its adaptations include the film '' The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter''. Plot "The Statement of Randolph Carter" is the first person testimony of the titular character, who has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren. Warren has come into the possession of a book, written in an unknown language, the exact contents of which he never revealed to Carter. Carter mentions that Warren has other "strange, rare books on forbidden subjects", several of which are in Arabic. From his mysterious book, Warren ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Tomb (short Story)
"The Tomb" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in June 1917 and first published in the March 1922 issue of ''The Vagrant''. It tells the story of Jervas Dudley, who becomes obsessed with a mausoleum near his childhood home. Plot "The Tomb" tells of Jervas Dudley, a confessed daydreamer. While still a child, he discovers the padlocked entrance to a mausoleum belonging to the Hyde family, whose nearby mansion had burnt down many years previously. Jervas attempts to break the padlock, but is unable to. Dispirited, he takes to sleeping beside the tomb. Eventually, inspired by reading Plutarch's ''Lives'', Dudley decides to patiently wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb. One night, several years later, Jervas falls asleep once more beside the mausoleum. He awakes suddenly in the late afternoon, and fancies that as he awoke, a light had been hurriedly extinguished inside the tomb. Jervas then returns to his home, where he goes directly to th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Terrible Old Man
"The Terrible Old Man" is a short story of fewer than 1200 words by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written on January 28, 1920, and first published in the ''Tryout'', an amateur press publication, in July 1921. It is notable as the first story to make use of Lovecraft's imaginary New England setting, introducing the fictional town of Kingsport. The story, about the fate of three would-be robbers of the titular old man's house, has been criticized by Peter Cannon for being an openly xenophobic polemic against immigration. Plot A strange old man, "so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name," lives alone in an ancient house on Water Street in the town of Kingsport. Even among the locals, few know the details of the old man's life, but it is believed that he once captained East Indian clipper ships in his youth and accumulated great riches throughout his life. Those who had visited the property had seen bizarre collec ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Festival (short Story)
"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of ''Weird Tales''. Inspiration The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in December 1922. Lovecraft later called that visit "the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence." The narrator's path through Kingsport corresponds to a route to the center of Marblehead; the house with the overhanging second story is probably based on Marblehead's 1 Mugford Street. The church in the story is St. Michael's Episcopal Church on Frog Lane. Built in 1714, it is the oldest Anglican church in New England that is still standing at its original site. The church is on a modest hill; for most of the 18th century, it had a steeple. Its crypt, where parishioners were interred, remains. Since Lovecraft visited the church (as evidenced by his signature in the guest register), he may have spoken w ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Picture In The House
"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. It was written on December 12, 1920, and first published in the July issue of ''The National Amateur''"H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Picture in the House'" The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.—which was published in the summer of 1921. It was reprinted in ''Weird Tales'' in 1923 and again in 1937. Plot While riding his bicycle in the Miskatonic Valley of rural , a seeks shelter from an approaching storm. He enters an apparently abandoned house, only to f ...[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Arthur Jermyn
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (also known as "The White Ape" and simply "Arthur Jermyn") is a short story in the horror fiction genre, written by American author H. P. Lovecraft in 1920. The themes of the story are tainted ancestry, knowledge that it would be best to remain unaware of, and a reality which human understanding finds intolerable. Plot The story begins by describing the ancestors of Sir Arthur Jermyn, a British nobleman. His great-great-great-grandfather was Sir Wade Jermyn, an early explorer of the Congo region whose books on a mysterious white civilization there were ridiculed. He was confined to an asylum in 1765. Lovecraft describes how the Jermyn family has a peculiar physical appearance that began to appear in the children of Wade Jermyn and his mysterious and reclusive wife, who Wade claimed was Portuguese. Wade's son, Philip Jermyn, was a sailor who joined the navy after fathering his son and disappeared from his ship one night as ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Temple (Lovecraft Short Story)
"The Temple" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1920, and first published in the pulp magazine ''Weird Tales'' #24 in September 1925. Plot The story is narrated as a "found manuscript" penned by Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, a lieutenant-commander in the Imperial German Navy during the days of World War I. Altberg begins by declaring that he has decided to document the events leading up to his untimely end in order to "set certain facts" before the public, aware that he will not survive to do so himself. In the North Atlantic, after sinking a British freighter and its occupied lifeboats, the cruel and arrogant Altberg commands his U-boat to submerge, surfacing later to find the dead body of a seaman who died clinging to the exterior railing of the sub. A search of the body reveals a strange piece of carved ivory. Because of its apparent great age and value, one of Altberg's officers keeps the object, and shortly thereafter, strange phenomena begin to o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Horror At Red Hook
"The Horror at Red Hook" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, written on August 1–2, 1925. "Red Hook" is a transitional tale, situated between the author's earlier work and the later Cthulhu Mythos. Although the story depicts a sinister cult, this cult offers a conventionally occult devil-worshipping threat, rather than the cosmic threat depicted in his later work. Living in poverty in the slum of Red Hook at the time of writing, Lovecraft was at this time urgently attempting to widen his markets in the pulp magazines. By having an unusually proactive Irish New York police detective as his protagonist, he hoped for a swift sale to a detective pulp, which would have opened up a new market other than his usual ''Weird Tales'' magazine. He did not get such a sale, and had to fall back on ''Weird Tales''. "Red Hook" was thus first published in the January 1927 issue of ''Weird Tales''. Plot summary The story begins with Detective Malone describing an on-duty incid ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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He (short Story)
"He" is a short story by American horror fiction, horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written August 1925, it was first published in ''Weird Tales'', September 1926. Plot The story's anonymous narrator has moved from New England to New York City, and greatly regrets it. One night, while wandering through a historic part of Greenwich Village, he happens upon a man dressed in garments from the 18th century. The man offers to show the narrator the secrets of the town. The man brings the narrator into his home. There, he tells him the story of a squire who bargained with Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans for the secrets of their rituals concerning time and space, which were practiced on the land where the squire had recently taken up residence. After learning these secrets, the squire killed the Native Americans by giving them "monstrous bad rum". Within a week all of them were dead, and he alone had their secret knowledge. The man shows the narrator visions of the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Cool Air
"Cool Air" is a short story by the American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in March 1926 and published in the March 1928 issue of ''Tales of Magic and Mystery (magazine), Tales of Magic and Mystery''. Plot The narrator offers a story to explain why a "draught of cool air" is the most detestable thing to him. His tale begins in the spring of 1923, when he was looking for housing in New York City. He finally settles in a converted brownstone on 14th Street (Manhattan), West Fourteenth Street. Investigating a chemical leak from the floor above, he discovers that the inhabitant directly overhead is a strange, old, and reclusive physician. One day the narrator suffers a Myocardial infarction, heart attack, and remembering that a doctor lives overhead, he climbs the stairs and meets Dr. Muñoz for the first time. The doctor demonstrates supreme medical skill, and saves the narrator with a combination of medications. The fascinated narrator returns regularly to sit and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Rats In The Walls
"The Rats in the Walls" is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. Written in August–September 1923, it was first published in ''Weird Tales'', March 1924. Plot In 1923, an American named Delapore, the last descendant of the De la Poer family, moves to his ancestral estate of Exham Priory in England following the death of his only son during World War I. To the dismay of nearby residents, he restores the estate. After moving in, Delapore and his cat frequently hear the sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further with the assistance of his son's war comrade Edward Norrys and several academics, and through recurring dreams, Delapore learns that his family maintained an underground city for centuries, where they raised generations of "human cattle"—some regressed to a quadrupedal state—to supply their taste for human flesh. This was stopped when Delapore's ancestor Walter killed his entire family in their sleep and left the country in order ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |