Turtle Reader

H. P. Lovecraft’s Collected Stories - Part 1, Collected Stories - Part 2 RSS and Supernatural Horror in Literature. I’ve never read any of the Cthulu stuff so these should be interesting. I guess they’ll take a while. There were so many stories in his collected work I had to break it into two parts.
Nicolo […]

His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr.
Wraxall pays the mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds
another padlock unfastened. The next day, his last in Raback, he
again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count farewell. Once more
queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting with the
buried nobleman, he now sees to […]

Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a
light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of
every-day events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and
gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic
detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian
scholarship. Conscious of the dose relation between present weirdness
and […]

Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany’s work. He
loves the vivid green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate
flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dream-cities.
Humour and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism
and modify what might otherwise possess a naïve intensity.
Nevertheless, as is inevitable in […]

The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes
both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and
sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The
Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island
are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art
and restraint in narrative reach their […]

The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous
vistas. Professor Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the
Welsh disappearances, the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient
geographers, and the black seal, has decided that a frightful race of
dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion
still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales. […]

There is a glory in the autumn wood,
The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
Of some great fire, and there are glints below
Of tawny yellow where the […]

Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such
folklore and its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that
falls truly within the domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burials in
sunken churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of death-heralding
banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of spectres and “the
unholy creatures of the Raths”–all these have their poignant and
definite shivers, and […]

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the
earth’s infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead,
after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as
the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges
with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful
verboseness, […]

The weird short story has fared well of late, an important
contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went
Too Far breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood,
and of Pan’s hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson’s
volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular
power; […]