An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

“The Colour out of Space”: The narrator is a surveyor, working on the outskirts of Arkham where a new reservoir is to be built. He finds that those living there consider the area of the former Nahum Gardner farm to be “evil,” but no

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one will divulge any information as to why, except the aged Ammi Pierce. The narrator serves as a mouthpiece for Pierce’s story.

“The Crawling Chaos”: The narrator, who is accidentally administered an overdose of opium, tells the ensuing drug-induced vision, ending in his witnessing the destruction of the world. “The Curse of Yig”: The narrator is researching snake lore in Oklahoma, investigating the legend of Yig. The curator of an insane asylum reveals to him the only surviving half-human, half-snake offspring of Yig and a human female.

“Dagon”: The narrator, a supercargo on an unspecified sailing vessel, is captured in the Pacific Ocean by a German man-of-war. He escapes in a small boat and, after several days of drifting, finds himself run aground. He encounters first a Cyclopean monolith bearing strange marine carvings, then a hideous monster of the kind depicted on the monolith. He escapes and ultimately finds himself confined in a hospital in San Francisco. He later comes to believe that he is still pursued by the creature.

“The Disinterment”: The narrator awakens in a hospital bed to find that he was stricken with leprosy and treated for it by his friend Marshall Andrews. He learns that Andrews has unorthodoxly “cured” him of the disease by transplanting his head to the body of an African American.

“The Electric Executioner”: The narrator is an auditor with the Tlaxcala Mining Company of San Francisco. He is tasked with finding one Arthur Feldon, who disappeared in Mexico with important company papers. He finds himself on a train in the company of a dangerous maniac, who claims to have devised a hoodlike instrument for performing executions. The narrator tricks the madman into donning the device, and the man is accidentally killed by it. The narrator faints, but is later informed that he was alone in the train car.

“The Evil Clergyman”: The narrator investigates the attic chamber of an absent clergyman, whose library contains not only theological and classical books, but also treatises on magic. Somehow, the narrator invokes the clergyman, who alters the appearance of the narrator to resemble his own. Since this is not a story, but an account of an actual dream from a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, the “narrator” is HPL himself.

“Ex Oblivione”: The narrator, weary with the “ugly trifles of existence,” begins dreaming of a gate in a “golden valley,” later discovering that the gate leads to oblivion.

“The Festival”: The narrator visits his ancestral (seventeenth century) home in Kingsport because his ancestors are bidden to “keep festival…once every century, that the memory of primal secrets not be forgotten.” When the identity of the old man he encounters there—“the true deputy of my fathers”— is accidentally revealed to him, he leaps into the underground river beneath the house and is found the next day half frozen in the harbor. Those who tend to him at the hospital dismiss his account of his experiences as a “psychosis,” although he is convinced his experience was real. “From Beyond”: The narrator is the “best friend” of the crazed inventor and philosopher Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast demonstrates for him a weird device that reveals the existence of creatures that cannot be perceived by the five

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senses. In terror, the narrator fires his revolver at Tillinghast’s machine and destroys it, and thus is unable to prove what Tillinghast has shown him.

“The Ghost-Eater”: Traveling on foot, the narrator encounters a house in a deserted wood, where he stays for the evening, to encounter what he later learns may have been a werewolf. “The Green Meadow”: The narrator (writing in classical Greek) tells of how he finds himself near a stream on a peninsula that breaks off and floats away. He approaches an island and experiences a revelation, which is not revealed, as the concluding text of his narrative is illegible. “The Haunter of the Dark”: The narrator, perhaps a detective, is probably the most distant observer of any story by HPL—his presence hinted at only by the invitation, “let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of [Robert Blake,] their chief actor.”