H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Collection

The Complete Collection

of

H. P. Lovecraft

b.1890 — d.1937

This book contains every story in the public domain that has been attributed to H. P. Lovecraft and confirmed in the online resource, The H.P. Lovecraft Archive.

This collection includes all of H. P. Lovecraft's available published works. 

Contents

The Nameless City

The Festival

The Colour Out of Space

The Call of Cthulhu

The Dunwich Horror

The Whisperer in Darkness

The Dreams in the Witch House

The Haunter of the Dark

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Discarded Draft of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

The Shadow Out of Time

At the Mountains of Madness

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Azathoth

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Celephaïs

Cool Air

Dagon

Ex Oblivione

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

From Beyond

He

Herbert West-Reanimator

Hypnos

In the Vault

Memory

Nyarlathotep

Pickman’s Model

The Book

The Cats of Ulthar

The Descendant

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Evil Clergyman

The Horror at Red Hook

The Hound

The Lurking Fear

The Moon-Bog

The Music of Erich Zann

The Other Gods

The Outsider

The Picture in the House

The Quest of Iranon

The Rats in the Walls

The Shunned House

The Silver Key

The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Strange High House in the Mist

The Street

The Temple

The Terrible Old Man

The Thing on the Doorstep

The Tomb

The Transition of Juan Romero

The Tree

The Unnamable

The White Ship

What the Moon Brings

Polaris

The Very Old Folk

Ibid

Old Bugs

Sweet Ermengarde, or, The Heart of a Country Girl

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

The History of the Necronomicon

The Nameless City

* * * * *

Written: January 1921

First published in The Wolverine,

No. 11 (November 1921), Pages 3-15

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert’s heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.