The Whisperer in Darkness

COLLECTED STORIES, VOLUME ONE

THE WHISPERER
IN DARKNESS

AND OTHER STORIES

H. P. Lovecraft

Selected and introduced
by M. J. Elliott

The Whisperer in Darkness first published by
Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2007

Published as an ePublication 2011

ISBN 978 1 84870 398 8

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ANTHONY JOHN RANSON
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For Joe

INTRODUCTION

Lovecraftian. The word does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, but there can be few readers who are unaware of its meaning. ‘Lovecraftian’ implies a very specific type of supernatural tale – of ancient horrors imagined in the darkest regions of one’s subconscious, or glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his famed Cthulhu Mythos occupy a very special and rather un-settling place in our hearts and minds – it is reported that when veteran B-movie actor George Zucco was admitted to an asylum in 1960, he claimed that the Great God Cthulhu was stalking him.

The life and career of Lovecraft, who died in 1937 at the age of 46, is filled with contradictions. Undeniably a prodigy possessed of a photographic memory and coddled beyond belief not only during his formative years but well into adulthood, he did not attend university or even, for reasons of ill-health, graduate from high school. His name is known around the world, but he rarely ventured outside his beloved Providence and never left America. Despite his reputation as one of the foremost horror writers of the twentieth century, his works were never collected in print during his lifetime, and he never overcame financial hardship.

This collection focuses upon the early stories in the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft’s famous cycle of tales concerning the Old Ones, a race of beings from the depths of space; they once ruled our world and may do so again. The term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ was coined not by Lovecraft but by his friend August Derleth. It might be argued that Cthulhu is not even one of the Old Ones and is therefore undeserving of this star-billing; The Dunwich Horror (1928) states that Cthulhu is a cousin of the Old Ones: ‘yet can he spy Them only dimly’. However, Lovecraft referred to his connected fiction as either ‘Yog-Sothothery’ or ‘Cthulhuism’, so the use of the name is not entirely unwarranted.