The Dunwich Horror
1929
In the decaying hills of rural Massachusetts, something is wrong with the Whateley family. Lavinia Whateley, deformed and reclusive, gives birth to twins fathered by no mortal hand. One dies. The other, Wilbur, survives to grow monstrous, uncanny, consumed by forbidden knowledge and rituals spoken in languages older than human tongues. The townspeople of Dunwich whisper of the hill behind the Whateley farm, of sounds that should not come from any animal, of Wilbur's desperate searches through ancient texts for the moment when the stars align and something vast and patient finally breaks through. When Professor Armitage of Miskatonic University follows the trail of occult murders and impossible disappearances to Dunwich, he finds a horror that defies every law of nature and sanity. The terror here is not a monster in the shadows but the shattering realization that humanity is insignificant, that things exist beyond our world that do not recognize us as anything but intruders. Lovecraft built an entire mythology on this premise, and no story crystallizes it more perfectly than this one: a town, a family, and a door about to open that should never have been touched.
Editions
X-Ray
“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,And with strange aeons even death may die.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;””
— H. P. Lovecraft
