When an American man discovers that he's the last descendant of the De la Poer family, he travels to England to take over their crumbling estate. Accompanied only by his cat, the man follows the incessant sound of rats to a dark place beneath the estate, unearthing horrible, dark, gruesome secrets about his ancestors and the type of activities they partook in. Taken by madness, the man falls into a dark pit of despair and commits unthinkable crimes....

A man's dreams walk him through a valley to a vine-covered wall with a locked bronze gate therein. What lies beyond the gate?

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Collected in this volume are spine-tingling tales showing us that below the ground and at the top of mountain peaks lurk nameless gods and ghouls, powerful and horrific. In cemeteries and desert wastes and swampy bogs, the evidence of past civilizations remains waiting to be uncovered, ominously portending mankind's own inglorious future conclusion. Even more disconcerting...

The story involves a mine that uncovers a very deep chasm, too deep for any sounding lines to hit bottom. The night after the discovery of the abyss the narrator and one of the mine's workers, Juan Romero, venture inside the mine, drawn against their will by a mysterious rhythmical throbbing in the ground.

It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

The Thing on the Doorstep is a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos universe of horror fiction. It was written in August 1933, and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales. Daniel Upton, the story's narrator, begins by telling that he has killed his best friend, Edward Derby, and that he hopes his account will prove that he is not a murderer...

It tells the story of the esteemed sculptors Kalos and Musides, very close friends who live together, who have become rivals in the creation of a monumental statue of Tyche the Goddess of Fortune commissioned by the Tyrant of Syracuse. It is an old fashioned kind of story-a little Damon and Pythias, a little Cain and Abel-which Lovecraft brings to a satisfying, if somewhat elliptical conclusion.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft written in 1919 and first published in the amateur publication Pine Cones in October 1919. Inspiration Lovecraft said the story was inspired by an April 27, 1919 article in the New York Tribune. Reporting on the New York state police, the article cited a family named Slater or Slahter as representative of the backwards Catskills population. The nova mentioned at the end...

Polaris is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1918 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the amateur journal The Philosopher. It is noteworthy as the story that introduces Lovecraft's fictional Pnakotic Manuscripts, the first of his arcane tomes. The story begins with the narrator describing the night sky as observed over long sleepless nights from his window, in particular that of the Pole Star, Polaris, which he describes as...

The Statement of Randolph Carter is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written December 1919, it was first published in The Vagrant, May 1920. It tells of a traumatic event in the life of Randolph Carter, a student of the occult loosely representing Lovecraft himself. It is the first story in which Carter appears and is part of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle.