For over a century, sickness and death have befallen those who reside in the old house on Benefit Street. Surrounded by strange weeds and rancid odours, and infested by glowing fungus, two men venture into the depths of the accursed building to discover what brought such a fate upon the house's inhabitants, and discern once and for all if their deaths were natural, or something more sinister.
Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft, Fiction, Fantasy,"After I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk -- a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones. . . ."Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft, Fiction, Fantasy,
H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.
The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street. Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt Lillian Clark lived there in 1919/20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit. However, it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually compelled Lovecraft to write the story. As he wrote in a letter: On the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Elizabeth Avenue is a terrible old house—a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds—with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, and an outside flight of stairs leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed. It reminded me of the Babbit House in Benefit Street…. Later its image came up again with renewed vividness, finally causing me to write a new horror story with its scene in Providence and with the Babbit House as its basis
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an influential American writer of weird and horror fiction. Lovecraft's writing often explored themes of existential dread, forbidden knowledge, and the insignificance of humanity in the face of incomprehensible cosmic forces. In this book, we present you with five stories of Lovecraft—‘The Shunned House,’ ‘The Haunter of the Dark,’ ‘The Picture in the House,’ ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch House,’—each in its own way reveals his mastery of cosmic horror, weaving together ancient evils and the fragility of human sanity. In ‘The Shunned House,’ Lovecraft delves into the history of a cursed dwelling, its dark secrets, and the sinister forces that plague its residents. ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ explores the terror of forbidden knowledge and the dreadful consequences of uncovering ancient truths. ‘The Picture in the House’ and ‘The Rats in the Walls’ delve into the hidden horrors lurking in the past, in old books and beneath the foundations of ancestral homes, reminding us that history can be a grim and unsettling revelation. Finally, ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ takes readers on a journey through the ominous corridors of Arkham, where academic curiosity leads to encounters with eldritch horrors. Lovecraft's blend of psychological dread and cosmic malevolence continues to make these stories essential reading for fans of horror fiction, leaving a lasting impression on those who dare to explore the depths of his eldritch imagination.
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For over a century, sickness and death have befallen those who reside in the old house on Benefit Street. Surrounded by strange weeds and rancid odours, and infested by glowing fungus, two men venture into the depths of the accursed building to discover what brought such a fate upon the house's inhabitants, and discern once and for all if their deaths were natural, or something more sinister.
The Shunned House' is a horror novel by H. P. Lovecraft. It was first published in the October 1937 issue of "Weird Tales". It is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street; Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt, Lillian Clark, lived there in 1919-20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit. But it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually provoked Lovecraft to write the story.
The Shunned House (+Biography and Bibliography) (6X9po Glossy Cover Finish): " From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Some times it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street - the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette - and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John's whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination. "
