Американская литература

The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year and is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him.

The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. The intense darkness oppressed and stifled me so that I struggled for breath.Having been condemned to death by the Spanish Inquisition, the narrator…

"The Purloined Letter" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe. It is the third of his three detective stories featuring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being «The Murde…

In "The Masque of the Red Death" Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors – of the deadly approach of a terrible pendulum, of the awful end of an ancient and n…

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It is told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of his sanity, while describing a murder …

Sailors kill a 50 foot creature at sea after a lengthy battle. The creature bears strange anatomical irregularities such as a single large eye and rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place …

In the tale, an unnamed narrator relates the story of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar. "The Cats of Ulthar" was a personal favorite of Lovecraft's, who…

"The Colour Out of Space" is a 1st-person narrative written from the perspective of an unnamed Boston surveyor. In order to prepare for the construction of a new reservoir in Massachusetts, he su…

The story begins with the narrator describing the effects of opium and the fantastical vistas it can inspire. The narrator then tells of his sole experience with opium in which he was accidentall…

"The Descendant" is a story fragment, believed to have been written in 1927. Lovecraft may have been referring to this attempt at a story when he wrote that he was "making a very careful study of…

According to the tale, more than 10,000 years ago, a race of shepherd people colonized the banks of the river Ai in a land called Mnar, forming the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (not t…

Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was foun…

In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy's arrival …

The short story is actually an excerpt from a letter Lovecraft wrote. It begins in the attic of an ancient house. The narrator’s companion refers to the former owner of the house and the presumab…

The story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island and revolves around the Church of Starry Wisdom. The cult uses an ancient artifact known as the Shining Trapezohedron to summon a terrible being …

A gentleman in New York begins renting an apartment one floor below an aged doctor, who insists on keeping his quarters very chilly. As the two become friends, the old doctor's health begins to d…

The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who plans to commit suicide over an incident that occurred early on in World War I when he was a merchant marine officer.

A university student is forced, by his lack of funds, to take the only lodging he can afford. In a strange part of the city he had never seen before, on a street named "Rue d'Auseil", he finds an…

"The Nameless City" is a horror story written by H. P. Lovecraft. The story's title is an ancient ruin located somewhere in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and is older than any human civili…

Some of H. P. Lovecraft's most fascinating work came from a time in his life that he was forced, by economic survival, to ghostwrite, collaborate and revise the work of others in the field.