The Shunned House is a weird-fiction story by H. P. Lovecraft about an old Providence house that local people avoid and a narrator's investigation of its sinister past. It is worth listening to for its slow-building atmosphere of dread and Lovecraft's careful, suggestive prose.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
The
Shunned House
By H. P. LOVECRAFT
A posthumous story of immense power, written by a master of weird fiction
—a tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of an old house in New England
FǡLjƽ even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes 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 favorite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighboring hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft died last March, at the height of his career. Though only forty-six years of age, he had built up an international reputation by the artistry and impeccable literary craftsmanship of his weird tales; and he was regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as probably the greatest contemporary master of weird fiction. His ability to create and sustain a mood of brooding dread and unnamable horror is nowhere better shown than in the posthumous tale presented here: "The Shunned House."
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