Project Gutenberg's The Shunned House, by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Shunned House

Author: Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Release Date: March 2, 2010 [EBook #31469]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHUNNED HOUSE ***

Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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_

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."

From 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.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's
greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre