The Haunter of the Dark
The Haunter of the Dark follows Robert Blake’s investigation of a deserted Providence church and the growing connection between his mind and a presence unable to endure light. Written in November 1935 and published in the December 1936 Weird Tales, it combines a local cult history, a cosmic artifact and a fatal citywide power failure.
9 min read · 1,814 words
Publication and the dedication
Lovecraft wrote The Haunter of the Dark in November 1935. Weird Tales published it in December 1936. The story is dedicated to Robert Bloch, whose fictional exchange with Lovecraft supplies an additional personal context for its protagonist.
Robert Blake is nevertheless an invented writer and painter. His listed stories, residence, investigation and death belong to the narrative and should not be used as facts about Bloch. The account also names genuine Providence locations, making it important to distinguish the real city from the supernatural history placed within it.
The synopsis below includes the ending and the information recovered from Blake’s diary.
Sources: H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in composition order, H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in publication order, The Haunter of the Dark — Unspeakable Tales ebook
A death with competing explanations
The narrative opens after Blake’s death. An official interpretation attributes it to lightning or nervous shock associated with an electrical discharge, despite the unbroken window in front of him. His imaginative interests are offered as grounds for discounting the diary’s extraordinary claims.
Other investigators connect the diary with the church’s surviving records, the historical existence of the fictional Starry Wisdom congregation and the disappearance of an earlier reporter. One believer, Dr. Dexter, disposes of the stone and box found in the steeple by throwing them into Narragansett Bay.
The story then reconstructs events largely through Blake’s account. Its skeptical framing does not erase the additional witnesses, but it makes the interpretation of their evidence part of the plot.
The view from College Hill
Blake returns to Providence in the winter of 1934–1935 and takes rooms off College Street near Brown University and behind the John Hay Library. He writes, paints and looks west across the city from his study.
Federal Hill appears remote and almost dreamlike through smoke and changing light. A large dark church increasingly absorbs his attention. Its windows remain unlit, and he believes birds avoid its roof and steeple.
The attraction begins visually, through the same appetite for unusual landscapes that informs his art. By spring it interferes with work on his novel. He decides to cross the city and find the building he has repeatedly contemplated from a distance.
Federal Hill’s warnings
Blake reaches the church late in April after difficulty finding his way through the neighborhood. It stands on an elevated, fenced plot above the surrounding streets, with a padlocked gate and neglected grounds.
Residents react to his interest with avoidance or alarm. A policeman describes an old forbidden congregation, disappearances and a dangerous presence believed to remain in the building. The group’s departure in 1877 did not end the neighborhood’s fear.
Blake interprets the warnings partly as the imaginative material he has been seeking. He passes through a gap in the fence and finds an accessible basement window. Local reluctance to interfere makes entry easier, even though the warnings themselves advise the opposite course.
The abandoned interior
Inside, Blake encounters dust, cobwebs and the remains of a building once used by a congregation. The stained glass and ankh-like altar cross suggest an unusual religious setting.
A vestry library contains works he recognizes from occult study, including the Necronomicon, Liber Ivonis, Cultes des Goules, Unaussprechlichen Kulten and De Vermis Mysteriis. Other volumes are less familiar. Their presence changes his impression from a picturesque ruin to a place with a substantial history of forbidden research.
He also finds a leather-bound record written in astronomical and astrological symbols. Taking it for later decipherment, he continues upward through the tower.
The object on the pillar
The tower chamber contains seven high-backed chairs around a carved stone pillar. Seven large black-painted plaster figures stand nearby. Four narrow windows admit limited light through weathered exterior boards and the remains of opaque coverings.
An asymmetrical metal box rests on the pillar. Inside it, a nearly black, red-veined polyhedron is suspended by a central band and seven supports. Blake at first mistakes its dusty outline for a roughly rounded object; cleaning it reveals the irregular flat surfaces.
Looking into the stone produces impressions of other worlds, towers, mountains and remote forms of consciousness. Its fascination competes with his growing unease. A ladder in the same chamber leads to the separate, windowless steeple above.
Edwin Lillibridge’s remains and notes
Blake discovers a human skeleton near the ladder. Personal effects identify Edwin M. Lillibridge, a reporter for the Providence Telegram who disappeared in 1893. Some bones and clothing show unusual staining, damage and apparent charring.
The reporter’s notes trace the Starry Wisdom sect to Professor Enoch Bowen’s return from Egypt in 1844 and purchase of the former Free-Will Church. Later entries associate the congregation with disappearances, rumors of sacrifice, unsuccessful investigation and mounting public hostility.
The notes also identify the Shining Trapezohedron and a being called the Haunter of the Dark. Gazing into the stone is said to summon the presence, which retreats from weak light and can be banished by strong light. The congregation closes its church in 1877, and many associated people leave Providence.
A connection established
Blake looks into the stone again and experiences increasingly disturbing visions. He feels watched by something that has perceived him through the object rather than merely existing inside it.
As evening approaches, the stone appears faintly luminous. He closes the box, hears movement in the dark steeple and flees the church. Back in his rooms he investigates newspaper files and works on the encrypted record, telling no one immediately about the visit.
His westward view has changed. The church remains an object of fascination, but it now seems connected with an intelligence aware of him. The distance across Providence no longer feels sufficient to separate observer and observed.
Decipherment and the artifact’s history
In June Blake identifies the record’s language as Aklo and begins understanding it. The diary describes the Haunter as a possessor of extraordinary knowledge that demands terrible sacrifices. Street lighting appears to prevent it from leaving the darkness of the building.
The record also gives the Trapezohedron a long fictional history. It was fashioned on Yuggoth, brought to Earth, treasured by the Antarctic crinoid beings and recovered from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia. It later passed through Lemuria and Atlantis before reaching Egypt.
Nephren-Ka built a temple around it, and the temple’s destruction left it buried until a later excavation. These episodes enter the story through Blake’s reconstruction of the record. They are not a separate historical chronicle of actual Egypt or proof that every named civilization belongs to one uniform culture.
The first blackout
In July, neighborhood reports describe new sounds and movement in the church. A thunderstorm then interrupts the city’s lighting for an hour. During the darkness, residents believe the presence descends from the steeple and moves through the building.
People gather outside with protected candles and lamps. When electric lighting returns, the sounds retreat upward. The next day reporters find disturbed dust, damaged furnishings, unusual odors and traces of staining or burning.
The tower windows have been broken, and some openings have been stuffed with material taken from pew cushions and linings, apparently to restore darkness. The reporters interpret the scene as a hoax. Their observations nevertheless correspond in several respects with the movement feared by Blake and the neighborhood.
Sleepwalking and the steeple ladder
Blake becomes increasingly frightened of another power failure and of his own involuntary attraction to the church. On one occasion he wakes outdoors, moving westward. After the night of 30 July, he records a more severe episode.
He finds himself inside the tower near the ladder, surrounded by darkness, odor and movement above. An external report or explosion breaks the trance. He escapes through the building and returns home.
In the morning his clothes carry dirt and cobwebs, his body is bruised and his hair is scorched. He begins tying his ankles at night to prevent further sleepwalking. The attempted precaution addresses his movements, but it does not remove the mental connection he believes is growing.
The storm of 8–9 August
A major storm begins before midnight on 8 August. Blake watches Federal Hill and tries to contact the electricity company. At 2:12 a.m. the city’s lights fail.
Around the church, residents maintain a vigil with candles, lamps, flashlights and religious objects. Wind extinguishes many flames. Father Merluzzo and Patrolman William J. Monahan are among the witnesses to the disturbance that follows around 2:35.
Wood breaks from the tower’s east window. An overwhelming odor, a winglike vibration and a violent eastward gust accompany an indistinct mass moving toward College Hill. A later lightning flash and explosive sound occur farther east, where observers also notice the odor and unusual air movement.
Blake’s last entries
Students looking toward Blake’s study notice his motionless face at the window during the next day. After he remains there into the evening, they seek help and the apartment is entered. He is dead at his desk, still holding the pencil used for his diary.
The final entries describe a collapse of distance and identity. Blake appears to experience the dark church through senses that no longer behave like his own. He identifies the presence as an avatar of Nyarlathotep and struggles to retain his name and earthly location.
The last fragments report an approaching blur, black wings and a burning three-lobed eye. These are the diary’s culminating impressions, rather than a calm anatomical description supplied by an outside observer. The surrounding witnesses establish a disturbance but do not all report the same visible form.
Dexter and the unresolved artifact
Dr. Dexter removes the box and stone from the windowless steeple and throws them into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Their location differs from the tower chamber where Blake originally found them, implying an intervening movement that the story does not narrate directly.
Dexter believes disposal has removed an intolerable danger. The story does not show the object destroyed, nor does it demonstrate every future consequence of submerging it. Later writers can continue from that act, but their continuations belong to their own texts.
The official explanation remains electrical or nervous shock. The reader must consider that verdict alongside the diary, damaged church, missing reporter and independent witnesses, rather than treating the framing voice as a final scientific adjudication.
Interpretation: looking as a reciprocal act
Blake begins by watching a distant building. The decisive change occurs when his act of looking apparently allows another intelligence to perceive him. The Trapezohedron turns artistic and scholarly curiosity into a reciprocal connection.
The story also reverses assumptions about who understands the situation. The cultivated outsider discounts warnings, while residents treated dismissively in the narration organize the practical defense of light. Their knowledge is neither complete nor institutionally respected, but it addresses the danger more directly than the reporters’ confidence in a hoax.
Electricity becomes a fragile collective protection. A modern city’s infrastructure temporarily contains something associated with an ancient artifact, and an ordinary storm can interrupt that arrangement. The catastrophe depends on the connection between an individual mind, a neighborhood’s local memory and the citywide system that keeps darkness divided.
Related music
A Thousand Masks is a dark metal song inspired by Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos who walks among humanity, hiding behind countless faces and whispered lies.
References
- H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in composition order
Composition dates; question marks and ranges retain the source uncertainty.
- H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in publication order
First publication dates and venues; issue dates can differ from actual release dates.
- The Haunter of the Dark — Unspeakable Tales ebook
The fictional narrative is evidence for what the story says, not proof of events in the real world.
At a glance
H. P. Lovecraft
November 1935
1936, December
Weird Tales, 28, No. 5
Fiction