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Library of Lovecraft Mythos in Miskatonic University

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H.P. Lovecraft Wikipedia

Lovecraft Mythos. Forbidden Knowledge.

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Short fiction

Literature

An Inhabitant of Carcosa

An Inhabitant of Carcosa is Bierce’s short account of a man who believes he has wandered away from his sickbed and gradually discovers that his familiar city has passed into ruin. Its reversal depends on the difference between what the narrator can perceive and what he understands. Chambers later reused several of its names in The King in Yellow.

5 min read · 893 words

Literature

Haïta the Shepherd

Haïta the Shepherd is Bierce’s pastoral fable about a young man whose simple duties are disturbed by questions about existence and whose encounters with Happiness prove painfully brief. It is also the original literary setting of Hastur, presented here as a responsive god of shepherds rather than the monstrous figure familiar from some later Mythos treatments.

5 min read · 921 words

Literature

In the Court of the Dragon

In the Court of the Dragon follows an exhausted reader of The King in Yellow who seeks peace in a Parisian church. A hostile organist appears to pursue him across the city and into his own courtyard. When the apparent pursuit ends, the narrator discovers that the distinction between physical safety and spiritual peril offers no dependable refuge.

6 min read · 1,136 words

Authors

Laird Barron

Laird Barron is an American writer associated with cosmic horror, crime fiction and the contemporary weird. His fiction brings physically capable, often violent characters into contact with forces their experience cannot contain. The Old Leech material is his own developing mythology; his wider career also includes the Isaiah Coleridge crime novels.

5 min read · 857 words

Literature

The Demoiselle d’Ys

The Demoiselle d’Ys is a romantic supernatural tale in which an American traveler lost on the Breton moors encounters a young woman living in an apparently vanished historical world. Its conclusion joins a sudden return to ruins with evidence of a love that has already become part of the past. The story follows the four principal forbidden-play tales in The King in Yellow.

5 min read · 960 words

Literature

The Mask

The Mask is Chambers’s story of a sculptor’s discovery that can turn living things into marble and of a concealed love that breaks apart a circle of friends. Appearing second in The King in Yellow, it combines dangerous art, fevered visions and apparent death with an ending that differs sharply from the collection’s more unrelieved catastrophes.

6 min read · 1,054 words

Literature

The Repairer of Reputations

The opening story of The King in Yellow follows Hildred Castaigne’s belief that he is entitled to an American imperial crown. Set in an imagined 1920, it combines altered political history, the influence of a forbidden play and increasingly dangerous misinterpretation. Its apparent conspiracy unfolds through a narrator whose judgments the reader must continually reassess.

7 min read · 1,345 words

Literature

The Yellow Sign (story)

The Yellow Sign follows a New York painter and his model as disturbing dreams, a repellent church watchman and a mysterious clasp converge with the forbidden play The King in Yellow. Its first-person narrative makes artistic work and an unequal romantic attachment the setting for an intrusion that neither skepticism nor locked doors can contain.

6 min read · 1,190 words

Authors

Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti, born in Detroit in 1953, is an American writer whose weird fiction places consciousness, identity and the apparent structure of reality under pressure. His importance to the Lovecraftian tradition extends beyond shared monsters: he develops a distinctive literature of nightmare, artificiality, bleak humor and philosophical pessimism.

5 min read · 883 words