The Lovecraft Vault

THE SHADOW FROM THE STEEPLE is a short story by American author, Robert Bloch, first published in 1950. It completes a series of tales started by Bloch in 1935 with The Shambler from the Stars, and continued by H. P. Lovecraft in 1936 with The Haunter of the Dark. The story concludes the mystery surrounding the "Shining Trapezohedron".

THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK is a Cthulhu Mythos story, written in November 1935 and first published in the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales. It is notable for being Lovecraft’s final major work of fiction and serves as a sequel of sorts to Robert Bloch’s earlier story The Shambler from the Stars.

The tale follows Robert Blake, a writer with an interest in the occult, who becomes fascinated by a sinister, abandoned church on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island. Inside, he discovers relics of a forgotten cult known as the Church of Starry Wisdom, including a strange artifact called the Shining Trapezohedron—a window into other realms that can summon a terrifying entity known only as the Haunter of the Dark.

THE SHAMBLER FROM THE STARS is a horror short story by American writer Robert Bloch, first published in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales. A Cthulhu Mythos tale, it introduced the forbidden tome De Vermis Mysteriis (Mysteries of the Worm). Later on in 1935, Lovecraft wrote the short story "The Haunter of the Dark" as a sequel and dedicated it to Bloch. Eventually, in 1950, Bloch wrote his own sequel The Shadow from the Steeple.

THE SECRET OF KRALITZ is a Cthulhu Mythos short story by Henry Kuttner. The tale, which first appeared in Weird Tales in October 1936, was described as follows: “A story of the shocking revelation that came to the twenty-first Baron Kralitz.”

THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP is a Cthulhu Mythos story, written in 1933 and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

The story is narrated by Daniel Upton, who confesses to murdering his lifelong friend, Edward Derby—but insists it was not truly Derby he killed. As Upton recounts the strange events leading up to the crime, he describes Derby’s marriage to the mysterious Asenath Waite, a woman from the coastal town of Innsmouth with disturbing ties to the occult and the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

THE HOUND is a Cthulhu Mythos story, written in 1922 and first published in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales.

The story is narrated by one of two decadent grave-robbers obsessed with morbid curiosities and the occult. Seeking ever-greater thrills, they exhume a burial mound in Holland and steal a jade amulet from the centuries-old grave of a supposed ghoul. From that moment on, they are haunted by a terrifying, unseen entity—a monstrous hound-like being that brings death and madness in its wake.

THE NAMELESS OFFSPRING is a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. The tale, which first appeared in Strange Tales of Mystery in Terror back in June 1932, tells of a man's troubling stay at a remote property in the English countryside.

THE NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER is a work of horror by Arthur Machen—a key story in his 1895 novel, "The Three Impostors". In the story, a young man begins taking a prescribed medicine for a minor ailment, but his condition soon takes a strange and unsettling turn.

THE NAMELESS CITY is one of Lovecraft’s earliest explorations of cosmic horror and pre-human civilizations, introducing themes that would become central to the Cthulhu Mythos—particularly the insignificance of humanity in the face of ancient, alien forces. It was first published in the November 1921 issue of The Wolverine.

A REMINISCENCE OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON is a satirical short story, written in the style of an exaggerated 18th-century memoir. The narrator, an absurdly aged gentleman named James Boswell (a clear parody of the real-life biographer of Dr. Johnson), claims to have been born in 1690 and reminisces about his interactions with the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson.