Ekleticgoodies

H.P. Lovecraft Short Story Collection
by

H. P. Lovecraft

this collection contains the following stories:
 
Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

The story begins by describing the ancestors of Sir Arthur Jermyn, a British nobleman. His great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, had been an early explorer of the Congo, whose books on a mysterious white civilization there had been ridiculed. He had been confined to an asylum in 1765. Lovecraft describes how the Jermyn family has a peculiar physical appearance that began to appear in the children of Wade Jermyn and his mysterious and reclusive wife, whom Wade claimed was Portuguese.

From Wikipedia
Read by Smokestack Jones

The Cats of Ulthar
As mentioned this tale tells of the forming of the law "that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat". Previously to this an old cotter and his wife took great delight in slaughtering the cats of their neighborhood in some unknown yet horrid manner. After they kill the kitten of Menes, an orphan of the strange wanderers who visit the town, he utters a strange prayer before he and his people disappear forever that evening. In response to that prayer that night the cats of the town descend on the old cotters house, witnessed by Atal, and presumably kill and eat them in retribution.

From Wikipedia
READ BY SARAH JENNINGS

The Music of Erich Zann
university student is forced, by his lack of funds, to take the only lodging he can afford. In a strange part of the city he had never seen before, on a street named "Rue d'Auseil", he finds an apartment in an almost empty building. One of the few other tenants is an old German man named Erich Zann. The old man is mute and plays the viol with a local orchestra. He lives on the top floor and when alone at night, plays strange melodies never heard before. Over time, the student gains Zann's trust, and eventually learns of his secret, that the old man has discovered melodies and rhythms of which the sound open up a portal to another dimension and call through to the creatures living there.

From Wikipedia
Read by Smokestack Jones

The Beast in the Cave
In the story, a man touring a cave gets lost and hears a monstrous creature. Though he is unable to find out what it is, he kills it with a stone as it approaches him. He finds his group, who upon retracing the man's steps discover that this creature had been apelike. The creature speaks and is revealed to be a deformed human.

From Wikipedia
Read by: BroBry

The Doom That Came To Sarnath

According to the tale, more than 10,000 years ago, a race of shepherd people colonized the banks of the river Ai in a land called Mnar, forming the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (not to be confused with Kadath), which rose to great intellectual and mercantile prowess. Craving more land, a group of these hardy people migrated to the shores of a lonely and vast lake at the heart of Mnar, founding the metropolis of Sarnath.

But the settlers were not alone. At the other side of the lake was the ancient, grey-stone city of Ib, inhabited by a queer race who had descended from the moon. Lovecraft described them as "in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it.... [T]hey had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice.
These beings worshipped a strange god known as Bokrug, the Great Water Lizard, although it was more their physical form that caused the people of Sarnath to despise them.
The hatred of the people of Ib by those of Sarnath eventually drove them to madness and genocide, horribly slaughtering the helpless beings and stealing their idol as a trophy. The next night, the idol vanished under peculiar circumstances, and Taran-Ish, the high-priest of Sarnath, was found dead. Before dying, he had scrawled a single sign on the altar: "DOOM".

From Wikipedia
Read by Glen Hallstrom

Nyarlathotep 

In a 1921 letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, Lovecraft related the dream he had had described as "the most realistic and horrible [nightmare] I have experienced since the age of ten"  that served as the basis for his prose poem "Nyarlathotep". In the dream, he received a letter from his friend Samuel Loveman that read:

    Don't fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible horrible beyond anything you can imagine but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.

From Wikipedia
Read by: actualwolf

The Terrible Old Man

 The Terrible Old Man is strange elderly man "so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name". He lives alone in ancient house on Water Street in the town of Kingsport. Even among the locals, few know the details of the Old Man's life, but it is believed that he had captained East Indian clipper ships in his youth and had accumulated great jewels and riches over his life. Those who had visited the property had seen bizarre collections of stones on the front yard and observed the Old Man carrying on conversations with bottles on his table. Most locals care to avoid the Old Man and his house.

The story focuses on three robbers, Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva, who are "of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions". They little heed the locals' cautionary whisperings and disregard them completely when they hear that the Old Man possesses a treasure...
The bodies of the three robbers are later found horribly mutilated down on the beach, "horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels".

From Wikipedia
Read by Glen Hallstrom

The Tomb

"The Tomb" tells of Jervas Dudley, and how he was always a dreamer. In the woods one day, he finds the entrance to a cave of the Hyde family's tomb. On impulse, he tries to move the door but can't, so he goes home and finds a key in his attic. This he takes with him and opens the door to the crypt.

Inside he finds an empty coffin with his name on the plate, and he begins to sleep in it each night.

From Wikipedia
Read by Glen Hallstrom

Read by Various readers
Approx. running time 2 hours