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Where to Start with Lovecraft: A Reading Order for 13 Stories
H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential horror writers who ever lived, and also one of the easiest to bounce off. People tend to start with “The Call of Cthulhu” because it’s the famous one, run into nearly twelve thousand words of newspaper clippings, academic papers and adjectives, and quit. That’s a shame, because Lovecraft is much easier to like if you work up to him.
There are thirteen Lovecraft stories on Daily Creepypasta. This guide puts them in a reading order: short and atmospheric first, then the stories where his style comes together, then the three long cosmic tales his reputation rests on. Word counts and reading times are from the site. For his life, and for a frank note about the racism in some of his work, see the H. P. Lovecraft author page.
First: three short ones
If you read only one Lovecraft story, it’s a good choice. A poor student lodges in a steep, narrow street he can never find again afterward, and the mute old violist in the attic above him plays every night as though he were holding something back. It has almost none of the things people make fun of Lovecraft for. There are no tentacles, very few adjectives, and no long words a dictionary can’t handle. It’s just a sound, a window, and one of the best final images he wrote. Lovecraft counted it among his own favorites.
A lonely being who has lived all his life in a dark castle climbs toward the light. The story is Lovecraft at his most openly Poe-influenced, a dreamlike first-person Gothic, and the twist is famous enough that you may already know it. It still works, because the last paragraphs are about something sadder than the twist.
The ancestor of everything else. A morphine-addicted sailor writes a last statement about the day the sea floor rose up under his lifeboat. “Dagon” was among the first stories Lovecraft wrote as an adult, in 1917, and it already has the sea, the monolith, the half-glimpsed shape and the narrator who can’t live with what he knows. You can read it in about ten minutes.
Next: where the style comes together
This is the best entry point for readers who like a story with a punchline. A man explains to a friend why he won’t ride the Boston subway and why he broke off with a brilliant painter of the macabre. It’s told as a monologue, it’s set in real Boston streets, and its ending is a clean shock in the old magazine style. Companion piece: the painter in Chambers’s The Yellow Sign, who also sees too much.
The Statement of Randolph Carter
A man questioned by the police explains the night he waited above an old cemetery with a telephone wire while his friend climbed down into a tomb. It is built almost entirely around one phone call, and it may be the most purely suspenseful thing Lovecraft wrote.
A traveler caught in a storm on a back road takes shelter in a decrepit New England farmhouse whose ancient owner has one book he loves to look at. This is the first story set in Lovecraft’s invented “Miskatonic Valley,” and it’s a short piece of rural horror rather than cosmic horror.
A man in a cheap New York boarding house gets to know the brilliant, courteous doctor upstairs, who needs his apartment kept very cold. It’s the most domestic Lovecraft story here, almost a medical case study, and a fine one to read on a hot night.
Two stories from the mid-1920s, read as a pair. “The Hound” is about two bored young men who rob graves for a private museum and take a jade amulet from a corpse in Holland. It’s purple even by his standards, and some readers think it’s half a joke. “The Festival” sends its narrator to the fog-bound seaport of Kingsport for a family ritual at Yuletide. It’s a good choice for December.
Then: the three big ones
By this point you’ll know whether you like the voice. If you do, these are the stories that made “cosmic horror” a genre, and they are long. Give each one an evening.
A meteorite falls on a farm west of the fictional town of Arkham in 1882, and over the next year or so something in the well slowly poisons the land, the animals and the family. First published in Amazing Stories in 1927, it’s the best of the three and the least dependent on Lovecraft’s invented mythology. The horror is that the thing has no shape, no motive and no name, only a color nobody can describe. If you only read one of the long stories, read this one.
The famous one. A man sorting his late great-uncle’s papers finds a clay sculpture of a winged, tentacled being and notes on artists around the world who all dreamed of it during the same weeks in 1925. The story is built from documents, including a police report from the Louisiana swamps and a sailor’s account of an island that should not exist, and they add up to the idea that the human world is a brief accident. It’s slow, but after the earlier stories you’ll know how to read it.
The longest Lovecraft story on the site and the most like a monster movie. In a decaying hill village in Massachusetts, a strange child grows unnaturally fast, and his family keeps buying cattle. There is a forbidden book in a university library, a team of professors, and a climax on a hilltop. It is the most fun of the three, but also the one that leans hardest on the Mythos, so it’s best saved for last.
And for afterward: a fantasy
In the town of Ulthar, no one may kill a cat, and this is how that law came about. It’s one of Lovecraft’s early dream fantasies, written in the style of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, and more of a fable than a horror story. It’s a pleasant six minutes to end on, unless you’re a cat-hating cottager.
If you liked Lovecraft
Lovecraft wrote a long essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, about the writers he admired. Several of them are on the site. Read Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, which Lovecraft ranked above every other weird tale, and Arthur Machen’s The White People. Chambers’s The Repairer of Reputations and Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa contributed names to the mythology that Lovecraft and his friends shared. Among the AI-written stories by Pastada, Occultation and Soundings are written in the cosmic tradition, and the Cosmic Horror tag collects the rest.
AI was involved in writing this article.