Cosmic Horror
Horror on the largest scale, where the threat is not a ghost or a killer but the discovery that the universe is vast, old and indifferent to us. Stories in the line that runs through Lovecraft, plus modern ones about what is out past the stars and down under the ice.
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The Call of Cthulhu Classic
Sorting his late great-uncle's papers, a man finds a clay sculpture of a winged, tentacled being, and notes about artists who all dreamed of it on the same nights.
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The Willows Classic
Two friends canoeing down the Danube make camp on a tiny island of willows in a vast, flooded marsh, and the willows seem to move.
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The Festival Classic
Summoned by an ancient family tradition, a man arrives at the fog-shrouded seaport of Kingsport for the Yuletide festival.
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The Great God Pan Classic
A doctor performs brain surgery on a young woman to open her eyes to the world beyond the veil, and what she sees reverberates through London society for years.
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The Yellow Sign Classic
A painter in New York keeps seeing a pale, puffy-faced churchyard watchman staring at his studio window, and the watchman looks a lot like a corpse.
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The Music of Erich Zann Classic
A student in a narrow, steep street in a European city hears music from the attic above him that seems to be holding something back.
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The Statement of Randolph Carter Classic
Questioned by the police, Randolph Carter recalls the night he waited by a telephone at the edge of an ancient cemetery while his friend descended into a tomb.
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Ancient Air
I work in an ice core lab. When we melt Antarctic ice in a vacuum chamber, it gives up tiny bubbles of air that have been sealed since before people painted caves. Our new pressure sensors are sensitive enough to record what that air was carrying. Sound.
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The Repairer of Reputations Classic
In the strange America of 1920, a man recovering from a head injury becomes convinced of his royal destiny after reading a forbidden play.
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Dagon Classic
A morphine-addicted sailor writes his last statement, describing what he found when the sea floor rose to the surface.
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Soundings
Extracts from the survey log of a small research vessel mapping the floor of a remote northern sound. The seabed there is supposed to be flat, and sixty meters down.
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The Dunwich Horror Classic
In a decaying hill village of Massachusetts, a strange child grows unnaturally fast, and his family keeps buying more cattle.
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In the Court of the Dragon Classic
A man at evening mass in Paris notices that the organist is watching him with an expression of pure malice.
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The Mask Classic
A sculptor in Paris discovers a chemical solution that turns living things to marble, and his friends begin to worry about what he plans to do with it.
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A Note Below A
A standard piano has eighty-eight keys, and the lowest is an A. I've tuned pianos for twenty-six years. The old upright in the Halasz house in Dubuque has eighty-nine.
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Occultation
Pages from the observing log of an amateur astronomer in the high desert of eastern Oregon. He was timing stars as they blinked out behind the Moon. Then they started blinking out where the Moon wasn't.
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The Colour Out of Space Classic
A surveyor west of Arkham hears of the "strange days" that followed when a meteorite fell on a lonely farm in 1882.