H. P. Lovecraft 14 min read

On a sleepless night, walking desperately to save his soul, a man meets a mysterious stranger who offers to show him the true, terrible face beneath New York's teeming streets.

H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story channels his own loathing of the city into a vision of horror lurking beneath its labyrinths. Atmospheric, feverish, characteristic weird fiction. Read it for a potent slice of Lovecraftian dread, where the modern metropolis conceals something monstrous and old.

In its time

Published in 1926, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

14 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

G. O. Olinick