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Top Ten H.P. Lovecraft Stories

Here are my picks for the top ten H.P. Lovecraft stories of all time. You might have a different list of the best H.P. Lovecraft stories, but that’s okay.

  1. Dreams in the Witch-House – This is a story that will make you wonder about every dream you ever had. When a man moves into an old house, he dreams of traveling with a dead witch into different realms. When he dreams about stealing a baby, he wakes up to find out there has been a kidnapping.
  2. The Dunwich Horror – Probably one of Lovecrafts best works and one of the few where the good guys actually win. The main character is the offspring of an old god. Everyone thinks he is bad news but the thing growing in the family farmhouse turns out to be much worse.
  3. The Shadow Over Innsmouth – The mysterious creatures in Lovecraft’s tales are pretty disturbing but in this story, there is a whole town of them. When an investigator travels to the dilapidated town of Innsmouth, he finds the population is not entirely human. He also discovers a terrifying secret about himself.
  4. The Call of Cthulhu – The most famous of Lovecraft’s stories and the one that created a horror icon with the god Cthulhu. The story revolves around the investigation into a cult that follows ancient Cthulhu. The story has proved to be so popular that the squid-headed image of Cthulhu has appeared in many other forms of media.
  5. The Shadow Out Of Time – One of the weirdest stories about ‘possession’ I’ve ever read. Apparently a long dead race called Yithians like to switch bodies with other races to observe history. Sure, they give the bodies back to their original owners but what you do while possessed can have consequences.
  6. The Horror At Red Hook – Old and rundown neighborhoods are more than a cheap place to live. They can also be a great place to hide a door to another dimension. Naturally, when a police officer discovers strange occurrences that are going on, no one believes him.
  7. At The Mountains of Madness – A professor and his team find the remains of an ancient city in Antarctica, along with the bodies of several unidentified creatures. It seems though that not all the creatures in those mountains are dead. When another expedition to Antarctica is planned, the professor tries to talk them out of it.
  8. The Rats in the Walls – If you don’t already hate rats, you will after reading this story. The descriptions of the rats scratching and scurrying through the walls are enough to give you the creepy willies. Since it is Lovecraft, you can guess that it is not just a simple case of vermin.
  9. The Strange High House in the Mist – This story should be a moral that when someone tells you a house is haunted, you shouldn’t go in it. Because when you come out of the house, you may be missing something.
  10. The Thing on the Doorstep – One of my favorite stories of Lovecraft’s, it follows a man named Derby who marries a young woman. But he confides in his best friend that she may not be who she says. When Derby begins to act peculiar, his friend suspects that Derby’s claim of his wife’s soul transfer may be true.

For more about H.P. Lovecraft, check out:

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 9:04 am and is filed under Best Horror Books, Best Horror Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The Top Ten H.P. Lovecraft Stories”

  1. The Best of BestHorror.com - Our 10 Most Popular Posts says:
    October 16, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    [...] Top Ten H.P. Lovecraft Stories – If you haven’t read any H.P. Lovecraft yet, then you could do worse than to start with some of these stories. This one was written by someone else, which explains the glaring absence of “The Colour Out of Space”. [...]

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