10 Weirdest Lovecraft Stories Every Horror Fan Should Read

PREFACE: As many of you may know, times are turbulent right now. With the political landscape being how it is, it seemed wrong to delve into an author such as Lovecraft without addressing some of the issues that come with him. Many of these stories that I am about to recommend to you will contain some appalling language and opinions that are of a certain era and have no place in the culture of today. This article celebrates the stories alone, not what they represent.

Nowadays the genre of horror has all but infected our everyday lives. You can't even browse the front page on Netflix without spying the 800th spin-off of the Conjuring franchise. But there was once a time when the idea of horror was limited to the imagination of the storytellers that would spin tales of ghouls, vampires, werewolves and goblins that prowled the misty forests at night looking for scared children to snack on. Effective, but not exactly original.

Along comes Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a bright young spark who touches upon the most crippling and universal fear to sustain for the centuries to come: the unknown. Between existential dread and - god forbid - really hard maths, Lovecraft had begun to mine a vein of fear previously untapped, and today we are going to have a look at ten of the ways in which he managed it. Into the abyss we go...

Easily coming in as the longest entry in this list, At The Mountains Of Madness is technically more of a novella than the short stories Lovecraft was famous for, but its status in fictional history is undeniable.

Focusing on William Dyer, a geologist attempting to foil a second Antarctic expedition for the fictional and ever-present Miskatonic University within Lovecraft's tales, the story takes us back to the chilling events of the initial expedition. After the advance group led by the ambitious Professor Lake discovers the remains of previously unrecorded prehistoric life-forms, Dyer's group arrives to find the camp devastated and most of the crew dismembered. What follows is an increasingly tense and maddening report of an exploration into impossibly tall mountaintops with eldritch cities carved into the icy rock. If you can stomach the extremely detailed geological explanations that litter the first half of this novel, the payoff is well worth it.

Written in 1931, the story shares similarities to the 1938 story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, a novella that would eventually serve as the basis for John Carpenter's The Thing, with the tundra backdrop and alien intrigue. Just throw in a bit of Kurt Russell and we're good to go.