• Short Prose

• Type: Short Story

The Dunwich Horror is a 1929 short story by Horror fiction author, H P Lovecraft. - AsNotedIn

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

Places

• Dunwich, Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down.
• Hampden County, Dunwich is "a vague echo of the decadent Massachusetts countryside around Springfield say Wilbraham, Monson and Hampden." HPL letter to August Derleth
• Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, Cambridge, MA Dr Armitage had heard of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener Library.