#THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS SUMMARY SERIES#

What follows is a section of a letter Akeley sent to Wilmarth a few days later. Now here’s where the story really got scary. Six more dogs killed, and I felt presences all along the wooded parts of the road when I drove to Brattleboro today. My place is so far out that they may come by day as well as by night before long. I told them I wouldn’t go where they wish, or in the terrible way they propose to take me, but I’m afraid it will be no use. They don’t mean to let me get to California now-they want to take me off alive, or what theoretically and mentally amounts to alive-not only to Yuggoth, but beyond that-away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of space. Keep out of this, Wilmarth-it is worse than either you or I ever suspected.

I heard them plainly over the barking of the dogs, and once where they were drowned out a human voice helped them. They talked to me last night-talked in the cursed buzzing voice and told me things that I dare not repeat to you. It was bad enough before, but this time it is too much. It may be that all I have ever written you is a dream or madness. In each missive, Akeley described with accelerating intensity how he feared for his life.

#THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS SUMMARY SERIES#

Wilmarth, a professor at Miskatonic University received a series of letters from Henry Wentworth Akeley, a resident of the hills the creatures inhabit. Lovecraft came up with an exceptional plot for this story. This sure isn’t the Vermont I remember from the Newhart show. I liked how the author managed to work in some setting.īriefly summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills-in the deep woods of the highest peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. The narrator of the story cited a written account of the creatures. (Location 10753)Īfter reading this, mummies, zombies and witches don’t seem so scary they’re also much better looking. They were pinkish things about five feet long with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. He needed to come up with something creative to horrify his readers. As he wrote this piece in 1931, classic creatures like Frankenstein and Dracula had been around for decades.

Lovecraft put a lot of thought into his monsters. It frightened me so much I even get chills every time someone mentions Vermont to me. With the greatest of respect to the “Master of Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness” actually made me afraid to sleep with the lights off. Stephen King referred to Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” the best horror story ever written. I’d call this story the masterpiece of the tyrant of terror, H. If you read one terrifying tale of demoniacal creatures terrorizing the hills of Vermont, let it be this one.

The whisperer in darkness summary