The Beast in the Cave

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer, poet, literary critic and essayist, recognized as one of the greatest writers of horror literature together with Edgar Allan Poe and considered by many to be one of the precursors of Anglo-American science fiction. His works, a contamination between horror, soft science fiction, dark fantasy and low fantasy, have often been described, even by himself, with the term weird fiction (where weird stands for "strange"), being recognized among the main origins of the modern literary genre of the new weird.

Lovecraft's short story The Beast in the Cave, which we propose to our readers today, is one of the first early works of the great American writer. The first draft was written in the spring of 1904, with the final draft finished in April 1905, when Lovecraft was age fourteen. It was first published in the June 1918 issue of the amateur journalism publication The Vagrant.

A man touring the vast Mammoth Cave becomes separated from his guide and becomes lost. His torch expires and he is giving up hope of finding a way out in the pitch dark when he hears strange non-human footsteps approaching him…