Written in 1935 but first published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales, "The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This story was the last-written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".
"The Haunter of the Dark" takes place in Providence, Rhode Island and revolves around the Church of Starry Wisdom. The cult uses an ancient artefact known as the Shining Trapezohedron to summon a terrible being from the depths of time and space.
The Shining Trapezohedron was discovered in Egyptian ruins, in a box of alien construction, by Professor Enoch Bowen before he returned to Providence in 1844. Members of the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence would awaken the Haunter of the Dark, an avatar of Nyarlathotep, by gazing into the glowing crystal. Summoned from the black gulfs of chaos, this being could show other worlds, other galaxies, and the secrets of arcane and paradoxical knowledge; but he demanded monstrous sacrifices, hinted at by disfigured skeletons that were later found in the church. The Haunter of the Dark was banished by light and could not cross a lighted area...
When you start reading this story you will be lost, lost in a world of dreadful nightmare brought to screaming life by the century's greatest master of adult fantasy and horror.
