The picture in the house by H.P. Lovecraft.com.

The Picture in the House by H.P. Lovecraft.

Searchers after horror haunt

strange far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais and the Carvan

Mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined

prime castles and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of

forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines,

and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true

epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable

ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence,

esteems most of all the ancient lonely farmhouses of Backwoods, New England.

For there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance

combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from

travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.

200 years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread.

They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow.

But the small pained windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor

which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things. In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people whose like the world has never seen,

seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which

exiled them from their kind. Their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom.

There the signs of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows,

...