The Whisperer In Darkness

Considered one of most influential American authors, Howard Philip Lovecraft wrote some of the best fantasy and horror fiction of the twentieth century. The Whisperer in Darkness, a short story written in 1930 and originally published in Weird Tales a year later, introduces some of Lovecraft's later common themes and is still powerfully unsettling today.

When local newspapers report strange things seen floating in rivers during an historic Vermont flood, folklorist and university instructor Albert Wilmarth becomes embroiled in a controversy about the significance of the sightings. Though he initially sides with the skeptics—believing the strange bodies are simply people or farm animals that have been battered by the storm and interpreted through the lens of "half-remembered folklore" of the backwoods hill people—a local Vermont academic named Henry Akeley writes to him and offers proof of these ancient, alien beings' existence. What follows is a disturbing and terrifying correspondence that leads Wilmarth ever deeper into the mystery.