H.P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories Free Online: Download Audio Books, eBooks & More

We can­not prop­er­ly speak of hor­ror fic­tion with­out men­tion­ing the name H.P. Love­craft, any more than we could do so with­out speak­ing of Edgar Allan Poe, whose com­plete works we fea­tured in a post yes­ter­day. Even now, as some of Lovecraft’s real­ly vicious atti­tudes have come in for much crit­i­cal reap­praisal, the Love­craft­ian is still a dom­i­nant form. Win­ners of the World Fan­ta­sy Award receive a bust of the author, and dark mod­ern mas­ters like Stephen King and Joyce Car­ol Oates admit that Love­craft was “the twen­ti­eth century’s great­est prac­ti­tion­er of the clas­sic hor­ror tale” and “an incal­cu­la­ble influ­ence on suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tions of writ­ers of hor­ror fic­tion.” His work, writes Salon, has influ­enced “every­one from the Argen­tin­ian metafic­tion­ist Jorge Luis Borges to the film direc­tor Guiller­mo del Toro, as well as untold num­ber of rock bands and game design­ers.”

The ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry author spent almost his entire life in the New Eng­land of his birth, draw­ing on its many odd­i­ties in obscure sto­ries pub­lished in pulp magazines—notably the influ­en­tial Weird Tales. Hypochon­dri­ac, hyper-sen­si­tive, and reclu­sive in lat­er life, Love­craft sur­vived on a dwin­dling inher­i­tance and nev­er achieved much recog­ni­tion. But in death, he has spawned a for­mi­da­ble cult who immerse them­selves in a uni­verse cre­at­ed from ref­er­ences to the occult, demonolo­gy, and var­i­ous mytho­log­i­cal arche­types. How­ev­er over­wrought his prose, Lovecraft’s work can be sit­u­at­ed in a long lit­er­ary tra­di­tion of influ­ence, and a Love­craft cir­cle con­tin­ued to expand his vision of sci­en­tif­ic and super­nat­ur­al hor­ror after his death.

Cen­tral to the Love­craft cos­mos are “The Old Ones,” a col­lec­tion of pow­er­ful pri­mor­dial beings, and their cult wor­shipers, first intro­duced in “The Call of Cthul­hu” in 1926. At the top of the post, you can hear a dra­mat­ic read­ing of the sto­ry by Gar­rick Hagon. Just above hear a radio drama­ti­za­tion of “The Colour Out of Space,” which was col­lect­ed in The Best Amer­i­can Short Sto­ries in 1928, one of the few of Lovecraft’s works to receive such an hon­or in his life­time. You’ll find much more Love­craft read aloud on YouTube, includ­ing clas­sic sto­ries like “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” “At The Moun­tains of Mad­ness,” and “The Hor­ror at Red Hook.”

Lis­ten­ing to Love­craft is an excel­lent, as well as con­ve­nient, way to expe­ri­ence his work. His florid, often archa­ic, and melo­dra­mat­ic descrip­tions lend them­selves per­fect­ly to aur­al inter­pre­ta­tions. Luck­i­ly for us, we have not one, but two audio book col­lec­tions of near­ly every­thing Love­craft ever wrote. Just above, stream his com­plete pub­lic domain works, and see the Inter­net Archive for anoth­er audio­book set of his col­lect­ed works. One of the rea­sons audio of Love­craft is so plen­ti­ful is that most of his work is in the com­mons. SFF Audio has yet anoth­er huge col­lec­tion of Love­craft sto­ries read aloud, down­load­able as MP3s. Final­ly, if you some­how can’t find what you’re look­ing for at any of those links, you’re bound to at The World’s Largest H.P. Love­craft Audio Links Gate­way.

Should lis­ten­ing to Love­craft whet your appetite for more, you may just be ready to start read­ing. Although Lovecraft’s fic­tion fea­tures what may be some of mod­ern literature’s most dread­ful mon­sters, the hor­ror in his work is most­ly exis­ten­tial, as char­ac­ters con­front a vast, malev­o­lent and thor­ough­ly alien uni­verse that has no regard for human life what­so­ev­er. But the per­sis­tent bleak­ness and doom of his vision is coun­tered by an inex­haustibly rich imag­i­na­tion. In one of the open­ing sen­tences of “The Call of Cthu­lu,” Love­craft writes, “the most mer­ci­ful thing in the world, I think, is the inabil­i­ty of the human mind to cor­re­late all its con­tents,” per­haps the truest descrip­tion of his own fic­tion­al cos­mos. Love­craft schol­ars and fans spend life­times sift­ing through his mas­sive store­house of weird­ness. Whether you’re inclined to join them in the deep end, or just dip in a toe, you can find all of Lovecraft’s pub­lished work in var­i­ous forms at the loca­tions below.

• The Cthul­hu Chick blog has a com­plete works of Love­craft for Nook (ePub) and Kin­dle (MOBI), as well as in PDF
• Find an exten­sive col­lec­tion of Love­craft at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Adelaide’s online library, with HTML, ePub and Kin­dle.
• The H.P. Love­craft Archive has a wealth of bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion, and a huge col­lec­tion of Lovecraft’s work, includ­ing his poet­ry, let­ters, jour­nal­ism, lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, and sci­en­tif­ic, philo­soph­i­cal, and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essays. You’ll also find there arti­cles, reviews, and oth­er resources by fore­most Love­craft schol­ars like S.T. Joshi and Robert M. Price, as well as infor­ma­tion on Love­craft­ian influ­ence in pop­u­lar cul­ture and links to fur­ther inter­net resources.

Giv­en these resources, you should have no trou­ble becom­ing a Love­craft expert by Hal­loween. Or, at the very least, pick­ing out a few of his scari­est sto­ries to lis­ten to and read aloud around a flick­er­ing jack o’ lantern or your col­lec­tion of Cthul­hu fig­urines.

Love­craft’s works per­ma­nent­ly reside in our twin col­lec­tions: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Read Hun­dreds of Free Sci-Fi Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Love­craft, Brad­bury, Dick, Clarke & More

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness