Bill Kerwin's Reviews > The Shunned House

Written in October of 1924, "The Shunned House" is not only Lovecraft's best early novella but also one of the two watershed works which mark his transition to the themes and style of his mature period. As such, it is not only a pleasure to read but also an important work for anyone who is interested in the development of H.P. Lovecraft the writer.


It was written during the early period of his marriage, when Lovecraft and his wife were living in Brooklyn and he had already become uneasy--but not fearful, as he would later become in Red Hook--of the dark faces and diverse cultures found near the great city of New York. It seems he may have been homesick for Rhode Island too, for--although the plot of this tale was first inspired by another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey--he chose to locate it in a house (once lived in by his aunt) located in the familiar streets of Providence.

The shunned house of the title has long been an object of fascination for the narrator, a fascination he shares with his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple. The narrator summarizes the strange lore the good doctor has collected about the house, lore filled with unexplained sicknesses and deaths, and follows this with his personal account of what happened when he and his uncle ventured inside the old house.

The story is memorable not only because of our investigators' use of an electrical device to dispel supernatural phenomena (common in other weird stories of the period, but not common in Lovecraft) but also because of the artful accumulation of precise details (the white phosphorescence, the foul odor, the yellow mist, the outline of a figure on a wall). What sticks in the mind more than these, however, are the nostalgia for the familiar streets of Providence and how it contrasts with the utter alien nature of the thing discovered within the house.

It is the the union of these two--a profound sense of place, and the fear of the alien other which disrupts it--which will be the key to the terror evoked by the great Lovecraft tales to come.