The Shadow over Innsmouth
Source of horror's entire 'fishy seaside town with a secret' tradition, and the story where Lovecraft's hereditary anxieties are most nakedly the engine.
Book Entry · Horror
What is The Wendigo about?
A moose-hunting party in the Canadian backwoods splits up, and the level-headed guide Défago is taken by something out of Algonquin legend — snatched into the sky by a presence of wind and fire and burning feet, returning as something that is almost, but catastrophically not quite, himself. Blackwood, who had lived rough in the Canadian wilderness, renders the bush as a vast indifferent presence in which human personality simply isn't load-bearing. The cry of 'Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!' has lost none of its power to appal.
Why it matters
Fixed the wendigo permanently in horror's bestiary, influencing everyone from Lovecraft (who borrowed it for his Ithaqua mythology via Derleth) to Stephen King's Pet Sematary.
Read next
Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
At the Mountains of Madness
The peak of Lovecraft's 'materialist' horror, hugely influential on SF-horror hybrids from The Thing (Campbell's 'Who Goes There?' is its sibling) to Alien and Prometheus.