The HPLHS is pleased to present the first original audiobook of Lovecraft’s collaborations and revisions, covering 32 stories and comprising more than twenty-three hours of professionally recorded audio. The stories are read by HPLHS founders and trained actors Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, from texts prepared by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. The recordings feature original music by Troy Sterling Nies. Two years in the making, this collection gathers all the stories Lovecraft wrote with or for friends and clients, in one comprehensive and unified collection. (We regret the stories he wrote with C.M. Eddy are not included, in accordance with the wishes of the Eddy estate.)

The Collected Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft Audiobook is available in a Collector’s Edition featuring a faux old library book which holds a custom-made 16GB memory stick containing all of the stories as individual files. Download editions of the Collected Fiction are also available. You can get an "omnibus edition" as well that includes both these collaborations and all of the fiction Lovecraft wrote on his own. You can see all the options available at the HPLHS’s online store.

CONTENT WARNING: We read HPL's stories the way he wrote them, which means there are a few tales that contain language listeners might find offensive.

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SAMPLES

Click the play button of any of the samples below to hear some of the audio in the collection.

Thumb Drive

Where Do I Start?

Download CoverWhile these collaborations do include some compelling and beloved tales, a number of them are obscure and wouldn't be counted by anyone among Lovecraft's finest works. For an audiobook which might get played on a computer or a car stereo or an iPod or wherever with varying degrees of control, and for those who might not be familiar with all of these stories, we wanted to provide some suggestions for ways to approach this collection. As with our first audiobook volume of Lovecraft's fiction, for the thumb drive we decided the best choice was to put the files in alphabetical order, but provide some suggestions for other ways to hear them.

If you’re already familiar with these tales, we suggest you simply dive in and start listening to some of your favorite stories. If you’re new to Lovecraft, we suggest you start with our RECOMMENDATIONS in the tab to the right — once you’ve heard those stories, you can explore the rest of them on your own. We have some other suggestions in other tabs here.

How to Listen

These are some of our favorites from this collection...

The Mound
The Curse of Yig
The Night Ocean
The Horror in the Museum
Out of the Aeons
The Crawling Chaos

If you want to hear the stories in the order Lovecraft worked on them, here's a guide. Our thanks to Donovan Loucks of The H.P. Lovecraft Archive.

The Green Meadow (1918)
Poetry and the Gods (1920)
The Crawling Chaos (1920/21)
Four O'Clock (1922)
The Horror at Martin's Beach (1922)
Two Black Bottles (1926)
The Last Test (1927)
The Curse of Yig (1928)
The Electric Executioner (1929)
The Mound (1929)
Medusa's Coil (1930) CONTENT WARNING
The Trap (1931)
The Man of Stone (1932)
The Horror in the Museum (1932)
Winged Death (1933)
Out of the Aeons (1933)
The Horror in the Burying Ground (1933/35)
The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast (1933)
The Slaying of the Monster (1933)
The Tree on the Hill (1934)
The Battle That Ended the Century (1934)
The Sorcery of Aphlar (1934)
[Fragment] (1934)
Till A' the Seas (1935)
Collapsing Cosmoses (1935)
The Challenge from Beyond (1935)
The Disinterment (1935)
The Diary of Alonzo Typer (1935)
In the Walls of Eryx (1936)
The Night Ocean (1936)

If you want to hear the stories in order based on who Lovecraft's collaborator/client was, here's a handy list:

R.H. Barlow
The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast
The Slaying of the Monster
The Battle That Ended the Century
Collapsing Cosmoses
Till A' the Seas
The Night Ocean

Hazel Heald
The Man of Stone
The Horror in the Museum
The Horror in the Burying Ground
Winged Death
Out of the Aeons

Adolphe de Castro
The Automatic Executioner
The Electric Executioner
The Last Test
A Sacrifice to Science

Zealia Bishop
The Curse of Yig
The Mound
Medusa's Coil (CONTENT WARNING)

Duane W. Rimel
The Tree on the Hill
The Disinterment
The Sorcery of Aphlar

Winifred V. Jackson
The Green Meadow
The Crawling Chaos

Sonia Haft Greene
Four O'Clock
The Horror at Martin's Beach

Anna Helen Crofts
Poetry and the Gods

William Lumley
The Diary of Alonzo Typer

J. Vernon Shea
[Fragment]

Kenneth Sterling
In the Walls of Eryx

Wilfred Blanch Talman
Two Black Bottles

Henry S. Whitehead
The Trap

C.L. Moore, Abraham Merritt, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long
The Challenge from Beyond

In addition to the stories, we have provided an audio Foreword and a file of Outtakes. There is also a Listening Guide MP3 in which we provide a few suggestions for how to approach the collection.

We largely went with Mr. Joshi’s determination as to the contents of this collection. There are two "collaborations" which are included in Volume 1 of this collection, because the proportion of Lovecraft to his collaborator is so great that Joshi considers them to be Lovecraft's own stories. These are “Under the Pyramids” (with Harry Houdini) and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (with E. Hoffman Price).

We have not included the four tales written with Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr.: "The Loved Dead", "Ashes", "Deaf, Dumb and Blind" and "The Ghost-Eater", because Eddy's estate did not wish to make them available. We wish it were otherwise. They have been published most recently in The Loved Dead and Other Revisions by Carroll & Graf in 1997.

We have also not included any of the "posthumous collaborations" written by August Derleth. Although they may have been inspired by Lovecraft and/or his Commonplace Book, HPL had no active part in their creation.

One does, yes. "Medusa's Coil" includes a notorious racial slur and other more generally upsetting attitudes. Although we do not share or condone Lovecraft's racial views, we made the choice to read the stories the way he wrote them, and not to substitute euphemisms. It is our belief that fans of Lovecraft must come to terms on their own with his well-known racism. If you would like to avoid hearing that offensive word, we recommend not listening to "Medusa's Coil".

We chipped away at the project over the course of two years. Of course during that time we produced a number of other projects you might also enjoy....

It didn’t seem necessary to have one, as such. Each story is its own separate MP3 file, arranged alphabetically on the thumb drive. For longer stories, there are also separate files for each chapter in the folder called "Chaptered Stories".

By means of ritualistic procedures shrouded in immemorial madness.

Although that sounds like fun, please don’t post these on the internet or make digital copies. If you really want to use excerpts in some project, write to us and let’s talk.

There are some errors that arose in the process of recording these stories — those are solely our fault and we apologize for them. We fixed the ones we could, but some of them we had to let stand. You do not need to write in and tell us about any imperfections you may find — we just hope you, Mr. Joshi, and Mr. Lovecraft will forgive us. Leman still cannot reliably pronounced "basalt". Some thumb drives also have a few minor errors in their metadata, but we think we fixed those already. If you really want to point out a mistake you've found, here's where you can write to us.

We would like to thank Derek Koch, who helped edit some of these recordings, and Reber Clark, Michael Feldman and Kevin Miller, who risked — and lost — their precious sanity by doing a proof-listen.

We included genuine autographs of Lovecraft's collaborators/clients when we could find them.

Winifred V. Jackson
Anna Helen Crofts
Sonia Haft Greene
Wilfred Blanch Talman
Adolphe Danziger
Zealia Bishop
Henry S. Whitehead
Hazel Heald
R.H. Barlow
J. Vernon Shea
Duane W. Rimel
Abraham Merritt
Robert E. Howard
C.L. Moore
Frank Belknap Long
William Lumley
Kenneth Sterling

Some Windows users have reported having an issue unarchiving their download. We are currently running tests to see what the problem might be and will replace the ZIP file if needed. Meanwhile, Windows users report having success using WinRAR to unarchive the download. A free trial version of WinRAR is available at the foregoing link. If you continue to have trouble with the download and WinRAR doesn't help, please do write to us and we will do our best to solve the problem.

Included Stories

The Automatic Executioner
The Battle that Ended the Century
The Challenge from Beyond
Collapsing Cosmoses
The Crawling Chaos
The Curse of Yig
The Diary of Alonzo Typer
The Diary of Alonzo Typer (Draft)
The Disinterment
The Electric Executioner

Four O'Clock
[Fragment]
The Green Meadow
The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast
The Horror at Martin's Beach
The Horror in the Burying Ground
The Horror in the Museum
In the Walls of Eryx
The Last Test
Medusa's Coil (CONTENT WARNING)
The Mound

The Night Ocean
Out of the Aeons
Poetry and the Gods
A Sacrifice to Science
The Slaying of the Monster
The Sorcery of Aphlar
"Till A' the Seas"
The Trap
The Tree on the Hill
Two Black Bottles
Winged Death

These are NOT dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre - rather, this is an audiobook of the original stories, in all-new, never-before-heard recordings. This collection includes all Lovecraft's revisions and collaborations except for the four stories he wrote with C.M. Eddy.

The stories were recorded at The Jungle Room and Horse Latitudes studios in Glendale, CA. Our thanks to engineers Daniel Viafore, Jeff Stone, Shayna Adler and studio managers Kevin Anderson and Michael Dumas for risking their sanity in listening to (or at least overhearing) us read for infinite hours.