The Shunned House

I didn't realise this was one of Lovecraft's earlier works until I read other reviews. I liked it quite a bit - it's probably the start of what made me love his prose.

It's in his usual style of having a narrator tell his story of an old house that had a bad reputation for having an unusually high number of deaths and misfortunes. It starts off slowly by taking the reader through the history of the house and its early occupants, as part of the narrator and his uncle's “research”, which were prompted by curiosity.

The flow and pacing is what makes a classic Lovecraft short story - the slow build-up of weird happenings and eerie sequences of events, leading into a growing sense of dread and foreboding - all the while immersed in beautiful descriptive prose.

Its only flaw was the ending. The final reveal of the source of the evil in the shunned house was somewhat of a dampener. It wasn't quite what the narrator, in his investigations and imaginations, had alluded to, so it didn't leave any lasting impression on me. The closing paragraphs on how the narrator dealt with it was also weak, feeling a bit too abrupt and too unresolved for me.

But I still loved reading it, for this kind of suspenseful build-up is what I really enjoy reading.