The Shambler from the Stars
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"The Shambler from the Stars" is a horror short story by American writer
Lovecraft wrote the short story "The Haunter of the Dark" as a sequel and dedicated it to Bloch. Eventually, in 1950, Bloch wrote his own sequel "The Shadow from the Steeple".[2]
Plot summary
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The story focuses on a
Book of Eibon
. Soon afterwards, the narrator mails letters to various libraries, universities, and occult practitioners, hoping to secure the desired volumes. However, he is only met with both hostility and threats of violence. Undeterred, he then personally begins searching various bookstores around his hometown.
At first, he again meets with disappointment, but his perseverance eventually pays off and, in an old shop on South Dearborn Street, he succeeds in obtaining an occult volume known as familiars which he believes to be a summoning towards one of the invisible "star-sent servants" spoken of in the frightful stories surrounding Prinn.
Foolishly, the narrator makes no attempt to stop the mystic from reading the inscription out loud, and immediately afterwards, the room turns dreadfully cold, and an unearthly wind rushes in through the window, followed by a hideous laughter, which heralds the arrival of an invisible
corpse
. As the creature continues to feed, it slowly becomes more and more visible until its monstrous form is fully revealed. Upon witnessing the fully visible "shambler from the stars," the narrator goes mad. After the creature retreats back into the nameless cosmic gulfs whence it had come, the book mysteriously vanishes and the narrator wanders out into the streets, shortly after setting his own friend's house on fire. While the narrator struggles to move on from his ordeal, he still subconsciously fears that the shambler from the stars will one day return for him.
Adaptations
- In 1972, Journey Into Mystery anthology series, written by Ron Goulart and with art from Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer.[3]
References
- ^ Library of America (September 23, 2010). "What Robert Bloch owes to H. P. Lovecraft". Reader's Almanac: The Official Blog of the Library of America. Retrieved December 27, 2014.
- ^ H. P. Lovecraft (2008). S. T. Joshi (ed.). H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction. Barnes & Noble. p. 999.
- ^ Journey Into Mystery (Vol. 2) #3
External links
The full text of The Shambler from the Stars at Wikisource- The Shambler from the Stars title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
