"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5–9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales (Vol.

In Providence, Robert Blake, a young writer with an interest in the occult, becomes fascinated by a large disused church on Federal Hill which he can see from his lodgings on the city's east side.

However, when the city's electrical power is weakened during a thunderstorm, the local people are terrified by the sounds coming from the church and call on their Catholic priests to lead prayers against the demon.

[N 1] His last words refer to his perception of the approaching being: "I see it-- coming here-- hell-wind-- titan-blur-- black wings-- Yog-Sothoth save me-- the three-lobed burning eye..." His death is put down to a lightning strike, and a superstitious local doctor later removes the box containing the Shining Trapezohedron from the church and throws it into the Narragansett Bay.

In 1936, Bloch published a story that continued the professional fun, in which Blake did not actually die, but was possessed by Nyarlathotep, and kills off a character based on Lovecraft.

Author Lin Carter wrote stories which are pastiches of either Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith utilising all five titles.

Leigh Blackmore's poem "The Conjuration" (in his collection Spores from Sharnoth and Other Madnesses, P'rea Press, 2008) was inspired by the title "The Feaster from the Stars".

[7] Several of the surface details of the plot were taken directly from Hanns Heinz Ewers' "The Spider", which Lovecraft read in Dashiell Hammett's anthology Creeps By Night (1931).

[8] In Blake's final notes, he refers to "Roderick Usher", an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", which Lovecraft described in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" as featuring "an abnormally linked trinity of entities...a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment."