The Shambler from the Stars

"The Shambler from the Stars" is a horror short story by American writer Robert Bloch, first published in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales.

[2] The story focuses on a nameless narrator who, in addition to being a college student, hopes to make a living as a pulp writer of weird fiction.

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 De Vermis Mysteriis, which he knows was written by a Belgian sorcerer named Ludvig Prinn, who was burned at the stake during the witchcraft trials.

While perusing the book, the mystic inadvertently stumbles across a spell or invocation on a chapter dealing with familiars which he believes to be a summoning towards one of the invisible "star-sent servants" spoken of in the frightful stories surrounding Prinn.

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.