While riding his bicycle in the Miskatonic Valley of rural New England, a genealogist seeks shelter from an approaching storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find it contains antique books, exotic artifacts, and furniture predating the American Revolution.

However, he shows a disquieting fascination for an engraving in a rare old book, Regnum Congo, and admits to the narrator how it made him hunger for "victuals I couldn't raise nor buy" – presumably human flesh.

They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia.

But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

[6] The story introduces two of Lovecraft Country's most famous elements: I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data.... Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham.

[9] A phrase from the story's opening paragraph provided the title for An Epicure of the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi.

For Cannon, the careful realism and subtle plot development leading up to the denouement involve a restraint which helps make the story "however conventional its cannibal theme, the strongest of Lovecraft's early New England tales.