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The festival

by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

  • Free to read
  • 15 min read
  • Reading level: 8th & 9th grade

"The Festival" by H. P. Lovecraft is a short story written in October 1923. An unnamed narrator travels to the ancient Massachusetts town of Kingsport to honor a family tradition—attending a forbidden festival held once every century. He finds a decrepit town frozen in time, where silent, masked figures lead him through colonial streets to a church hiding dark secrets. Beneath the crypt lies a nightmare realm where ancestral horrors gather for rituals older than mankind itself.

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  • Short stories
  • Horror tales
  • New England

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The Festival

By H. P. Lovecraft

Author of “Dagon,” “The Rats in the Walls,” etc.

“Efficiunt daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi
sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.”—Lactantius.

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

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About this edition

This free edition of The festival by H. P. Lovecraft comes from Project Gutenberg eBook #68553, released 2022-07-18. It is in the public domain in the United States, so you can read it here in full at no cost, on any phone, tablet or computer. Genre: Short Stories, Science-Fiction & Fantasy, American Literature.

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