English · Intermediate
Read The Dunwich Horror in Englishwith every sentence explained
H. P. Lovecraft · 1929
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft was first published in 1929. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and horror. It runs to about 17,200 words.
A boy who grows far too fast. A farmhouse sealed shut. Something waiting in the hills.
Dunwich is a decaying village in the wild hills of Massachusetts, a place travellers avoid without quite knowing why. Strange rumbles come from beneath the ground, stone circles crown the mountaintops, and the locals whisper about the old Whateley family and their sorcery.
In 1913, Lavinia Whateley gives birth to a son, Wilbur. No one knows who the father is. The child walks and talks absurdly early and grows at a frightening speed, while his grandfather buys cattle that seem to vanish and nails up the windows of the house. Years later Wilbur appears at Miskatonic University, hungry for a forbidden book, and the librarian, Dr Henry Armitage, begins to fear what the Whateleys are planning.
The Dunwich Horror is one of Lovecraft's most famous tales, a cornerstone of the Cthulhu Mythos and of modern horror.
- Author
- H. P. Lovecraft
- First published
- 1929
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Fantasy, Horror
- Length
- About 17,200 words
How it opens
When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.
Reading The Dunwich Horror in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
