[1935] The Shadow Out of Time
by H. P. Lovecraft
The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories.After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the
mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which
I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason
to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant
causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If
the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his
own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too,
be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole
race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It
is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of
all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition
set out to investigate.
mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which
I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason
to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant
causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If
the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his
own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too,
be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole
race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It
is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of
all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition
set out to investigate.