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Winged Death
Winged Death is a classic American horror short story by H. P. Lovecraft that begins: The Orange Hotel stands in High Street near the railway station in Bloemfontein, South Africa. On Sunday, January 24, 1932, four men sat shivering from terror in a room on its third floor.
40 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
About the author
H.P. Lovecraft
6,498 books19.7k followersHoward Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
May 1, 2017
3.5
Oh, joy, one of my favourite things ever: insects!
Four people are sitting in a room in the Orange Hotel. They are terrified. There's a dead body in the room, a journal and a dead fly 'of peculiar aspect which floated in a bottle of ammonia on the table'. Above them on the ceiling 'a series of faltering alphabetical characters had somehow been scrawled in ink'.
One of the men opens the journal and reads from it to the other three. In it the dead man, a well-known scientist, had written all about his revenge on a colleague, whom he blamed for losing a chance to be knighted. He never expected the old legends to be true.
You now from the start that he's going to die and why, so the story is about the how. Since he is a horrible human being (not once he felt remorse about his revenge), I never felt sorry for him.
Oh, joy, one of my favourite things ever: insects!
Four people are sitting in a room in the Orange Hotel. They are terrified. There's a dead body in the room, a journal and a dead fly 'of peculiar aspect which floated in a bottle of ammonia on the table'. Above them on the ceiling 'a series of faltering alphabetical characters had somehow been scrawled in ink'.
One of the men opens the journal and reads from it to the other three. In it the dead man, a well-known scientist, had written all about his revenge on a colleague, whom he blamed for losing a chance to be knighted. He never expected the old legends to be true.
You now from the start that he's going to die and why, so the story is about the how. Since he is a horrible human being (not once he felt remorse about his revenge), I never felt sorry for him.
Image source
September 26, 2016
Be careful of flies you can't identify.
September 19, 2018
These collaborations with Hazel Heald are priceless. It is all so loony and with the writing on the wall. Read it. You might get a small shudder, but you'll get an even greater laugh.
December 5, 2019
Wordsworth Editions
London, 2010.
This crazy shit has two diegetic levels of narration. The first level is the heterodiegetic level with an all-seeing narrator who presents to us how some group of policemen discovered a diary of a mad scientist.
That diary is the metadiegetical level of narration, of course written in the first person, written by the protagonist himself, thus an autodiegetical metadiegetical narration.
At the very end the diary finishes and we return to the starting all-seeing narrator, the heterodiegetic narrator. So, the form of this novella is a circle.
The text has some basic elements of Lovecraft s writing, a metaphora that stands as a describing synonym:
"March 15- Struck lake Mlolo this morning- where Merana was bitten. A hellish, green-summed affair, full of crocodiles."
The describing metaphora of the lake is what I am talking about. By no doubt I am not saying that this is unique for Lovecraft, but it is really omnipresent in his work. Or maybe it just catch my eye by chance...
The content is so typical for Lovecraft but I love it that way.
A mad scientist full of resent who creates a malign fly to kill his former friend scientist who allegedly tried to screw him.
It has some glimpses, aka parallels, to Conrad s opus, especially "The Heart of Darkness" because of its postcolonial features of Africa.
¡Hasta luego!
London, 2010.
This crazy shit has two diegetic levels of narration. The first level is the heterodiegetic level with an all-seeing narrator who presents to us how some group of policemen discovered a diary of a mad scientist.
That diary is the metadiegetical level of narration, of course written in the first person, written by the protagonist himself, thus an autodiegetical metadiegetical narration.
At the very end the diary finishes and we return to the starting all-seeing narrator, the heterodiegetic narrator. So, the form of this novella is a circle.
The text has some basic elements of Lovecraft s writing, a metaphora that stands as a describing synonym:
"March 15- Struck lake Mlolo this morning- where Merana was bitten. A hellish, green-summed affair, full of crocodiles."
The describing metaphora of the lake is what I am talking about. By no doubt I am not saying that this is unique for Lovecraft, but it is really omnipresent in his work. Or maybe it just catch my eye by chance...
The content is so typical for Lovecraft but I love it that way.
A mad scientist full of resent who creates a malign fly to kill his former friend scientist who allegedly tried to screw him.
It has some glimpses, aka parallels, to Conrad s opus, especially "The Heart of Darkness" because of its postcolonial features of Africa.
¡Hasta luego!
July 19, 2018
4*. Very good! I have some doubts about inevitability of danger in this story, but nonetheless I was hooked!
March 26, 2022
Spaventosamente lucido, riesce ad impressionare come fosse reale. Le parole compongono un quadro così perfetto. Uno dei miei preferiti di Lovecraft, davvero inquietante.
May 7, 2022
Lovecraft #86: Winged Death (1933, with Hazel Heald)
“Old N’Kuru, one of the Galla boys at the post, says it must be the bite of a devil-fly, which makes its victim waste away gradually and die, and then takes hold of his soul and personality if it is still alive itself—flying around with all his likes, dislikes, and consciousness.”
[Winged Death (2016) by Warmics Mario Vazquez (known as Warmics). This illustration has nothing to do with the Heald/Lovecraft story, I just like it]
The premise of “Winged Death” is absolutely ridiculous and that makes it so much fun to read. This story is arguably the 86th oldest extant story by American weird fiction author Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937) and probably his third collaboration with Hazel Heald. I am reading all of HPL’s fictional works in chronological order this year.
[Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935)]
Like an earlier collaboration between Heald and Lovecraft, The Horror in the Museum, Winged Death reminds me of Universal Studios horror movies from the 1930s. The premise of a mad scientist using poisoned flies to enact an elaborate revenge scheme is so gloriously campy! I can picture Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi chewing the scenery as the protagonist/villain Thomas Slauenwite. Vincent Price in the 1950s would also have been great in the part. Most of Winged Death is told from Dr. Slauenwite’s diary entries. He is a highly entertaining, utterly immoral human being and it was fun to see him get his comeuppance.
Title: Winged Death
Author: H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald
Dates: probably written in the summer of 1932, first published in March 1934
Genre: Fiction - Novelette*, horror, science fiction
Word count: 9,987 words
Date(s) read: 5/7/22
Reading journal entry #143 in 2022
Sources:
Link to the story: https://hplovecraft.com/writings/fict...
First publication citation: Weird Tales vol. 23, no. 3 (March 1934): 299–315.
Joshi, S. T., & Schultz, D. E. (2001). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press.
Links to the images:
https://www.deviantart.com/mrzarono/a...
https://falconmovies.wordpress.com/20...
Written on 5/7/22
“Old N’Kuru, one of the Galla boys at the post, says it must be the bite of a devil-fly, which makes its victim waste away gradually and die, and then takes hold of his soul and personality if it is still alive itself—flying around with all his likes, dislikes, and consciousness.”
[Winged Death (2016) by Warmics Mario Vazquez (known as Warmics). This illustration has nothing to do with the Heald/Lovecraft story, I just like it]
The premise of “Winged Death” is absolutely ridiculous and that makes it so much fun to read. This story is arguably the 86th oldest extant story by American weird fiction author Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937) and probably his third collaboration with Hazel Heald. I am reading all of HPL’s fictional works in chronological order this year.
[Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935)]
Like an earlier collaboration between Heald and Lovecraft, The Horror in the Museum, Winged Death reminds me of Universal Studios horror movies from the 1930s. The premise of a mad scientist using poisoned flies to enact an elaborate revenge scheme is so gloriously campy! I can picture Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi chewing the scenery as the protagonist/villain Thomas Slauenwite. Vincent Price in the 1950s would also have been great in the part. Most of Winged Death is told from Dr. Slauenwite’s diary entries. He is a highly entertaining, utterly immoral human being and it was fun to see him get his comeuppance.
Title: Winged Death
Author: H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald
Dates: probably written in the summer of 1932, first published in March 1934
Genre: Fiction - Novelette*, horror, science fiction
Word count: 9,987 words
Date(s) read: 5/7/22
Reading journal entry #143 in 2022
Sources:
Link to the story: https://hplovecraft.com/writings/fict...
First publication citation: Weird Tales vol. 23, no. 3 (March 1934): 299–315.
Joshi, S. T., & Schultz, D. E. (2001). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press.
Links to the images:
https://www.deviantart.com/mrzarono/a...
https://falconmovies.wordpress.com/20...
*The difference between a short story, novelette, novella, and a novel: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Diff...
Vignette, prose poem, flash fiction: 53 - 1,000 words
Short Stories: 1,000 - 7,500
Novelettes: 7,500 - 17,000
Novellas: 17,000 - 40,000
Novels: 40,000 + words
Written on 5/7/22
June 2, 2019
Томас Слауенвайт мав намір вбити Генрі Мура і кожен свій крок задокументував у щоденнику. Слауенвайт був відомим лікарем, а Мур - відомим ентомологом, але якось так вийшло, що Мур зруйнував кар'єру Слауенвайта, тому той вирішив будь-що йому помститися. І найкраще це буде зробити в іронічний спосіб.
Лікар дізнався про муху-диявола, укус якої неодмінно вбиває людину, а щоб ентомолог напевно не впізнав її, то схрещує її з мухою-цеце і розпилює на неї тривкий синій барвник. Досліди на африканських слугах дали позитивний результат, і він нарешті відіслав сотню екземплярів своєму ворогу.
Якою ж була його радість, коли він дізнався, що Мур спочатку отримав посилку, а потім поскаржився на укус і нездужання! Але він тримався неочікувано довго - пвітора року пройшло поки хвороба його нарешті здолала.
Але втіха Слауенвайта була недовгою. Він помітив, що одна з його мух якимось чином повернулася до нього. І тут він згадав повір'я про те, що після смерті укушеної людини її душа переселяється в муху-диявола, яка її вкусила. Тож це сам Мур прилетів мститися і зробить він те саме, що задумав зробити з ним Слауенвайт!
Одне з оповідань Лавкрафта, де расизм навіть не прихований.
Лікар дізнався про муху-диявола, укус якої неодмінно вбиває людину, а щоб ентомолог напевно не впізнав її, то схрещує її з мухою-цеце і розпилює на неї тривкий синій барвник. Досліди на африканських слугах дали позитивний результат, і він нарешті відіслав сотню екземплярів своєму ворогу.
Якою ж була його радість, коли він дізнався, що Мур спочатку отримав посилку, а потім поскаржився на укус і нездужання! Але він тримався неочікувано довго - пвітора року пройшло поки хвороба його нарешті здолала.
Але втіха Слауенвайта була недовгою. Він помітив, що одна з його мух якимось чином повернулася до нього. І тут він згадав повір'я про те, що після смерті укушеної людини її душа переселяється в муху-диявола, яка її вкусила. Тож це сам Мур прилетів мститися і зробить він те саме, що задумав зробити з ним Слауенвайт!
Одне з оповідань Лавкрафта, де расизм навіть не прихований.
April 1, 2026
I meant to come back and review this but clean forgot.
H.P Lovecraft isn't one of my favourite authors, but when he collabs, his stories gain a more comical tone, which makes it worth the read. This one had me crying with laughter at certain moments. It was brilliantly written.
It's incredible what can be made when you combine a mans horror with a ladies wit. I'm not fond of insects, but they do add a certain decorum to stories.
I will however say, I felt uncomfortable with this story. A part of my brain thought there were some racial remarks made about Africa- someone correct me if I'm wrong. I could be. Aside from that. Wonderful story.
H.P Lovecraft isn't one of my favourite authors, but when he collabs, his stories gain a more comical tone, which makes it worth the read. This one had me crying with laughter at certain moments. It was brilliantly written.
It's incredible what can be made when you combine a mans horror with a ladies wit. I'm not fond of insects, but they do add a certain decorum to stories.
I will however say, I felt uncomfortable with this story. A part of my brain thought there were some racial remarks made about Africa- someone correct me if I'm wrong. I could be. Aside from that. Wonderful story.
March 15, 2018
Rather an odd one, but with an intriguing premise and the journal worked well for the execution. One complaint:
January 22, 2020
All right..so in this one the character does not keep writing in his journal as he's dying, or about to die. He wraps it up long before the final hours. In short, not "The Diary of Alonso Typer" all over again. A sociopath and evil genius bringing about his own doom in a Promethean manner, that's how I'd sum it up in one sentence. Think Langeelan's "The Fly" but subtler.
June 6, 2022
Прочитав збірку оповідань від Фоліо під назвою «Крилата смерть», де було ще багато інших оповідань, крім цього (правда доблесне Фоліо не додає своїх книжок сюди, дякую).
Щодо відгуку, то творами задоволений і читати їх було приємно, відразу погружаєшся в цю атмосферу. Хоча лячно не стає, але читати дуже цікаво. Тому рекомендую!
Щодо відгуку, то творами задоволений і читати їх було приємно, відразу погружаєшся в цю атмосферу. Хоча лячно не стає, але читати дуже цікаво. Тому рекомендую!
May 15, 2023
Another collaboration between Hazel Heald and Lovecraft, another disappointment.
This is a story of revenge, with a mosquito twist, possible inspired by the same whippoorwills from The Dunwich Horror. Nor the narrator, nor his desire for revenge are interesting and the tale fails to to realize the short life-span of the tsetse flies.
Overall, a very forgettable tale.
This is a story of revenge, with a mosquito twist, possible inspired by the same whippoorwills from The Dunwich Horror. Nor the narrator, nor his desire for revenge are interesting and the tale fails to to realize the short life-span of the tsetse flies.
Overall, a very forgettable tale.
September 18, 2017
Hazel Heald and Lovecraft collaborated on 5 novels: she wrote the novel, and Lovecraft reviewed them. Interestingly enough, they often are far superior than the average Lovecraft's story. Winged Death is no exception, it is a compelling, entertaining story, dealing with professional envy, competition, revenge, and murder. Unfortunately, as it is pretty much always the case with Lovecraft, the story is marred with xenophobia, to the point of making it, at point, hard to read.
The most horrifying thing about this story, is that the horrifying idea of using people of African descent as guinea pigs, was, at the time, and for a long time afterwards, not fictional (Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment). That is to say that reality can be more horrifying that fiction.
The most horrifying thing about this story, is that the horrifying idea of using people of African descent as guinea pigs, was, at the time, and for a long time afterwards, not fictional (Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment). That is to say that reality can be more horrifying that fiction.
August 21, 2024
E' il mio racconto lovecraftiano top 2 sicuramente, la versione italiana sempre mi fa venire i brividi e lo leggerò tutte le volte possibile quando avrò bisogno di sentire quella "paura rica".
(scusatemi del mio schifoso italiano)
(scusatemi del mio schifoso italiano)
February 11, 2021
I liked the idea, but it didn't worth a read. This kind of simplistic story doesn't need a 40-pages book. Too predictable narrative with weirdly motivated characters.
February 28, 2022
And you thought using blue ringed octopuses as a murder weapon was weird...
November 12, 2022
Хорошо читать летом, отбиваясь от назойливой мухи.
December 8, 2023
Oh my god Lovecraft must've been so high writing this shit down
August 30, 2024
Really creative - creepy and imaginative. This is a strong short entry from Lovecraft.
April 3, 2026
I don't think there can be anything more terrifying (maybe) than the horror that comes from insanity.
May 16, 2022
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tal...
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Winged...
Two months after Winged Death was published in Weird Tales, The Outpost(*) by H.P. Lovecraft was published in the May 1934 issue of Fantasy Magazine:
(*) https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/... - http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
https://www.tor.com/2017/06/28/horrib...
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Winged...
In Uganda at last! [...] This jungle is a pestilential place—steaming with miasmal vapours. All the lakes look stagnant. In one spot we came upon a trace of Cyclopean ruins which made even the Gallas run past in a wide circle. They say these megaliths are older than man, and that they used to be a haunt or outpost of “The Fishers from Outside”—whatever that means—and of the evil gods Tsadogwa and Clulu. To this day they are said to have a malign influence, [...]
Two months after Winged Death was published in Weird Tales, The Outpost(*) by H.P. Lovecraft was published in the May 1934 issue of Fantasy Magazine:
[...]
And voidward from that pest-mad zone
Amorphous hordes seethed darkly back,
Their dim claws laden with the wrack
Of things that men have dreamed and known.
The ancient Fishers from Outside—
Were there not tales the high-priest told,
Of how they found the worlds of old,
And took what pelf their fancy spied?
Their hidden, dread-ringed outposts brood
Upon a million worlds of space;
Abhorred by every living race,
Yet scatheless in their solitude.
[...]
(*) https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/... - http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
https://www.tor.com/2017/06/28/horrib...
December 11, 2014
I thought that this was very good; very straightforward in a circular way. Mad scientists ahoy!
August 3, 2015
scary, i really like it.
August 6, 2015
Cuando las moscas son más que insectos... :D <3
January 6, 2016
For a story which starts at the end, this does a great job of pulling the reader along and making them dread the inevitable conclusion. Some interesting body horror as well.
May 30, 2016
A chilling story with an excellent ending. Highly recommended to everyone who likes mysterious stories that, slowly crawl on you.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews