He

by H.P. Lovecraft, K. Anderson Yancy (Illustrator)

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Lovecraftian, Fiction, Classics, Fantasy, Audiobook

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Howard 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

Reviews

[Peter]

In this disturbing and bizarre story a first person narrator gets shown by a nameless magician the real face of the city. Is it a perspective of the future or one of the past? The visions seen are terrible and absolutely shocking. What is going on here? This story definitely casts a black shadow on the big city of New York. Does the narrator survive his trip? Well, you have to go on a trip yourself and read this well crafted story by Lovecraft. Sometimes I felt I was shown those thing by the magician. Great read. Recommended!

[Bill Kerwin]

This short story, first published in Weird Tales (September, 1926) was written eleven months earlier, at 7 A.M., in a Elizabeth, New Jersey park, after one of H.P.’s midnight rambles in August of 1925. Its Greenwich Village geographical details are based on an even earlier walk Lovecraft made during the summer of 1924. During these solitary nighttime walks, Lovecraft could escape from the immigrant throngs that crowed the daytime metropolis, an alien horde which—Lovecraft habitually thought—menaced him by day. (Was this in spite of—or because of—he was married to a Ukrainian immigrant Jew—Sonia Shafirkin Greene—at the time?)

In this tale—one of the most blatant literary expressions of Lovecraft’s racism—our narrator encounters an ancient gentleman who becomes his guide through the oldest alleys of the city. This person—who turns out to be more ancient that anyone could have reasonably suspected—shows his companion a vision of New York City’s past and then a view of its future:

For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandaemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

Luckily for Lovecraft’s craft—and his sanity—he soon relocated to New England, and there he sublimated his fears of Levantine and Far Eastern aliens into a fear of a much more alien kind of alien. It was then that his best work began.

[ᴥ Irena ᴥ]

3.5

He
An unnamed optimistic poet arrives in New York. He loves everything about it since the night promises great things for him. Daylight, however, brings disappointments. The wonderful city of night turns into a dead, modern thing during the day. Soon the disappointed man starts going out only at night, wandering the less known or even forgotten streets and alleys and loving the feeling of old he manages to find there.
One night he meets a strange man who promises to show him more. He promises something wonderful. Although there is something not quite right with the stranger, the narrator goes with him. Creepy story with a twist near the end.

[Andrés Diplotti]

The purple prose is strong in this one. Take a look at this, barely the second sentence of the story:

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.

Yes, that is just one sentence.

Only because the prose is so fun to read I'm giving this two stars instead of only one. Just look at who the monsters are in this story: foreigners and Indians. The foreigners are "squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes" that corrupt the once proud New York; a vision of the future of the city overrun by immigrants is enough to give the sensitive, blue-eyed protagonist screaming fits. The Indians might or might not have drunk themselves to death (because of course they would), and then their spirits blame the white sorcerer who stole their magic (again, because blaming white people is what Indians do, right?). I suspect Lovecraft would support Donald Trump today.

I find Lovecraft's phobias make for better stories when they are less overt. In The Shadow over Innsmouth, for example, they make for the right kind of creepy. When the batrachian abominations are humans of the wrong ethnic makeup, old H. P. is just your racist grandpa.

[Virginia]

I think I need a break from Lovecraft. I'm not sure I appreciate such a vivid glimpse of what the world must look like through the eyes of a bigot.

[Dorotea]

Just because you put together beautiful words, it doesn’t make it a great story
​

[Brian]

Lovecraft writes beautiful prose.

A man guides the first person narrator to labyrinths he seeks. He shows him secrets by power of necromancy and the narrators screams awaken something slithering up the stairway, black and with hundreds of undead eyes, "He."

[Jonathan Dunne]

Wow!

Wishing Netflix would make a HP Lovecraft mini series, each episode dedicated to one short story. I would tune in.

[Rissa (rissasreading)]

1.75

[Baal Of]

A fairly standard offering from HPL including a trip through weird landscapes and buildings, and the expected overwrought language. Mystical arts, a mysterious stranger, visions of a future with weird architecture, and then black goo with lots of eyes. It's enough to drive one mad.

[Quirkyreader]

This was a very twisted story.

[Graeme Rodaughan]

A youthful poet seeks 'Wonderment,' in the alleys and byways of New York. Accepts a stranger as a guide and quickly finds himself within an ancient realm of otherworldly horrors. Barely escapes with his mind and body intact. Kinda dragged in spots, although the creature known as 'He,' was inventive.

3 'Beware Strangers in New York,' stars.

[Amanda]

So racist.

[Tihana]

I really do love his stories, but sometimes I find it hard to separate art from the artist with him, you know? Especially in works like these, where the bigotry shines through. True, one can't expect much better from someone living in those times, especially from a person as paranoid about, well, literally everyone and everything, as he was. But it doesn't make it easier to stomach. I've seen some takes on this story saying that 'He' is the personification of Lovecraft's racism and the story tells a kind of fight or struggle against it. If I recall correctly, I did read that he regretted his racism/xenophobia later on in his life. But one can only guess, I suppose. In any case, I just felt uncomfortable during this entire thing. I couldn't get into it no matter how hard I tried. I give it two stars only because I like his writing style. Everything else was just... I don't know.

[Nikita]

Though only the second Lovecraft story I read, it establishes him as the archetype white racist American without any redeeming qualities. A slight possibility exists that Lovecraft was mocking the ambiguous morality of post-WWI Western world, by exaggerating the deep-rooted fears of racists. However it's hard to distinguish the narrator from the writer in case of such short stories.
Still I find myself immensely attracted to the brilliant prose of Lovecraft which settles between the archaic fearful lore of our ancestors and the ramblings of modern man disappointed by promise of triumphant civilization.

[for-much-deliberation ...]

Another of Lovecraft's weird tales. An unnamed narrator has moved to New York, decides to take a walk one night, meets a strangely dressed fellow, accepts his invitation to go on some late night site seeing, listens to some strange tale, gets damn frightened, then learns that he's just met some dead guy from the 1700s...

[Michael Sorbello]

The prose in this story was phenomenal and dripping with eldritch fascination, but the racial undertones dragged it down quite a bit. He could have pulled off a nice dream cycle story here, but chose to go with this instead. Luckily, this was around the point he began to grow out of his discriminatory attitude and moved on to bigger and better things.

[Jesus Flores]

Cuento pequeño sobre un tipo que conoce a otro y de buenas lo lleva a ver algo y pues resulta que es algo terrorifico.

Tarda mucho explicando el porque al primer personaje no le gusto el Nueva York pues no era a sus expectativas.

3 stars

[Absolute Orwell]

fun idea but not long enough to actually have much impact.

[Juri Lennart]

Definitiv sehr persönlich

Zum Kontext: Lovecraft hat sich in New York nie wohlgefühlt und ist schnell wieder in seine Heimat in New England zurückgekehrt, genauso wie der Protagonist dieser Geschichte. New York kommt hier auch nicht sehr gut weg, insbesondere tatsächlich die New Yorker. Aber die Beschreibung der Stadt, insbesondere des Wiederspruchs der architektonischen Schönheit und des gleichzeitigen Toten leblosen Gefühls dass die Stadt im Protagonisten auslöst sind echt toll
Die Auflösung fällt dafür ein bisschen flach

[Netanella]

First line: I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision.

Our loquacious narrator travels to New York where he encounters a dirty city, dirty natives and even dirtier foreigners, and has visions of unknowable horrors in the city hat leaves him cataleptic in the end. Typical Lovecraftian stuff, but not as good as other shorts.

[Branson Plunk]

It looks like our boy Howard does NOT like New York City. Most of Lovecraft's writings are about things he was afraid of, and hoo boy he did NOT like the idea of an old city. The weird bit about time-traveling was kind of fun, but the entity that was knocking down the door was weird and spooky. Overall I think I liked this one a bit more than some of the other stories in this collection.

[Sara]

Its nt my imigation
that black under city who have yallow eys pep
itsnt my imigtion
to take that adv cold mist road
to have my redimpation
to survive behind black window
to survive yallow fung and flash hold sky pirsoner
with pain and broken bone searce to my freedom
just my word and poem my candle was
at cold road
my imganition take that desert to sea
greensky hold dark sea with cold eyes
still me and river of my blood who wake the life of my soul
that city nt my imgation witgj witch green one take me over the cloud
natural to feel free when i open my eys
and beleve.

[Julia Leporace]

“[...] and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things.”

[Mika]

I think that this short story is loosely based on the Native Americans genocide which is truly tragic.

While it's not just about Native Americans, it mainly felt rather sad than creepy, which is quite disappointing as I expect a creepy horror story.

[Tony Ciak]

Horror, short story by a master, well done!!

[Jonathan Larham]

"Read" as an Audiobook as part of the Complete HP Lovecraft collection

A decent short story but basically tells you not to trust magicians. Don't worry, I won't

[Griffin]

The scariest part? Willingly moving to New York City.

[Teemu Öhman]

A story set in the "tenebrous labyrinths" of New York, sort of. Not a really great one, but worth reading anyway.

3.75/5

[Tom]

4.25 Stars rounded down to 4 Stars.