Lovecraft was at work on a document that was actually was designed to be read by the general public: “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Although this would be among the most difficult in its composition of any of his major stories, this 25,000-word novelette—the longest of his fictions up to that time aside from his two “practice” novels—conjures up the hoary grandeur of the New England countryside even more poignantly than any of his previous works, even if it suffers from some flaws of conception and motivation.
