In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders.

So another disappointing short story from the goat himself. Sometimes I think that reading classics is not for me because most of the time they disappoint me. Which is sad because I want to enjoy them.

The writing style here was probably the best part in this entire short story, but still it wasn’t the best as you might expect from H.P Lovecraft. After reading this several of H.P Lovecraft’s works I know that he was able to do much better than he did on this one.

The plot itself here wasn’t the best. The plot is the most generic plot about an abandoned house which you can imagine. I know that now on days there are too many horror stories about abandoned house and they are the reason why I didn’t enjoy this short story as much as I wanted to. 

This short story is about 48 pages long, but these 48 pages felt more like 480 pages. Because this short story is so boring and uninteresting. It was so boring that I needed completely focus on it because my attention was running away from the plot any chance it got. 

I give this short story 1 / 5