The Lurking Fear (Fantasy and Horror Classics) ; With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss

Beneath the cursed mountains, a hunger has been waiting for generations. A lone journalist travels to the desolate, fog-shrouded Catskill Mountains to investigate a series of gruesome, inexplicable attacks that have terrorized the isolated community of Tempest Mountain. The local legends whisper of a monstrous creature--a ghastly, subterranean entity that emerges from the earth during lightning storms to feast upon the living. The journalist's skepticism is quickly eroded by the sheer brutality of the attacks, which point not to a wild animal, but to a vast, intelligent, and deeply degenerate force. He soon discovers the source of the dread: the ruined, accursed manor house of the Martense family. The Martenses, a wealthy and reclusive Dutch line, slowly succumbed to generations of inbreeding and debauchery within their isolated estate. The result was a grotesque, primal, and incredibly fertile lineage that retreated underground, devolving into a horde of pale, ape-like cannibals. The "creature" is not one monster, but a ravenous, subterranean colony of them--the horrifying, mutated remnants of a once-noble family. The Lurking Fear is one of H. P. Lovecraft's most visceral and disturbing tales. It combines the slow-burn dread of the gothic novel with a harrowing look at biological horror, suggesting that the most terrifying monsters are not aliens from space, but the degenerate forms of humanity that have been breeding in the dark right beneath our feet. Listen closely for the scratching. The family is hungry.