The Music Of Erich Zann

The Music Of Erich Zann
by H. P. Lovecraft

"The Music of Erich Zann" is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. Written in December 1921.

A university student is forced, by his lack of funds, to take the only lodging he can afford. In a strange part of the city he had never seen before, on a street named "Rue d'Auseil", he finds an apartment in an almost empty building. One of the few other tenants is an old German man named Erich Zann. The old man is mute and plays the with a local orchestra. He lives on the top floor and when alone at night, plays strange melodies never heard before. Over time, the student gains Zann's trust, and eventually learns of his secret, that the old man has discovered melodies and rhythms of sound of an almost otherworldly nature. Zann plays these sounds to keep back unknown and unseen creatures from Zann's window, which is said to look out into a black abyss, most likely another dimension.

About The Author :-

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the inverse is fundamentally alien.

Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, but his reputation since then has grown in leaps, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century.

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in March 1937, at the height of his career. Though only forty-six years of age, he had built up an international reputation by the artistry and impeccable literary craftsmanship of his weird tales; and he was regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as probably the greatest contemporary master of weird fiction.