From Beyond

H. P. Lovecraft wrote From Beyond in 1920, but the story did not see print until June 1934, when editor Charles D. Hornig ran it in a fan magazine called The Fantasy Fan. That gap of fourteen years says something about how strange the tale is. The narrator, a physician named Crawford Tillinghast, has built a machine that vibrates the pineal gland, letting him and a reluctant friend perceive creatures and dimensions that share our space but normally stay invisible. What they see is not friendly. The story runs barely a dozen pages in most editions, and its brevity is part of the punch. Lovecraft wrote it early in his career, before he had fully worked out the cosmic-horror voice of At the Mountains of Madness or The Shadow over Innsmouth, and the prose shows a writer testing an idea rather than polishing it. Still, the central notion, that science can open doors better left shut, became one of his recurring themes. The Fantasy Fan version remains the standard text, and later collections such as The Dunwich Horror and Others keep it in circulation. Readers who know Lovecraft only through Cthulhu will find here a leaner, more claustrophobic kind of dread, set in a single house and built on a single terrible device.[edit]