H. P. Lovecraft Trivia
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60 free H. P. Lovecraft trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This H. P. Lovecraft trivia quiz covers the writer, the mythos and the strange afterlife of both. The easier questions are the ones any horror reader knows: where he was born and died, the tentacled god who sleeps beneath the Pacific, the forbidden book he invented and the pulp magazine that printed most of his work. From there it moves into his life story, from the grandfather who told him weird tales and the night-gaunts of his childhood nightmares to his brief marriage, his miserable years in New York and his return to Providence. The harder end is for devoted readers: the story ghostwritten for Houdini, the novella he never typed up, the one book published in his lifetime, the magazine that finally ran At the Mountains of Madness, the origins of Arkham and Miskatonic, the writers of the Lovecraft Circle, August Derleth's reshaping of the mythos, and the tangled question of who owns the copyrights. There are also questions on his influence on Stephen King, heavy metal, tabletop games and Batman's asylum. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the author, his stories and his circle before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King and horror literature quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lovecraft wrote that the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of what?
The unknown
The unknown. The line opens his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he argues that this ancient dread is what earns the horror tale its dignity as a literary form.
Q 02What do the initials in H. P. Lovecraft's name stand for?
Howard Phillips
Howard Phillips. Phillips was his mother's maiden name, and when the Phillips fortune collapsed in 1904 mother and son had to leave the family mansion for half of a small duplex.
Q 03Lovecraft said his father was paralysed by overwork, but the death certificate points to which disease?
Syphilis
Syphilis. The certificate gives general paresis, a late stage of the infection, and he died in an asylum five years after breaking down in a hotel room on a business trip.
Q 04What name did the young Lovecraft give the faceless winged creatures of his childhood dreams?
Night-gaunts
Night-gaunts. He said they came for him night after night from about the age of six, and thirty years on he turned them loose in his fiction, where all they do is clutch, fly and tickle.
Q 05As a boy, Lovecraft published his own hectographed Rhode Island Journal of which science?
Astronomy
Astronomy. He wrote each issue by hand and ran off copies for his friends, and as a teenager he went on to write columns on the night sky for local newspapers.
Q 06Which university did Lovecraft plan to attend before a breakdown ended his high-school career?
Brown
Brown. He never enrolled, yet within months of his death his manuscripts and letters were deposited in the university's library, where they remain.
Q 07Lovecraft's path to a writing career began with a 1913 letter attacking which kind of magazine fiction?
Love stories
Love stories. His letter attacking Argosy's sentimental favourite Fred Jackson set off a long feud in the letters page, with Lovecraft firing back at Jackson's defenders in rhyming couplets.
Q 08What title did Lovecraft give the amateur paper he published from 1915 to 1923?
The Conservative
The Conservative. The title suited the young Tory who filled its pages with political essays, but the Great Depression later turned him into a socialist who backed Franklin Roosevelt.
Q 09Which 1985 cult horror film is based on Lovecraft's serial about the medical student Herbert West?
Re-Animator
Re-Animator. A friend commissioned the serial it adapts, Herbert West-Reanimator, for his new humour magazine Home Brew, which launched it as Grewsome Tales and ran it in six monthly parts.
Q 10Which Irish fantasy writer's 1919 Boston lecture did Lovecraft attend soon after discovering his work?
Lord Dunsany
Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft said the encounter gave his writing perhaps its greatest push, and later admitted that in pure fantasy he could do no more than imitate him.
Q 11Which words complete Lovecraft's famous line 'And with strange aeons even…'?
Death may die
Death may die. The couplet, which opens 'That is not dead which can eternal lie', first appeared in The Nameless City in 1921, and Lovecraft brought it back five years later in The Call of Cthulhu, where an aged cultist cites it.
Q 12Whom did Lovecraft marry in 1924?
Sonia Greene
Sonia Greene. The milliner planned to support him while he wrote, but within a year her hat shop had failed and she had left New York for a job in Cleveland.
Q 13What was the informal name of Lovecraft's circle of literary friends in New York?
The Kalem Club
Q 21Lovecraft's last solo story kills off Robert Blake, a writer he modelled on which young correspondent?
Robert Bloch
Robert Bloch. The future author of Psycho had killed off a Lovecraft-like character in a story of his own, so Lovecraft returned the courtesy in The Haunter of the Dark and dedicated it to him.
Q 22What did Lovecraft die of in March 1937?
Cancer of the small intestine
Cancer of the small intestine. He saw a doctor only in his last month, by which time nothing could be done, and he logged his own symptoms in a diary until he could no longer hold a pen.
Q 23What phrase did fans inscribe on the headstone they erected for Lovecraft in 1977?
I Am Providence
The Kalem Club. The name played on the letters K, L and M, the initials of its early regulars, among them Kleiner, Kirk, Loveman, Leeds, McNeil and Morton.
Q 14Which celebrity's supposedly true Egyptian adventure did Lovecraft ghostwrite as 'Under the Pyramids' in 1924?
Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini. He liked the tale of his own burial beneath the Sphinx so much that he hired Lovecraft again, and the two were planning a book attacking superstition when Houdini died in 1926.
Q 15Which Weird Tales editor often rejected Lovecraft, then accepted many stories after his death?
Farnsworth Wright
Farnsworth Wright. He liked his stories short, which is why he turned down At the Mountains of Madness, and Lovecraft took the rejection so badly that he shelved the novella for years.
Q 16Which Brooklyn neighbourhood near Lovecraft's 1925 lodgings gave its name to one of his horror stories?
Red Hook
Red Hook. Lonely and jobless, he had come to loathe New York, and The Horror at Red Hook pours that feeling, and his hostility to the district's immigrants, into a tale of a hidden devil cult.
Q 17Lovecraft's wife remarried in 1936 believing they were divorced, but what had he done with the final decree?
Left it unsigned
Left it unsigned. She had pushed for the divorce in 1929 and the papers were filed, but without his signature it never became final, which left her new marriage in California technically bigamous.
Q 18Which Texan pulp writer became Lovecraft's correspondent after praising "The Rats in the Walls" to Weird Tales?
Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard. The creator of Conan the Barbarian argued with Lovecraft by letter for six years, and his suicide in 1936 moved Lovecraft to write a memoir of him almost at once.
Q 19Which Lovecraft novel first saw print in Weird Tales, cut, four years after his death?
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He wrote the 50,000-word novel in early 1927 and then made almost no effort to sell it, so it sat in manuscript for the rest of his life.
Q 20Which Lovecraft story came out as a cloth-bound book of its own in 1936, months before his death?
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Shadow over Innsmouth. It was no triumph: the crudely produced edition was full of misprints, to Lovecraft's dismay, and only about half of the 400 printed copies were ever bound.
I Am Providence. The line comes from one of his letters, and for forty years he had no stone of his own, only his name added to the family monument a few feet away.
Q 24Which mindless 'daemon-sultan' did Lovecraft enthrone at the centre of all infinity?
Azathoth
Azathoth. Lovecraft began a novel named after him in 1922 and abandoned it after a few pages, leaving a god whose name, his stories say, no lips dare speak aloud.
Q 25What name is given to Lovecraft's philosophy that humanity is insignificant in a vast, uncaring universe?
Cosmicism
Cosmicism. Lovecraft denied being a pessimist and called himself an indifferentist: the powers in his tales are not hostile to humanity, they simply take no notice of it.
Q 26Roughly how many letters is Lovecraft estimated to have written in his lifetime?
100,000
100,000. That is roughly his biographers' estimate, so letters, not fiction, make up the bulk of what Lovecraft wrote, and he said he wrote them as easily as he talked.
Q 27In The Call of Cthulhu, Inspector Legrasse raids a cult's swamp ceremony south of which city?
New Orleans
New Orleans. Expecting a voodoo meeting, his men seize a hideous stone idol instead, and he carries it to a gathering of archaeologists in St. Louis to find out what it is.
Q 28Lovecraft's narrator says Cthulhu's image suggests a human caricature crossed with which two creatures?
An octopus and a dragon
An octopus and a dragon. He first meets the shape in a clay relief that a young sculptor modelled from his dreams: a pulpy, tentacled head on a scaly body with rudimentary wings.
Q 29In which sunken city does Cthulhu lie dreaming?
R'lyeh
R'lyeh. Lovecraft's coordinates for it lie close to Point Nemo, the spot in the ocean farthest from any land, where space agencies bring down their retired satellites and space stations.
Q 30How does the sailor Johansen escape Cthulhu at the climax of The Call of Cthulhu?
Rams it with a yacht
Rams it with a yacht. The monster's head bursts like an exploding bladder as the steamer drives through it, then begins to knit itself back together while Johansen flees at full speed.