On Venus, crystal prospector Kenton J. Stanfield follows his detector across poisonous jungle toward a prize worth the danger. The crystal is enormous—but something invisible stands between him and escape. What first appears to be an impossible wall soon reveals itself as part of a vast structure whose corridors cannot be seen.
Trapped inside, Stanfield records his attempts to find a way out while his water, oxygen, and strength steadily disappear. Beyond the unseen walls, the Venusian natives gather to watch. Stanfield has always dismissed them as primitive creatures standing between humanity and the planet’s valuable crystals. Now, as they wait and observe his every move, he begins to wonder how badly humans have misunderstood them—and what the labyrinth was built to do.
H. P. Lovecraft helped transform American weird fiction through stories including The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space, and At the Mountains of Madness. In this unusual excursion to Venus, his familiar sense of human vulnerability is placed inside a planetary adventure filled with alien biology and speculative technology.
Kenneth Sterling conceived the original idea while still a teenager and collaborated with Lovecraft on the story in 1935. In the Walls of Eryx was published in Weird Tales in October 1939, two years after Lovecraft’s death, and remains one of the most distinctive science fiction stories associated with his name.
