This is a weird little story I came across in a list of haunted house tales. Except it's not really a haunted house story, and it's not really a vampire story, and it's not really a werewolf story, although there are intimations of each. There's a bit of fungal horror in there as well, but mostly it's one of Lovecraft's "giant terrible thing makes its way out of the deep" stories, and if only said giant terrible thing could have done it more quickly I might have been more impressed. For a short story, this had an awful lot of padding in it. I mean, Lovecraft does have a tendency to belabour his points, and while some people find that atmospheric it kind of goes past atmospheric and into tedious for me. I wanted to shake the protagonist and say "Get on with it man, why are you not digging up the floor already, surely that has been the obvious thing to do from the start?!" But alas: he would rather bloviate.