Carter, most likely is Randolph Carter, the biographical alter ego of Lovecraft's tells the history of the house and its hauntings to Manton, who gets mildly more excited about the possibility but still maintains his original take.
Just as Carter gets to the end of the history lesson, the duo is attacked by a monster dwelling in the house. They survive and in hospital, Manton is forced to accept the fact, that such things, like the gelatinous multi-shaped monsters, which are unnamable by science, really do exist.
The Unnamable is an okay story, not really the best of Lovecraft's and goes in the bin of cute, but not fully realised ideas. Interestingly enough, the story has been adapted into a 1980s horror movie and it's a sequel. The first movie is aptly titled The Unnamable, the sequel The Unnamable 2: The Statement of Randolph Carter. I haven't seen either, but I have a feeling they might be mildly more entertaining than the original story. There's also a short movie adaptation that apparently is closer to the story, made in 2011.
The Festival (1923) Family ties take the narrator of this tale back to his ancient home of Kingsport during the Christmas season, or the Yuletide as he prefers to call it, being more aware of the paganistic roots of the holiday. The town he enters the first time in his life, is an old, almost ancient looking place, with no modern niceties.
In his old family home, he meets an old man, whose face is like a mask made out of wax and an old woman, who just keeps spinning her wheel. As the narrator waits for the Festival to begin, he peruses the ancient books he finds from the house, among the treaded Necronomicon by the mad Arab Alhazred. A short interval of sinister tales later, he is finally taken to the ancient, dark church of Kingsport's, where the mass has gathered.
The congregation proceeds to descend into deep caverns under the church, where they begin an ancient mass, summoning forth winged beasts, which they then mount in order to take the dark skies above. Appalled and scared, the narrator refuses his mount, even after the old man with a mask-like face explains to him how he must as it is his family's way. He knows, as they are related and he proves this by showing him an ancient pocket watch that belonged to the long-dead grandparent of the narrator.
In the grips of madness, the narrator declines and jumps over the ledge of the cavern, plunging in the dark, cold ocean below. He, later on, awakens in a Kingsport hospital, but the town he sees through the windows is more modern than the one he entered during the fateful night.
The Festival is a fantastic story, I'd even peg it among the best Lovecraft wrote. It has something of a unique perspective to the sinister traditions of those who worship the ancient old ones, as instead of showing the story from the perspective of an uninvited guest, it is seen from the view of a person who is supposed to take part in the celebrations, albeit without being aware of what he is actually participating in.
Lovecraft himself didn't think much of the story, but overall, it is strongly written and oozes a sinister atmosphere. I wouldn't call it a horror story as such. It's more of a macabre tale on the sinister forces that exist below the surface of what people commonly do when they partake in the modern holiday festivities. Most of them are, after all, placed upon the dates of ancient paganistic events, which is something Lovecraft was probably very aware of.
The Shunned House (1924) This story feels more of a fleshed-out iteration of The Unnamable. There's again an abandoned house, this time because all its occupants have died long before their time. The house itself has been a subject of fascination for the narrators' uncle, Dr Whipple who has kept records on the many sicknesses and deaths among the people who had lived there.
A big problem with the story is the way it goes off the tangent with the history of the house and the people who built and lived in it. A good bulk of this long story is dedicated to narrating those histories when less would have been more in this case. Now, it comes out as a rambling and overly padded tale.
Whipple and the Narrator decide to take care of the evil forces dwelling in the cellar of the house. They arm themselves with flamethrowers and Crookes Tubes in the hopes of killing whatever resides in the house with them. This leads to the death of Whipple and the Narrator devising his final plan of getting strong acid and a military-grade gas mask.
He re-enters the cellar and digs a deep hole until he hits something soft. He pours the stuff in and ends up killing the monster as is proven by the fact of the deadly fungus dying all around the house as well as the garden behind it slowly recovering from its state of decay.
The Shunned House was an attempt from Lovecraft in longer prose and was only partly successful. While parts of it work, he also overestimates the intrigue of the ancient family histories he drones on and on over a couple of chapters. He's also a bit over verbose and almost pedantic with the latter half of the story, which just makes the narrative overbearing to read, not to mention boring.
By this point, Lovecraft had written several stories, where ancient sins cause havoc in the present. Many of them succumb to similar sins, but here Lovecraft seems to almost over-indulge himself with the histories of the house like he was unable to decide how much or what he should tell, so he just throws everything on the wall and sees what sticks.
You'll lose very little if you give this one a miss.
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