The sixth step towards darkness, entitled Desire, consists of a single short story - but it is all the more significant.
It is a shorter work by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the author who is the pillar of the series. The Outcast (in other translations The Outcast or The Outsider) is one of his most frequently published and translated stories and is still very popular today. The piece dates from 1921, but was first published five years later in Weird Tales magazine (April 1926). Lovecraft himself, in a letter to a friend, rates The Outcast very highly, and in his words, he has managed to come very close to Edgar Allan Poe's style in this story - the opening paragraphs are even a kind of echo of Poe's short story Berenice, and the inspiration of The Masque of the Red Death is also evident. The narrator is the only one, the lone inhabitant of a mysterious old castle, whereby it is not entirely clear, how long he's lived in this place, but it's obvious that, apart from the writing on the walls, it's without any contact with the outside world. Primarily because of the central theme of loneliness, some critics and literary historians have considered it to be an autobiographical tale, but it seems more likely that the author may indeed have felt lonely and ugly in his weaker moments. Overall, this is perhaps Lovecraft's most elaborate work, with echoing patterns and multi-layered references.