Sticks (short story)
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"Sticks" is a short story by horror fiction writer Karl Edward Wagner, first published in the March 1974 issue of Whispers.[1] It has been reprinted in several anthologies, including the revised edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, making it a retroactive part of the Cthulhu Mythos.
On a fishing trip in North Pitcher, NY, horror illustrator Colin Leverett encounters an old abandoned house surrounded by bizarre stick formations. Sketching the strange constructions, he enters the house and is attacked by a lich in the basement, from whom he narrowly escapes. Many years later, Leverett is contacted by a descendant of a famous horror author, H. Kenneth Allard (supposedly based on H.P. Lovecraft), who hires him to illustrate a volume of Allard's previously unpublished stories. When Leverett decides to base the illustrations on his old sketches of the stick lattices, he is drawn into a supernatural conspiracy.