THE READING RHEUM: "THE SILVER KEY" (1926/1929)

In my review of CALL OF CTHULHU, I included no biographical data on what was going on with HPL in the year he wrote this major "Mythos story." But that story, this story, and THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH were all either begun or completed in 1926, the year that HPL ended his attempts to find gainful employment in other cities and returned to his beloved home town of Providence. This may not have been good for his personal life, as the move eventually led to his divorce from his wife. But the move was very good for horror fiction, because HPL wrote the majority of his major works while remaining in his cherished boyhood home.

KEY, in contrast to THE UNNAMEABLE, is an unquestionable follow-up to 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER, not only because the character's full name is used, but because the unnamed narrator of the story explicitly mentions the events of STATEMENT. KEY covers some of the same philosophical ground as UNNAMEABLE, and makes Carter's dilemma far more relatable. The narrator tells how Carter once possessed a Dunsanian ability to imagine far-flung realms of fantasy, but he loses this ability as he allows his mind to be polluted by the doctrines of realism. It's hard to say what sort of philosophy Carter ends up with, according to the narrator, but it leads him to seek unknown horrors in STATEMENT.

However, thanks to surviving his horror-hunting, Carter is able to acquire a special silver key "handed down from his ancestors," at least one of whom sounds like a magician. With the key in his possession, Carter goes driving near "the lonely rustic homestead of his people," which, incidentally, lies near the fictional Arkham. Carter never precisely opens a door with the key, but just having it on his person allows him to transition back to the time of his childhood, where he essentially merges with his younger self. The narrator concludes by saying that he will try to block the probate of Carter's possessions, since he's not really dead. And possibly Carter returns to mundane life so that he can experience the more involved visions of DREAM QUEST-- though this work too has a sort of "there's no place like home" message.

As much as I like the first half of KEY, I found that the second half did not resolve any of the philosophical questions raised, and I'm not entirely sure why Leslie Klinger included it in his collection, except for the Arkham association. Klinger does not include the sequel HPL co-wrote with E Hoffman Price, which I may examine in a future post.