An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Other details of Providence history are also authentic: the straightening of Benefit Street after the removal of the graves of the oldest settlers to the North Burial Ground; the great floods of 1815; even the random mention of the fact that “As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace.” This last point has recently been studied by Faye Ringel Hazel, who notes that several articles on this subject appeared in the Providence Journalin March 1892, and goes on to examine the vampire legendry of Exeter (in Washington County, south of Providence) and the neighboring area.

The most interesting elaboration upon history in the story is the figure of Etienne Roulet. This figure is mythical, but Jacques Roulet of Caude is real. HPL’s brief mention of him is taken almost verbatim from the account in John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers(1872), which he owned and which was a significant source of his early views on the anthropology of religion. Part of Fiske’s account of Roulet is a direct quotation from S.Baring-Gould’s A Book of Were-wolves(1865); but HPL had not read this book at this time (he would do so only a decade or so later), so his information on Jacques Roulet must have come from Fiske.

The story shifts from the supernatural to quasi-science-fiction by asserting that the existence of the vampire and its effects may be accounted for by appealing to advanced scientific conceptions: “Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action.” HPL refers to Einstein’s theory of relativity (about which, only a year and a half earlier, he had expressed considerable bafflement and perturbation [see SL1.231] because of its defiance of nineteenth-century conceptions of physics) and to the quantum theory. That the entity is killed not by driving a stake through its heart but by sulfuric acid is telling. The “titan elbow” seems an adaptation of the ending of “Under the Pyramids,” where what appeared to be a five-headed hippopotamus proves to be the paw of an immense monster.

W.Paul Cook wished to print the story as a chapbook (with a preface by Frank Belknap Long), but his financial and physical collapse in 1928 prevented the binding and distribution of the book, although 300 copies had been printed.

< previous page page_243 next page > < previous page page_244 next page >

Page 244

In 1934 R.H.Barlow secured about 265 of those copies and over the next year bound and distributed fewer then ten; he also distributed some copies of the unbound sheets. The remaining copies (about 150) eventually ended up in the hands of August Derleth of Arkham House, who in 1959 distributed 50 unbound copies and in 1961 about 100 copies bound in black cloth. A forgery of this edition, probably emerging in England, was issued in 1965.

See Faye Ringel Hazel, “Some Strange New England Mortuary Practices: Lovecraft Was Right,” LSNo. 29 (Fall 1993): 13–18.

Silva, Manuel.

In “The Terrible Old Man,” a thief (of Portuguese ancestry) who meets a bad end when he attempts to rob an old sea captain of his reputed hoard of Spanish gold and silver.

“Silver Key, The.”

Short story (5,000 words); probably written in early November 1926. First published in WT(January 1929); first collected in O;corrected text in MM

Randolph Carter—revived from “The Unnamable” (1923)—is now thirty; he has “lost the key of the gate of dreams” and therefore seeks to reconcile himself to the real world, which he now finds prosy and aesthetically unrewarding. He tries all manner of literary and physical novelties until one day he finds the key—or, at any rate, a key of silver in his attic. Driving his car along “the old remembered way,” he goes back to the rural New England region of his childhood and, in some magical and wisely unexplained manner, finds himself transformed into a nine-year-old boy. Sitting down to dinner with his aunt Martha, Uncle Chris, and the hired man Benijah Corey, Carter finds perfect content as a boy who has sloughed off the tedious complications of adult life for the eternal wonder of childhood.