Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: 1910s

Literature

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson is a comic literary memoir spoken by a narrator who claims to have lived since 1690. The impossible witness places himself among eighteenth-century writers while repeatedly exposing his own vanity. Its fantasy serves antiquarian humor and self-parody rather than a revelation of Mythos immortality.

3 min read · 552 words

Literature

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Beyond the Wall of Sleep follows a young institutional internee who believes a patient’s dream speech reveals an intelligence beyond ordinary human life. His attempt to communicate with Joe Slater becomes an encounter with luminous cosmic existence and a promised astronomical event. The narrative places its expansive vision inside a medical case whose evidence remains disputed.

5 min read · 965 words

Literature

Dagon

Dagon is an early sea-horror story in which a wartime escapee finds himself stranded on an apparently risen ocean floor and encounters evidence of an intelligent undersea world. Written in July 1917 and first published in November 1919, it presents the experience through a desperate survivor whose recollection culminates in fear of an approaching presence.

6 min read · 1,219 words

Literature

Memory

Memory is a brief prose fantasy set among the ruins of humanity in the valley of Nis. A moon-associated Genie asks the Daemon of the Valley about the builders of the abandoned structures. The answer reduces the whole human past to a fading resemblance and a remembered name, making extinction a problem of lost significance as well as lost life.

3 min read · 469 words

Literature

Old Bugs

Old Bugs places a fallen intellectual in a Chicago drinking establishment in an imagined 1950. His final attempt to stop a young visitor’s first drink reveals a connection with the visitor’s family. The story works through exaggerated temperance melodrama, recognition and sacrifice rather than supernatural horror.

4 min read · 731 words

Literature

Polaris

An unnamed man believes that his apparent waking life is a dream preventing him from returning to an endangered northern city. In Polaris, repeated visions become a recovered identity and a military duty, while the Pole Star seems to encourage the sleep that betrays both. The compact narrative ends without resolving which existence deserves to be called real.

5 min read · 844 words

Literature

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

The Doom That Came to Sarnath recounts the rise and disappearance of a human city built beside the older settlement of Ib. Its founders destroy their nonhuman neighbors and celebrate that extermination for a thousand years. On the great anniversary, signs from the lake and reports from the royal banquet overturn the city’s confidence in its permanent supremacy.

6 min read · 1,055 words

Literature

The Green Meadow

The Green Meadow is a collaboration by H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred V. Jackson, presented as a translation of a notebook recovered from a strange fallen stone. The enclosed narrative follows a solitary consciousness drifting toward a place that promises recognition, then reveals an inescapable future. Its damaged ending makes the origin and meaning of the testimony part of the mystery.

6 min read · 1,070 words

Literature

The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Statement of Randolph Carter is an account given to investigators after Harley Warren disappears during an expedition into an ancient cemetery. Carter remains above ground, connected to his friend by a portable telephone, while Warren descends into a vault. The story makes the unseen danger increasingly vivid through the collapse of the voice coming up the wire.

6 min read · 1,063 words

Literature

The Tomb

The Tomb follows Jervas Dudley’s obsession with the burial vault of the Hyde family and his belief that he has entered the life of a dead namesake. His testimony includes nocturnal visits, an ancestral portrait and a vision of a burning mansion. Reports from other characters challenge important parts of his account, while the final discovery preserves an unresolved connection between the living narrator and an empty coffin.

6 min read · 1,182 words

Literature

The Transition of Juan Romero

The Transition of Juan Romero describes an unexplained death after a mine opens an apparently bottomless cavity. A narrator remembers following Romero into the depths, although other witnesses place both men in their bunks throughout the night. The vanished opening, a missing ring and the narrator’s withheld final vision prevent a single, fully demonstrable explanation.

6 min read · 1,090 words

Literature

The White Ship

The White Ship is Basil Elton’s account of a voyage from his lonely lighthouse through lands embodying forgotten beauty, dangerous mysteries, pleasure and imagination. After finding a realm without suffering, he insists on pursuing a still more perfect destination. His return joins the loss of that imagined happiness to the consequences of a failed beacon.

5 min read · 1,018 words