Miskatonic Arcihves

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Tagged: Brown Jenkin

Entities & creatures

Brown Jenkin

Brown Jenkin is Keziah Mason’s rat-like familiar in The Dreams in the Witch House. Its human-looking face, grasping paws and ability to travel with the witch make it a far more capable adversary than its small size suggests. It survives the encounter that defeats Keziah and carries the story’s danger into the apparent aftermath.

5 min read · 938 words

Film & television

Dreams in the Witch-House (2005)

Stuart Gordon’s Dreams in the Witch-House adapts Lovecraft for the first season of Masters of Horror. A graduate student’s cheap room brings theories of other dimensions into contact with a witch, a human-faced familiar and neighbors whose vulnerability makes the danger immediate.

4 min read · 698 words

Characters

Frank Elwood

Frank Elwood is Walter Gilman’s fellow student and principal confidant in The Dreams in the Witch House. His attempts to provide shelter, observation and practical help turn him into the surviving witness to a catastrophe he cannot fully explain.

4 min read · 718 words

Film & television

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is an eight-part horror anthology whose 2022 season includes two direct Lovecraft adaptations. Its relevance also extends to Henry Kuttner and Michael Shea, but the collection’s varied authorship should not be reduced to eight Lovecraft stories.

4 min read · 798 words

Characters

Keziah Mason

Keziah Mason is the witch whose knowledge of routes beyond ordinary space links a seventeenth-century escape with Walter Gilman’s modern research. In The Dreams in the Witch House, she recruits through threats and coercion, travels with the familiar Brown Jenkin and appears to use a sealed loft as a working chamber across an extraordinary span of time.

5 min read · 998 words

Literature

The Dreams in the Witch House

The Dreams in the Witch House brings witchcraft, advanced mathematics and the physical consequences of nightmare into one story. Walter Gilman’s attempt to understand an old Arkham room leads from disturbing dreams to an alien artifact, a coerced initiation, a child’s abduction and a catastrophe that later discoveries in the building partly corroborate.

11 min read · 2,150 words

Places

The Witch House

The Witch House is the decaying Arkham lodging-house where Walter Gilman rents a room once associated with Keziah Mason. Its unusual angles, sealed spaces and ordinary rat infestation become the physical setting for journeys and crimes that the later demolition exposes only in fragments.

5 min read · 1,020 words

Characters

Walter Gilman

Walter Gilman is the Miskatonic student whose study of mathematics and witchcraft becomes a series of involuntary journeys in The Dreams in the Witch House. His experiences are marked by a widening gap between intellectual understanding and practical control, ending with an attempted rescue that defeats one adversary but leaves him exposed to another.

6 min read · 1,066 words