Miskatonic Arcihves

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

Tagged: Ephraim Waite

Characters

Asenath Waite

Asenath Waite is the Innsmouth-born woman who marries Edward Pickman Derby in The Thing on the Doorstep. The story’s later disclosures make her identity unusually difficult to summarize: the body known socially as Asenath is said to have been occupied by her father, Ephraim, before the marriage.

5 min read · 1,002 words

Characters

Daniel Upton

Daniel Upton is the architect and first-person narrator of The Thing on the Doorstep. He writes after shooting the person confined under Edward Derby’s identity, attempting to show that he avenged his friend rather than murdered him. His account turns longstanding familiarity, changes in behavior and a final written message into an argument about where Edward’s consciousness had actually gone.

5 min read · 986 words

Characters

Edward Pickman Derby

Edward Pickman Derby is the poet and occult student whose loss of bodily autonomy drives The Thing on the Doorstep. Daniel Upton’s account follows him from a sheltered childhood through his marriage to Asenath Waite and his final attempt to communicate from a body that is no longer his own.

5 min read · 861 words

Characters

Ephraim Waite

Ephraim Waite is the Innsmouth occultist whose continued identity lies behind the revelations of The Thing on the Doorstep. Publicly, he is Asenath Waite’s deceased father. Edward Derby’s account instead describes a predatory consciousness that took over its daughter’s body and later sought his own. The story distinguishes the death of a visible body from the possible survival of the person who controlled it.

5 min read · 885 words

Themes & context

Identity and possession

Lovecraft repeatedly separates the person others recognize from the intelligence occupying a recognizable body. His stories use several different mechanisms: coercive exchanges of consciousness, physical impersonation, alien custodianship and the survival of a mind under radically altered conditions. Reading these mechanisms separately reveals how letters, habits, memories and witnesses become tests of identity when appearance fails.

8 min read · 1,506 words

Places

Innsmouth

Innsmouth is the declining Massachusetts seaport at the center of The Shadow over Innsmouth. Its ruined maritime economy, powerful Marsh family, altered religious institutions and relationship with the Deep Ones gradually disclose a history that reaches from Pacific trade to the narrator’s own ancestry.

7 min read · 1,462 words

Themes & context

Resurrection and reanimation

Death fails to end action in several different ways across Lovecraft’s fiction. Herbert West attempts chemical reanimation; Joseph Curwen restores people from essential salts; the rulers of K’n-yan use animated corpses as labor and punishment; Ephraim Waite preserves a capacity to invade other bodies after bodily death. These mechanisms have different limits and produce very different kinds of survival.

6 min read · 1,174 words

Literature

The Thing on the Doorstep

The Thing on the Doorstep follows Daniel Upton’s attempt to justify shooting his closest friend by reconstructing a marriage, a series of personality exchanges and a final visit from a body that should no longer be alive. Its horror turns on the difference between recognizing a familiar body and identifying the mind inside it.

9 min read · 1,718 words