Miskatonic Arcihves

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

Tagged: Full spoilers

Characters

Charles Dexter Ward

Charles Dexter Ward is the young Providence antiquarian whose investigation of Joseph Curwen becomes the central tragedy of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. His research begins with family history and ends with the bodily return of an ancestor who can exploit their resemblance. The person confined under Ward’s name near the end is not simply the original young man suffering a change of personality. This article includes the novel’s identity revelation.

6 min read · 1,061 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

Literature

The Hound

The Hound follows two collectors whose pursuit of increasingly extreme aesthetic sensations leads them to rob a grave in Holland. The jade amulet they take becomes the focus of a pursuit that neither travel nor the destruction of their collection can end. The narrator’s attempt to return the object produces a final discovery that links the stolen relic, the grave’s occupant and the sound following him. This synopsis includes the ending.

6 min read · 1,052 words

Literature

The Mound

The Mound expands an Oklahoma haunting into an account of an ancient underground civilization. A modern ethnologist discovers a sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript describing K’n-yan, where extraordinary technical powers coexist with captivity, exploitation and accelerating cruelty. His eventual descent beneath the mound tests the manuscript’s claims and reveals what became of the man who wrote it. The following account includes the ending.

12 min read · 2,326 words