Miskatonic Arcihves

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

Tagged: Medical experimentation

Literature

The Disinterment

The Disinterment follows a man who accepts a physician’s plan to simulate his death and discovers that the promised rescue has concealed a radical operation. Written with Duane W. Rimel, the story turns a refuge from feared social exclusion into a private laboratory. Its final revelation concerns the ownership and continuity of the narrator’s body, rather than the intervention of a named Mythos power.

7 min read · 1,424 words

Literature

The Great God Pan

Arthur Machen’s novella connects an experiment on human perception with a series of deaths and disappearances in Victorian society. Its central figure, Helen Vaughan, is reconstructed through reports, portraits, aliases and frightened witnesses. The final documents connect her birth to a breach between ordinary existence and an overwhelming spiritual reality. The work is a major predecessor of Lovecraft’s horror of forbidden knowledge and inhuman parentage.

11 min read · 2,117 words