Silver Key
A man searches for the line between past and present, truth and illusion, and sleep and waking, in this eerie story in H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle.
Randolph Carter has grown older, and lost the key to the gate of dreams. He yearns to return to the fantastical worlds of his childhood dreams, with their promises of wisdom and understanding that he could not access while he was awake.
Now Randolph lives in the so-called real world, but he wonders which dream realm truly represents reality. He intends to find out, and embarks on a journey that will take him to places both familiar and deeply strange . . .
H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was born in New England, a landscape that he turned into a stage of fiction. His stories inherited the tradition of gothic horror tales from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, but Lovecraft set his own standards. His first stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine. “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), a short story about a monstrous deity that inhabits the Earth, is the base of the myths related to the Cthulhu Mythos, a genre of horror fiction launched by Lovecraft. In its world, populated by beings of other dimensions, the laws of humanity are worthless. But man is incapable of understanding its insignificance in the face of the magnitude of the cosmos.
