An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

In “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” the enemy of Henry Thorndike, the village undertaker, and brother of Thorndike’s sweetheart, Sophie. Thorndike injects Sprague with a chemical that simulates death, but in

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the course of embalming Sprague, he accidentally injects himself with the chemical. St. John,———.

In “The Hound,” the narrator’s partner in the search for decadent thrills. Like some of HPL’s early characters (e.g., Harley Warren, Herbert West), he is the leader of various occult expeditions or activities, the narrators (typically somewhat autobiographical characters) being passive followers. St. John is killed by the ghoul from whose tomb the two stole an exotic amulet for their charnel museum.

Stanfield, Kenton J.

The narrator of “In the Walls of Eryx,” whose diary of his entrapment in an invisible maze on Venus constitutes most of the story. His initials are those of the story’s coauthor, Kenneth J.Sterling. Starrett, [Charles] Vincent (1886–1974),

American bookman, journalist, and brief correspondent of HPL. Starrett was put in touch with HPL by Frank Belknap Long. Starrett was passing through New York in the spring of 1927, and Long gave him two of HPL’s stories to read. Starrett was a well-known journalist (he wrote a weekly column on books for the Chicago Tribunefrom 1942 until his death) and the American advocate of Arthur Machen (he wrote the short treatise Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin[1918] and edited two collections of Machen’s miscellaneous work, The Shining Pyramid[1923] and The Glorious Mystery[1927]). Starrett was impressed with HPL’s tales and wrote to him about them. Starrett also found much merit in HPL’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as published in the Reclusein the summer of 1927. The correspondence ceased by the end of the year. Starrett also published a few weird tales, some in WT;they are collected in The Quick and the Dead(Arkham House, 1965). After HPL’s death Starrett took note of several of HPL’s volumes in his Tribunecolumn, reviewing Beyond the Wall of Sleep(January 2, 1944), Marginalia(March 4, 1945), Something about Cats(December 18, 1949), and The Shuttered Room(January 10, 1960); the first two of these are reprinted in his Books and Bipeds(1947). In the first of these reviews he made the memorable, if not entirely accurate, comment: “he was his own most fantastic creation—a Roderick Usher or C. Auguste Dupin born a century too late.”

See Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman: The Life and Times of Vincent Starrett(1968). “Statement of Randolph Carter, The.”

Short story (2,500 words); written in late December 1919. First published in the Vagrant(May 1920); rpt. WT(February 1925) and WT(August 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in MM;annotated version in CC.

Randolph Carter tells a police investigation what happened one night when he and Harley Warren entered an ancient cemetery and only Carter returned. Warren, a learned mystic, had been intrigued by an ancient book that led him to wonder “why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years.”So Warren and Carter walk along the Gainesville pike toward Big Cypress Swamp and approach a particular tomb in an old cemetery,

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