An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

But if Derby’s youth and young manhood are an amalgam of HPL and some of his closest friends, his marriage to Asenath Waite clearly brings certain aspects of HPL’s marriage to Sonia Greene to mind. Sonia was clearly the more strong-willed member of the couple; it was certainly from her initiative that the marriage took place at all and that HPL uprooted himself from Providence to come to live in New York. The objections of Derby’s father to Asenath—and specifically to Derby’s wish to marry her —may dimly echo objections of HPL’s aunts to his marriage to Sonia. (Such objections can only be inferred from the tenor of some of HPL’s letters to his aunts.)

In one sense the story is a reprise of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:the attempt by Asenath (in Derby’s body) to pass herself off as Edward in the madhouse is precisely analogous to Joseph Curwen’s attempts to maintain that he is Charles Dexter Ward.

One glancing note in the story that has caused considerable misunderstanding is Upton’s remark about Asenath: “Her crowning rage…was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers.” This sentiment is clearly expressed as Asenath’s (who, let us recall, is only Ephraim in another body), and need not be attributed to HPL. A decade earlier HPL had indeed uttered some silly remarks on women’s intelligence: “Females are in Truth much given to affected Baby Lisping…They are by Nature literal, prosaic, and commonplace, given to dull realistick Details and practical Things, and incapable alike of vigorous artistick Creation and genuine, first-hand appreciation” ( SL1.238). But by the 1930s he had come to a more sensible position: “I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences…. The feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is probably little if any inferior in total quality” ( SL5.64).

HPL was so dissatisfied with the story upon its completion that he refused to submit it anywhere. At last, in the summer of 1936, when Julius Schwartz proposed to HPL to market some of his tales in England, HPL reluctantly submitted the story, along with “The Haunter of the Dark,” to Farnsworth Wright of WT,who promptly accepted both.

See S.T.Joshi, “Autobiography in Lovecraft,” LSNo. 1 (Fall 1979): 7–19 (esp. 12–15); Donald R.Burleson, “The Thing: On the Doorstep,” LSNo. 33 (Fall 1995): 14–18.

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Thorfinnssen, Georg.

In At the Mountains of Madness,the captain of the barque Miskatonic,one of the supply ships for the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31.

Thorndike, Henry.

In “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” the village undertaker who invents a chemical that can simulate death in a person who remains alive and conscious. He accidentally injects himself with his chemical and is buried alive.

Thornton,———.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” a “psychic investigator” brought in by Delapore to investigate the crypt beneath Exham Priory.

“Through the Gates of the Silver Key.”

Novelette (14,550 words); written in collaboration with E.Hoffmann Price, October 1932–April 1933. First published in WT(July 1934); first collected in O;corrected text in MM

Several individuals gather in New Orleans—Etienne Laurent de Marigny, Ward Phillips, the lawyer Ernest B.Aspinwall, and a strange individual named the Swami Chandraputra—to discuss the disposition of the estate of Randolph Carter. The Swami opposes any action, because he maintains that Carter is still alive. He proceeds to tell a fabulous story of what happened to Carter after his return to boyhood (as noted in “The Silver Key”).