Pulp Fantasy Library: Through the Gates of the Silver Key

1929 saw the publication of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," a wistful, semi-autobiographical tale of Randolph Carter, his recurring dreamer-protagonist. In that story, Carter, now middle-aged, finds himself disillusioned with the mundane world, bereft of the golden moments of his youth when he roamed the Dreamlands freely. After discovering an old silver key in his ancestral home, Carter then departs for the wooded hills of his boyhood and disappears.

For Lovecraft, that was enough, but not so for his friend, E. Hoffmann Price. He wondered, what really had happened to Carter? During HPL's visit to New Orleans in June 1932, Price suggested to him the idea of a sequel, which he then proceeded to draft. The sequel, which Price titled "The Lord of Illusion," drew on his interests in Theosophy, Eastern philosophy, and occult cosmology. With some reluctance, Lovecraft agreed to revise it and, as often happened in such collaborations, “revision” really meant extensive rewriting. By the end, Price estimated that fewer than fifty words of his original draft remained, though traces of Price’s mystical elements are nevertheless apparent. The story was published in Weird Tales (July 1934) under the title by which it is known today.

Where "The Silver Key" is tinged with melancholy and personal longing, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is expansive, ornate, and metaphysically dense. The story begins at a gathering to settle Carter’s estate, long held in trust since his disappearance. The mysterious Swami Chandraputra, swathed in robes, with strange mittens on his hands, tells the assembled company of Carter’s fate. After performing its ritual, the Silver Key transported Carter beyond space and time, through the First Gate and into the Outer Extension, where he encountered the Ancient Ones led by ’Umr at-Tawil, a being feared in the Necronomicon. 

Accepting an invitation to plunge further into the cosmos, Carter passed the Ultimate Gate and found himself in the infinite void before an entity implied to be Yog-Sothoth, though only a fraction of its true nature, the Supreme Archetype, the All-in-One and One-in-All. Shown the unity of all consciousness as facets of this Archetype, Carter was granted a wish: to experience life as one of the wizardly inhabitants of Yaddith, a world besieged by the monstrous Dholes. The Supreme Archetype transferred his mind into the body of Zkauba the wizard, but Carter soon discovered his arrogance had trapped him in an alien form, sharing a mind with a being that found him as repugnant as he did it.

After centuries on Yaddith, Carter subdued Zkauba’s mind with drugs and returned to Earth using the Silver Key and alien machinery, seeking a manuscript of symbols he believed would restore his human body. The Swami claims Carter found it, contacted him, and sent him to Arkham to announce his imminent return. However, Carter’s cousin, lawyer Ernest Aspinwall, accuses the Swami of fraud, tearing at his face, thereby revealing the inhuman visage beneath. Aspinwall dies of apoplexy and Zkauba’s mind resurfaces, fleeing in a strange coffin-like clock. A postscript speculates the Swami was merely a criminal hypnotist, though some details of the tale seem disturbingly precise.

The shift in tone and content between "The Silver Key" and its sequel is striking. In the first tale, Carter longs to escape a disenchanted world, hoping to reclaim the dreamlike wonder of his youth. In the second, that escape comes at a terrible cost: the obliteration of the self. The human-scale yearning of "The Silver Key" gives way to a vision that is cold, alien, and inexorable, where the price of ultimate knowledge is nothing less than one's personal identity. 

Here, Price’s influence is unmistakable. Themes such as the unity of all beings, reincarnation, and the dissolution of the ego into a higher self are hallmarks of Theosophical thought, ideas largely absent from Lovecraft’s solo work. For Price, such transcendence could be uplifting, a step toward enlightenment; for Lovecraft, it becomes a transformation so complete that the human perspective is erased. Carter’s so-called apotheosis is not joyous but inhuman, stripping away every anchor to his mortal life.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is that Lovecraft seems to attempt to use Price's conceptions as a way to bridge the Dreamlands stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. By introducing Yog-Sothoth, Umr at-Tawil, and Yaddith into Carter’s dream-journey, Lovecraft draws a direct line between the fanciful dream adventures of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the cosmicism of, say, “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Whisperer in Darkness.” The implications of this are profound: the Dreamlands are not a separate realm of whimsy, but part of the same vast, uncaring universe, which is precisely the tack Chaosium took in its own RPG adaptation of the former.

Whether Lovecraft fully succeeds in this synthesis is open to debate. The story’s ornate, metaphysical passages can be both dazzling and impenetrable and the fusion of Price’s mysticism with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is uneasy at times. Yet Carter’s arc, from wistful seeker of lost dreams to fragment of an incomprehensible, alien consciousness is an ambitious character transformation. The conclusion of this tale is deeply unsettling. The dreamer passes beyond the gate, not to reclaim his past, but to become something no longer human.

If "The Silver Key" is about losing the magic of youth, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is about losing oneself entirely. In Lovecraft’s cosmos, this may be the only form of escape and the ultimate price of seeking truths not meant for human minds.