H. P. Lovecraft 16 min read

At thirty, Randolph Carter loses the key to the gate of dreams, cut off from the strange and lovely lands beyond space he once wandered nightly, and sets out to find his way back.

H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story is a wistful, philosophical dream-fantasy, a Randolph Carter tale. Lyrical, melancholy, superbly told. Read it for one of Lovecraft's most personal and poetic works, a seeker's quest to recover lost wonder and the dreams of childhood, a meditation on imagination and disillusion at the heart of his Dreamlands cycle.

In its time

Published in 1926, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

16 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).