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Dreamquest

Randolph Carter (1874-1928?) is an American writer, antiquarian, and dreamer, featured in several stories written by H.P. Lovecraft:

  • The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)
  • The Unnamable (1923)
  • The Silver Key (1926)
  • The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926/1927)
  • Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1933)

Carter also makes brief appearances in Out of the Aeons (1933) and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927). In all these stories, various elements specific to the Cthulhu Mythos appear, notably the Dreamlands which Carter visits whilst asleep. Amongst Carter's own published works are listed a short story mentioned in The Unnamable, "The Attic Window", which he had published in the pulp magazine Whispers in January 1922.

A story by Edgar Hoffman Price, entitled Lord of Illusion, contains an alternate rendition of the same events that Lovecraft recounted in Through the Gates of The Silver Key. Other authors to have featured Randolph Carter in their works include Brian Lumley, Ralph E. Vaughn and Alberto Lopez Aroca.

Although Philip José Farmer included elements from Lovecraft's stories in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, Randolph Carter himself is considered part of the Wold Newton Universe through the work of the eminent pulp scholar Jess Nevins, who established an (indirect) family relationship between Randolph Carter and John Carter of Mars in his article The Carters of Virginia: a Tragedy. In the comic-book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, Randolph Carter is identified as the grand-nephew of John Carter.

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