"Herbert West: Re-Animator"
Herbert West is a brilliant, but disturbed man whom the narrator met when both were med students in college. West is obsessed with the idea that death is misunderstood as the end of mortality, convinced that it is merely a dormant state of retardation of essential functions of the body which can potentially be re-animated. Having failed to learn anything from Mary Shelley’s landmark novel, this modern day Frankenstein’s plan to test his theories does not proceed without incident.
Basil Elton (The White Ship)
Elton is a third-generation lighthouse keeper who relates the tale of a strange white ship that arrives from the south when the moon is full, gliding silently on the waves. He boards the ship after walking across moonbeams where a mystical bearded man takes him on a long and distant journey to strange and bizarre worlds.
Erich Zann (The Music of Erich Zann)
Zann is an older German man living in the nearly deserted apartment building in which the young narrator takes up residence. The mute Zann is a musician with the city’s orchestra with a habit of playing eerily unfamiliar music on viol alone at night. Eventually, the younger man discovers the secret of these otherworldly compositions: they are melodies Zann has learned that serve to protect the world from the dangerous creatures residing in another dimension from crossing the abyss outside the man’s window into our own world.
"The Terrible Old Man"
The mysterious title character of this story lives alone in a story said to contain ancients treasures and relics which three men determine is worth the risk of robbing. Things do not go well and the old man is revealed to be good deal older than presumed and a far less vulnerable victim than expected. The name of this old man is not revealed in the text.
Randolph Carter (The Statement of Randolph Carter)
In “The Statement of Randolph Carter” Lovecraft first introduces his fictional alter ego who go on to reappear in a number of later stories. In this story, the quiet reserved lover of books and writer of under-appreciated books is recounting the events surrounding the mysterious disappearance of his friend Harley. Harley, a student of the occult, has come into possession of a book that purports to tell of the existence of passages between the underworld and the world above.
Nyarlathotep
Nyarlathotep, who appears at first to be a traveling scientific showman, takes the form of a slim, tall man who gives the appearance of being from ancient Egypt. His name contains some phonemes associated with ancient Egyptian rulers and deities. In reality he is one of an ancient group of supernatural beings known as the "Old Ones". But instead of sleeping beneath the ocean or traveling between the stars, he walks the Earth disguised as a human being. People who interact with him tend to lose their sanity. This character first appears in the story "Nyarlathotep".
Crawford Tillinghast
In "From Beyond", the scientist Crawford Tillinghast is a clever inventor who overreaches, as many Lovecraftian antiheroes do. He has created an electronic device that emits a special kind of wave that alters the pineal gland of a human being, enabling that person to see into an alternate dimension where mysterious jellyfish-like beings roam. He is presented as an arrogant megalomaniac who has little regard for the people who die as a result of his experiments.
Jervas Dudley
In "The Tomb", Jervas Dudley is a young man who becomes convinced that he is in fact the reincarnation of Jervas Hyde, a member of the Hyde family whose mansion had burned down many years before, and who is returning to the family mausoleum to be buried there.
Arthur Jermyn
In "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", Sir Arthur Jermyn is not only a baronet but the last surviving member of a noble British family. One of his ancestors, Sir Wade Jermyn, concealed a terrible secret about his wife that explained why all of his descendants were peculiar in appearance and behavior. When Arthur Jermyn discovers the secret, he is so filled with self-loathing that he commits suicide.
Joe Slater
In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", Joe Slater is depicted as an ignorant, uneducated yokel who nonetheless has moments of either extreme enlightenment or violent behavior. The narrator describes Joe, his family, and his class of people in contemptuous terms. The murders he commits when under the influence of what appears to be some unearthly power result in his confinement in an insane asylum, where the narrator resolves to discover the source of Slater's visions of extraterrestrial beings of light.
Juan Romero
In "The Transition of Juan Romero", Juan Romero is a Hispanic laborer who works in a mine. He has an air of nobility about him, and the narrator fancies that he is descended not from the Paiutes that occupy the area but from the Aztecs. Orphaned early and raised by a local cattle thief, Romero is uneducated. But every morning, he performs a ritual in which he greets the sun. He speaks very little English and has difficulty understanding the narrator because the two speak radically different dialects of Spanish. However he is fascinated by a ring worn by the narrator.
Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein
In "The Temple", there is a U-boat captain named Lieutenant-Commander Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein. He is a naval officer by profession, serving in the Imperial German Navy during the Great War, or what is now known as World War I. The "von" in his name indicates that he is descended from a German noble house, and the fact he is a "Graf" (which translates roughly as "Count") means that he has inherited a noble title and is not only the head of his family but one of the most socially elite people in his nation. He is a stereotypical aristocrat with a strong sense of class and superiority, looking down at his subordinates for being of a lesser class of people due to having been born in parts of the country he considers inferior, and is proud of his German heritage and his social and military rank. He values discipline, patriotism, and his own strength of character. But the iron will he is so proud of ironically leads him to a bad end.
Dr. Samuel Johnson
Dr. Samuel Johnson is not a fictional character but a celebrated English writer born in 1709 whose career and influence rivaled that of Shakespeare. In "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson", the narrator reveals his own extreme antiquarian pretensions by describing an event at which Dr. Johnson gave a speech.
Dagon
Dagon was a sea god that was also associated with weather and the harvest. He was worshipped extensively during Biblical times, and was one of the primary gods of the Philistines. He was not always depicted as human, and sometimes took the form of a fish. The being depicted in the story "Dagon" is not necessarily a deity but the title suggests a connection between the supernatural being and the Philistine fish god.
