Character guide

Unknown Narrator

major

Also known as I, me, mine, myself

He moves through Lovecraft's tales as a witness and confidant—sometimes a poet turned reporter, sometimes a friend of the afflicted—always sensitive to the macabre shadows that others dismiss. His own morbid imagination, offset by keen logic and dark humor, makes him both a reliable observer and a man half in love with forbidden visions. He matters because his sensibility shapes how the horror arrives: not as spectacle but as a slow, personal revelation that the world is not what it seems.

Edward Derby Upton

major

Also known as Edward Derby, Derby, young Derby, Upton, Ed

Raised in overprotected seclusion in legend-haunted Arkham, Edward grew into a childlike genius—blond, soft-voiced, dependent—whose verse collection Azathoth and Other Horrors made him a minor sensation. His marriage to Asenath Crowninshield, a woman of hypnotic will, leaves him increasingly uncertain of his own self, hinting darkly about 'gaining his identity.' His helpless drift from gifted dreamer to something unrecognizable anchors the story's central dread.

Young Blake

major

Also known as Blake

Blake lives alone in a north attic studio, producing tales like The Burrower Beneath and canvases of unhuman monsters while watching the spectral Italian quarter across the smoke. His imagination, already tuned to the alien and fabulous, fastens on a dark Gothic church that no birds will approach and no lights ever warm. His mounting obsession with that unreachable world beyond the curling smoke draws him toward the story's threshold.

Randolph Carter

major

Also known as Carter, Betty, Randy, Randolph

Carter loves beauty alone, and the cheapness and squalor of modern freedoms sicken him; his reason rebels at their flimsy logic, yet he cannot believe in the old gods either. He served in the Foreign Legion, traveled widely, and found every vista a mockery—every flash of sunlight only a reminder of dreams he once knew. His longing for a beauty that only dream can give makes him the quintessential Lovecraft seeker, poised between disillusion and revelation.

Wilbur Whateley

major

Also known as Old Whateley, Wilbur, young Wilbur, Willy

Raised by old Wizard Whateley on Sentinel Hill, Wilbur grows fast and strange, steeped in wicked lore and the summoning of forces that do not belong in our part of space. He is a devil and a precocious monster, half of something outside Nature, and his diary and altar-stone rituals aim to let in beings that would wipe out the human race. His presence turns Dunwich from a decaying village into ground zero for cosmic intrusion.

Ammi Pierce

major

Also known as old Ammi Pierce, old Ammi, Ammi

Old Ammi Pierce is the last living link to the strange events that blighted the Blasted Heath, a man whose memory holds the slow, terrible unfolding of the colour's influence on the Gardner family. His account, told to a visiting narrator, is the story's spine—patient, grieving, and unshakably specific. He matters because without his testimony the horror would be only rumor; through him it becomes a lived, irreversible fact.

Dr. Armitage

major

Also known as Armitage

Armitage is the scholarly anchor of the Dunwich affair: a man of manuscripts, ciphers, and quiet academic habit who suddenly finds his erudition the only weapon at hand. Locked alone with a cryptic diary, he refuses food, sleep, and his physician's orders, trembling over pages he can barely force himself to finish. His terror is not for himself but for what he has understood, and that understanding drives him toward Professors Rice and Morgan and whatever desperate conference may follow.

The Doctor

supporting

Also known as the Doctor

He is a man of respectable Arkham standing whose marriage has turned into a slow dispossession, his limbs and hours claimed by another presence that wants to be fully human. He clings to fragments of his old identity, confessing to a friend in rambling hints about black magic, Innsmouth blood, and a formula that cheats death. His mounting dread and strange new vigor make him both pitiable and unsettling, the human face of a bargain already half-lost.

Asenath Waite

major

Also known as Asenath

Asenath arrives at Arkham as the daughter of old Ephraim Waite, already whispered about for hypnotic influence over schoolgirls and an unnerving command of occult learning. She marries Edward Derby and steadily absorbs his family ties, his will, and even, by some accounts, his body, while her own features age and his grow childlike. Her insistence on staying in the Crowninshield house and her uncanny backhand script keep everyone guessing whether she is wife, sorcerer, or something wearing both.

The Man

minor

Also known as the man

A generic male figure appearing in various stories.

Kuranes

major

Kuranes is a man whose inner life has outgrown the waking world: he created Ooth-Nargai in dreams, and Celephaïs answers him with roan horses and cloth-of-gold banners. The cavalcade that comes for him rides back through Time itself, past the villages of his ancestors, blurring the line between memory and vision. His story turns on the pull between the grey ordinary life he was born to and the luminous realm that only he could imagine into being.

Malone

supporting

Also known as II To Malone, VII Malone, Thomas F. Malone

Malone is a man of letters detailed to the Butler Street station, drawn to the macabre since poverty and exile turned his gaze darker. He has long treated the world's secret horrors as half-spied visions to play with lightly, offset by keen logic and a deep sense of humor. When the Red Hook matter lands in his lap, his private fascination collides with duty, and the latent mystery he always sensed becomes something he cannot put down.

Richard Upton Pickman

supporting

Also known as Pickman

Pickman is the black sheep of an old Boston family, a painter whose work is so repellent that even hardened gallery circles recoil from it. He insists his ghouls are drawn from life, and his talk of tunnels, charnel places, and things that feed below the city carries a conviction no mere artist should possess. His friendship with the narrator draws the reader down into that conviction, where aesthetic daring and genuine monstrosity become impossible to separate.

Erich Zann

supporting

Also known as Zann

Zann is the tenant above the narrator in the Rue d'Auseil, a shabby old musician who chose his lofty room for its single gable window and his nightly playing after the theatre. When the narrator befriends him, Zann's gratitude wars with a terror that surfaces the moment his stranger, more haunting strains are whistled back at him. His locked door, his bare attic, and his refusal to perform certain airs make him the story's still center of dread.

Nahum Gardner

supporting

Also known as Nahum, Nahum Gardner

Gardner is the respectable head of a New England farmstead, known for good land, good humor, and a stubborn faith in plain sense. When the blasted heath and the poisoned well follow the meteorite, his confidence curdles into suspicion and then into something worse, straining his wife and sons past endurance. His slow unraveling is the story's barometer, turning a rural tragedy into a study of how ordinary men meet the unearthly.

Joe Slater

supporting

Also known as Slater

Slater arrives at the asylum as a violent, incoherent backwoodsman, tried and acquitted on grounds of insanity after a killing he never explains. In his quiet hours he weaves willow baskets and pines for the mountains; in his fits he describes radiant alien cities with a vocabulary no degenerate should possess. The narrator's fascination with this gap between the man and his visions drives the story's central question about where dreams come from.

Iranon

supporting

Iranon drifts from Teloth to Oonai and beyond, trading songs of a lost golden city for bread and shelter, gathering friends like the boy Romnod who grows fat and forgetful beside him. He is beautiful, gifted, and utterly sincere, yet his listeners tire of his dream as they tire of him, and he moves on in ragged purple. His refusal to test his own legend against the world is the quiet tragedy that shapes the tale.

Robert Suydam

supporting

Also known as Robert, Suydam, the Suydam

Suydam's relatives drag him into court over his squalid habits, his imported tomes, and his nightly ceremonies behind green blinds in a Parker Place basement. He defends himself with urbane talk of European folklore and folk dances, walking free while the police quietly open a file on his associates. His double life as gentleman scholar and occult conspirator makes him the pivot on which the story's criminal and supernatural threads meet.

Sir Wade Jermyn

supporting

Also known as old Sir Wade, Sir Wade, Wade Jermyn, Jermyn

Sir Wade is the scandalous ancestor whose strange collection of African antiquities and wilder notes become the obsession of his descendant Arthur. His tales of a prehistoric civilization and a degenerate white ape race were dismissed as madness, yet his family's odd cast of face and long arms kept the rumors alive. The shadow he throws across the Jermyn line is the story's engine, turning a genealogical curiosity into a slow horror.

Lieutenant Klenze

supporting

Also known as Klenze, poor Klenze, the madman Klenze

Klenze commands a wartime submarine whose crew watches him unravel as something in the water begins following the boat. His terror is not cowardice but recognition — he alone seems to understand what is hunting them, and his shipmates dismiss his warnings as madness. His collapse turns the vessel itself into a trap, making every man aboard doubt whether the enemy is British, German, or something older.

Harley Warren

supporting

Also known as Warren

Warren dominates his narrator-friend through sheer intellectual force, drawing him into forbidden Arabic texts and studies pursued more from fascination than inclination. He carries an undecipherable book from India and speaks obsessively of tombs where the dead rest firm and fat for a thousand years. His confidence and his secrecy pull the pair toward an ancient cemetery at midnight, and it is his absence the next morning that turns a scholarly expedition into a lifelong haunting.

Sir Arthur Jermyn

supporting

Also known as Arthur Jermyn, Arthur, young Arthur, Jermyn

Arthur Jermyn redeems his family's tainted intellectual reputation through brilliance at Oxford, yet his odd facial angle and long arms unsettle everyone he meets. He pours himself into Sir Wade's strange collection of African antiquities, weaving tales about a silent jungle city the old explorer swore existed. His devotion to proving his ancestor right is both his finest quality and the flaw that will drag him toward the truth about his own blood.

Young Wilcox

supporting

Also known as Wilcox, poor Wilcox

Wilcox drifts at the edges of Providence society, dismissed as queer by the Art Club and cherished only by a small circle of aesthetes. After an earthquake tremor he dreams of titan blocks and green ooze, waking in his nightclothes to find himself sculpting hieroglyphics he has never seen. When he carries the damp tablet to Professor Angell, his dreamy, stilted manner both alienates and fascinates — and sets in motion an inquiry into the Cthulhu cult that will outlive them both.

Crawford Tillinghast

supporting

Also known as Tillinghast

Tillinghast is a man of strange erudition who has spent years chasing sensations beyond ordinary reality, first through occultism, then through his own electrical experiments. He summons an old friend to his crumbling ancestral home at night, haggard and half-starved, insisting that what he has built will reveal the true nature of existence. His desperate need for a witness — and his terror of what he has already seen — make him both host and warning in a story about the cost of forbidden perception.

Capt. Norrys

minor

Also known as Norrys, Capt . Norrys, the plump Capt . Norrys

A sea captain who encounters the colour from space.

Joel Manton

minor

Also known as Manton

A professor who debates the nature of the unnamable.

Dr. Johnson

minor

Also known as Dr. Johnson, Johnson, Samuel Johnson

The famous lexicographer, featured in a reminiscence.

Cap'n Obed

minor

Also known as Obed

An old sailor with knowledge of Innsmouth's secrets.

Little Atal

minor

Also known as Atal

A young priest who accompanies Barzai up the mountain.

Cthulhu

supporting

Also known as Cthulhu fhtagn, great Cthulhu, mighty Cthulhu

Cthulhu exists at the center of a global web of cults, sailors' rumors, and carved idols that surface from swamp, sea, and asylum alike. His worshippers chant 'Cthulhu fhtagn' — he dreams — and their scattered testimony points toward a sunken city that rises when the stars are right. He matters less as a monster than as a pressure: the slow, geological certainty that something older than humanity is not dead but only sleeping, and that the dreams leaking out of R'lyeh are already reshaping the minds of the sensitive.

Gustaf Johansen

supporting

Also known as Johansen, Second Mate Johansen, Mate Johansen

Johansen commands the eight remaining sailors of the Emma after the Alert's hybrid crew orders them back from waters they should never have entered. He is described as a worthy man, yet he grows queerly reticent about the island where six of his men died and about the storm that took his last companion, Briden. His silence is the story's most tantalizing gap: a reliable witness who will not speak, holding back exactly what the inquiry most wants to hear.

Inspector John R. Legrasse

supporting

Also known as Inspector Legrasse, Legrasse

Legrasse arrives at the American Archaeological Society with a captured bas-relief and a story of bayou rites that sober men cannot dismiss. He is methodical, skeptical by trade, and visibly unsettled by what he saw in the Louisiana marsh, which makes his testimony all the more damning. His evidence links the Providence dreams to a living cult, giving the narrator the first hard proof that Cthulhu's worshippers are real and organized.

Ephraim Waite

supporting

Also known as Waite, Ephraim, old Ephraim

Old Ephraim Waite was feared in Arkham for forbidden studies and for a death that never quite convinced anyone. His daughter Asenath carries his look and his arts, and his shadow hangs over her marriage to Edward Derby like a debt coming due. He matters because his refusal to die sets the terms of the story's central horror: identity as something that can be stolen, traded, and worn.

The Servants

minor

Also known as the servants

Generic household staff in various stories.

Robert Blake

major

Also known as Blake

Blake returns to College Street in the winter of 1934, renting an upper floor with a view across the rooftops toward Federal Hill. He is a devotee of myth and terror who treats the abandoned church as material, until the diary entries begin to read less like notes and more like a man being watched. His slow obsession with the steeple's sealed window drives the story from idle research into something that follows him home.

Jan Martense

minor

Also known as young Jan Martense, Martense, Jan

A murdered man whose ghost haunts the Martense mansion.

Nyarlathotep

supporting

Also known as Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep

Nyarlathotep arrives in the civilized world buying strange instruments of glass and metal, speaking of electricity and psychology, and drawing crowds who shudder even as they queue. Where he goes, rest vanishes and nightmares become a public problem. The narrator attends one of his exhibitions expecting fraud and leaves marching through ruined streets with strangers, which is precisely the point: Nyarlathotep does not argue, he simply takes.

William Harris

minor

Also known as Harris, William

A man involved in the strange events at the shunned house.

Arthur Munroe

minor

Also known as Munroe

A man who disappears during the Innsmouth investigation.

Curtis Whateley

minor

Also known as Curtis

A relative of the Whateley family in Dunwich.

Cotton Mather

minor

Also known as Mather

A historical Puritan minister mentioned in the story.

Mr. Czanek

minor

Also known as Joe Czanek, Czanek

A man who assists in a robbery of the Terrible Old Man.

Professor Angell

minor

A professor who studied the Cthulhu cult.

Alfred Jermyn

minor

Also known as Alfred, Sir Alfred Jermyn, Jermyn

A member of the degenerate Jermyn family.

St. John

minor

A friend of the narrator who dies in a crypt.

Denys Barry

minor

Also known as Barry

An Irish landowner who drains a bog and awakens horror.

Lavinia Whateley

supporting

Also known as Lavinia, Lavinny

Lavinia lives with her father Old Whateley in a decaying farmhouse above Dunwich, tolerated and avoided by neighbors who remember her wild youth. She is tied to Wilbur by something more than motherhood, and her presence in the story is a quiet dread beneath the louder horrors of the farm. What she knows about her son's parentage and the rites on Sentinel Hill makes her the human hinge on which Dunwich's ruin turns.

Matt Eliot

minor

Also known as Eliot, Matt

A friend of the narrator in the story 'He'.

Captain Obed Marsh

supporting

Also known as Marsh, old Captain Marsh, Obed Marsh, Captain Obed

Obed Marsh is the ancestral shadow hanging over Innsmouth — a mariner who brought prosperity and something far worse back from the South Seas, and whose descendants still bear his unsettling eyes. His pact binds the town's fortunes to a bargain no one will name aloud, and his mixed heritage surfaces in the narrator's own face and dreams. He matters because every early clue about Innsmouth's decay leads back to him, making his choices the engine of the story's creeping dread.

Daniel Upton

supporting

Also known as Dan, Daniel Upton

Upton moves through the story as the steady, rational counterweight to his friend's unraveling — a man of ordinary affections caught between duty and dread. His bond with the doomed companion is the story's emotional spine, and his compulsion to record what happened becomes both confession and warning. He matters because his skepticism and grief make the encroaching horror feel personal rather than abstract.

Dr. Francis Morgan

minor

Also known as Dr. Morgan, Morgan

A doctor who investigates the strange case of Joe Slater.

Sir Robert Jermyn

minor

Also known as Robert Jermyn, Sir Robert

A member of the cursed Jermyn family line.

Henry Anthony Wilcox

minor

Also known as Wilcox

A sculptor who dreams of Cthulhu and R'lyeh.

The Whateleys

minor

Also known as the decadent Whateleys, witch Whateleys, Whateleys

The degenerate family of Dunwich involved in dark magic.

Luther Brown

minor

Also known as gasps Luther, Luther

A man who witnesses the horror in the Martense mansion.

Castro

minor

Also known as Old Castro, old Castro

An old cultist who reveals the history of Cthulhu.

Professor Warren Rice

minor

Also known as Professor Rice, Rice

A professor who investigates the Dunwich horror.

Carrington Harris

minor

Also known as Carrington, Harris

A man who tells the story of the shunned house.

Mr. James Boswell

minor

Also known as Mr. Boswell, James

The biographer of Dr. Johnson in the reminiscence.

Abdul Reis

minor

Also known as Abdul, Abdul Reis el Drogman

A dragoman who guides the narrator in Egypt.

Old Zadok

supporting

Also known as Zadok, Zadok Allen

Zadok is the town's disreputable memory — a drunkard everyone dismisses and no one silences, muttering about Marsh, the reef, and things that come ashore at night. His fear is genuine and his details too specific to be mere delusion, which makes him both pitiable and dangerous to know. He matters because he hands the narrator the first real key to Innsmouth's history, and his terror primes the reader for what the town is hiding.

Sir John Hawkins

minor

Also known as Sir John, Hawkins

A historical figure mentioned in the Jermyn family history.

Menes

minor

Also known as small Menes

A pharaoh mentioned in the story 'Imprisoned with the Pharaohs'.

Earl Sawyer

minor

Also known as Sawyer

A man who helps investigate the Dunwich horror.

Sally Sawyer

minor

Also known as Sally

A woman involved in the Dunwich events.

Barzai the Wise

minor

Also known as Barzai, unseen Barzai

A priest who climbs a mountain to see the gods.

Nigger-Man

minor

Also known as old Nigger-Man

An old African man living in a haunted house.

Walter de la Poer

minor

Also known as Walter

An ancestor of the Jermyn family with a dark secret.

Charles Le Sorcier

minor

Also known as Charles, Le Sorcier, young Charles

An alchemist who cursed the Manton family.

Old Dr. Fenton

minor

Also known as old Dr. Fenton

A physician who treats the narrator in a strange case.

Little Merwin

minor

Also known as Merwin

A child who disappears in the story 'The Moon-Bog'.

The Stranger

minor

Also known as the stranger

A mysterious visitor in several stories.

Zenas Low

minor

Also known as Zenas, the missing Zenas

A missing person in the story of the shunned house.

Dr. Reid

minor

Also known as Reid

A doctor who treats the narrator in 'Hypnos'.

The Boatswain Müller

minor

Also known as Müller

A boatswain on the U-boat in 'The Temple'.

Wal

minor

A character in the story 'The Picture in the House'.

Thaddeus

minor

Also known as Thad, young Thaddeus

A young man in the story 'The Tomb'.

Kilderry

minor

A character in the story 'The Moon-Bog'.

The Gardners

minor

Also known as Gardners

The family of Nahum Gardner, victims of the colour.