"The Descendant" is a story fragment by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, believed to have been written in 1927.[1] It was first published in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft may have been referring to this attempt at a story when he wrote that he was "making a very careful study of London...in order to get background for tales involving richer antiquities than America can furnish. Lord Northam is a "harmlessly mad" Londoner who "screams when the church bells ring." Once a "scholar and aesthete" who studied at Harrow and Oxford, he has become "thin and grey and wrinkled" before his time and "seeks...not to think" through "books of the tamest and most puerile kind". He only begins to explain the fear he lives under when confronted with a copy of the Necronomicon. The details of the character evoke two of Lovecraft's favorite British writers: He lives in Gray's Inn, where Arthur Machen lived for many years, and is the "nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past", recalling Lord Dunsany, who was the eighteenth baron of a line founded in the 12th century. Northam's sampling of various worldviews is similar to Randolph Carter's quest for meaning in Lovecraft's "The Silver Key". Northam's description as "a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying" also links him to Carter. Northam is also linked to Lovecraft's "The Nameless City," perhaps even being the main character therein: "He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory." Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) - known as H.P. Lovecraft - was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre.
