"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price

This is just all the chapters put together into one upload. If you've been following along the whole time, there is nothing new to hear here.

0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:18:09 Chapter 2
0:22:54 Chapter 3
0:44:34 Chapter 4
0:54:50 Chapter 5
1:11:26 Chapter 6
1:23:44 Chapter 7
1:31:41 Chapter 8

This story was written as a sequel to "The Silver Key". If you haven't listened to that one yet, you might want to go there first.

Apparently the sequel was Price's idea, and Price wrote the first draft of the story. Lovecraft didn't keep much of Price's works, it appears he retained Price's basic plot and themes but rewrote the whole thing in his own style.

Chapter 1 also references the events in the story "The Statement of Randolph Carter", so that would be another one to give a listen, whether before or after this narration.

It must have been so much more fun to be an author in a time when the solar system had not yet been explored. You could make up whatever crazy things you wanted about the other planets, and there was no harsh reality of observations to spoil your fun.

I am always amazed at how many words have obscure pronunciations and nobody seems to agree on how to say them. You'd think with the Internet, things would be made clearer and move towards convergence, but no, that is rarely the case. In today's reading, we have 'olibanum', a synonym for frankincense. I decided to drag out my old (1984!) physical-book dictionary on this one. Only to discover just how awful my vision is getting... But I do have a magnifying glass. Anyways, the pronunciation I used in the reading corresponds to what my dictionary says it should be. If you don't like it, you can take it up with Random House. Oh wait, it's now Penguin Random House. Which is owned by Bertelsmann. There's probably nobody left any more with which to take up any complaints over such an old edition :-P

Gotta love words with more than one accepted pronunciation. Rather hilariously, at the start of chapter 3, you can hear me use two different pronunciations of 'neither' IN THE SAME SENTENCE! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!! Even though I caught that in edit, I left it in because it struck me as funny.

And in chapter 8, we unfortunately have yet another case of a verboten word. For youtube purposes I blanked out the word entirely. I hate to do it, but blame youtube and their censoriousness. You can find the uncensored version over on bitchute.

Normally I'd rather not censor a story and if I had to, I would just make it a bitchute exclusive instead. However, given how long it has taken me to work through this story, I can't have four days of effort with nothing to show for it here on youtube. So, you get a censored version instead. I really hate this part of youtube...

The pictures used are:

Chapter 1: A crop from the cover page spread from "Weird Tales", volume 5, number 2, published in Feb 1925, for the story "The Statement of Randolph Carter".

Chapter 2: The Silver Key, created by Gage Prentiss for Propnomicon, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Chapters 3 and 4 are freely available wallpaper downloads found on a public domain image search.

Chapter 5: The illustration by Harry Clarke from "Tales of Mystery and Imagination", 1923.

Chapter 6: The title page illustration by H.R. Hammond as it appeared in Weird Tales, July 1934. It's all wrong, of course - clearly the illustrator never read the story, neither Zkauba nor the bholes look anything like what is shown here, but I had the damnedest time finding *anything* at all to use as an illustration for this chapter, and since this is artwork that appeared with the story in its original publication, that's what you get.

Regarding chapters 7 and 8: There were a couple of pictures of Zkauba out there, and Yaddithians in general, but only a couple, and none with permissions of a nature that I could use them here. So you get these rather boring and anti-climatic pictures instead. Sucky. Such is life. Beggars can't be choosers, and all that.

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tgsk.aspx