This text begins a story, in which an eldritch book precipitates the narrator’s unmooring from the usual relationship that any natural creature shares with space and time. This new relationship is manifest outwardly as a previously non-existent shadow—a preternatural extension of the narrator smeared into the physical world—and inwardly in his bewilderingly altered perception of reality.

This work was written in 1933, 28 years after the Annus Mirabilis in which the public first learned of what comes to be called Minkowski spacetime. That Time is not the sugary frosting on a 3-layered cake of Space, but is instead sugar co-equal with the flour, eggs, and butter, which make up the cake itself, is an idea truly mind-bending to any—such as the author—who seeks to wrap his mind around it.

Blackwood—who influenced Lovecraft—took on the weird subject of spacetime—after its publication in 1905—in Entrance and Exit (1909), The Man Who Found Out (1912), A Victim of Higher Space (1914), and The Pikestaffe Case (1914). How Lovecraft’s treatment differs from Blackwood’s is that Lovecraft’s narrator speaks from within that experience, rather than about that experience. An ambitious undertaking, it was perhaps too ambitious, as the story was not completed by its author.