The Transition of Juan Romero

Written by H. P. Lovecraft

Narrated by Howard King

"The Transition of Juan Romero" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written on September 16, 1919, and first published in the 1944 Arkham House volume Marginalia.
Plot: The story involves a mine that uncovers a very deep chasm, too deep for any sounding lines to hit bottom. The night after the discovery of the abyss the narrator and one of the mine's workers, a Mexican called Juan Romero, venture inside the mine, drawn against their will by a mysterious rhythmical throbbing in the ground. Romero reaches the abyss first and is swallowed by it. The narrator peers over the edge, sees something - "but God, I dare not tell you what I saw!" and loses consciousness. That morning he and Romero are both found in their bunks, Romero dead. Other miners swear that neither of them left their cabin that night. The chasm has vanished as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digital Literature International
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9783991450818

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born in New England, a landscape that he turned into a stage of fiction. His stories inherited the tradition of gothic horror tales from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, but Lovecraft set his own standards. His first stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine. “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), a short story about a monstrous deity that inhabits the Earth, is the base of the myths related to the Cthulhu Mythos, a genre of horror fiction launched by Lovecraft. In its world, populated by beings of other dimensions, the laws of humanity are worthless. But man is incapable of understanding its insignificance in the face of the magnitude of the cosmos.