The story takes place sometime after Pickman's disappearance. Steeling his nerves with whiskey, Thurber relates the day Pickman took him to his private atelier and gallery, located somewhere in the derelict slums of Boston. There he witnesses even more horrific works by the painter as well as the true source of inspiration to his works. For the whole time, Pickman had painted from real models. There was no imagination in hid works, just works based on genuine horrors living under the city.
Pickman's Model is decent enough of a horror story. It's one of those short tales Lovecraft was well versed in writing. It doesn't really matter that you can guess the end well before it happens, Lovecraft still manages to keep it interesting to the end.
The story has been adapted to other media as well. There are at least one TV adaptation and a comic book adaptation.
The Silver Key (1926) Randolph Carter is a man of dreams. He believes, that dreams are nothing but another side of reality and he has always preferred his dreams to wake reality. But, he found out that he had gradually lost his dreaming ways the older he got. This he blames on the scientific ideas which are more prominent in the waking.
After a time of trying to decide if the real ideas are better than those in dreams, he sees a dream where he is reminded of a silver key in the attic of his old home. He returns to where he was born and by magic, he is sent back to his childhood, but his memories are still intact. As he grows older, again, people are amazed at his knack of foresight of future matters. The narrator then continues by stating he is certain, he will meet himself soon in the same dreamscapes he has always dwelled.
The Silver Key is a part of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, placing it somewhere around the final sequence of the set of stories. It is, just like the other stories in Dream Cycle, a poetic, dream-like tale of searching for something that lies beyond reality.
Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, initially rejected The Silver Key, only to accept it for publication a year later, of his own request. he later told to Lovecraft, that the readers had disliked the story almost violently. That is kind of a shame, as it's not a terribly written story, but it might have been something too different from what the readers of Wierd Tales had accustomed to.
The Strange High House In The Mist (1926) A philosopher, Thomas Olney, is fascinated by a house on a seaside cliff of the town of Kingsport. The house, built to a steep cliff, almost hanging over the ocean is feard by the locals and no-one really knows who lives there.
One Morning, Olney decides, that he wants to climb the cliff to the house. He has figured, that the people who live there must patron the town on another side of the cliff, hence the reason why no one living there ever visits Kingsport. The man climbs to the house and finds a strange man, seeming both old and young at the same time, living there. They chat for a while, but then, some other visitor intends to enter the house. His host hurries to ensure the windows and doors are closed, preventing the new visitor from coming in. The next day Olney returns back to the village, but it is obvious something is wrong with him. His spirit seems to be lost. It's almost like his soul was left behind in the strange house he spent a night in.
The Strange High House In The Mist is somewhat of a callback to an older story Lovecraft wrote. Kingsport was previously mentioned in the story The Terrible Old Man, and the titular Old Man is a character in this story as well. He mentions remembering his grandfather stating the house had been on the cliff even back when he was a boy. Despite this connection, TSHHITM works surprisingly well as an independent story. While it does help to know something about the history of the town, that isn't strictly necessary to be able to enjoy the story as it is. It is a well written and intriguing tale on its own right, well worth a read.
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