"The Transition of Juan Romero" is a short story by American
horror fiction
Horror is a genre of fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, or disgust. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which is in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian ...
writer
H. P. Lovecraft, written on September 16, 1919, and first published in the 1944
Arkham House
Arkham House is an American publishing house specializing in weird fiction. It was founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish hardcover collections of H. P. Lovecraft's best works, which had ...
volume ''Marginalia''.
Plot
The story involves a
mine
Mine, mines, miners or mining may refer to:
Extraction or digging
* Miner, a person engaged in mining or digging
*Mining, extraction of mineral resources from the ground through a mine
Grammar
*Mine, a first-person English possessive pronoun
...
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 together 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. The next morning, the narrator and the deceased Romero are both found in their bunks. Other miners swear that neither of them left their cabin that night. The
chasm
In geology, a rift is a linear zone where the lithosphere is being pulled apart and is an example of extensional tectonics.
Typical rift features are a central linear downfaulted depression, called a graben, or more commonly a half-graben wi ...
has vanished as well.
Other details
The story was a private illustrative exercise, meant only for the eyes of his small circle of correspondents. Written in less than a day, it was meant to quickly demonstrate what might be done with a desert setting that had been used in what Lovecraft called a "dull yarn" of a story (now lost) by 'Phil Mac' (Prof. Philip Bayaud McDonald).
[Lovecraft "Letter to the Gallomo, April 1920", in ''Letters to Alfred Galpin'', Hippocampus Press, 2003.]
Lovecraft seems to have disavowed the story early in his writing career. He did not allow it to be published in the small press during his lifetime, and it does not appear on most lists of his stories. He seems not to have shown the story to anyone until, toward the end of his life,
Robert H. Barlow badgered him into sending him the manuscript so that Barlow could prepare a typescript of it.
Huitzilopochtli, a Mesoamerican deity associated with human sacrifice, is mentioned, indicating that Juan Romero's transition may have been related to a sacrifice ritual.
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
Full text – The Transition of Juan Romero*
1944 short stories
Short stories by H. P. Lovecraft
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