The next story is a real treat, because I don’t have it in any of my anthologies! Therefore, I will be reading it alongside you. It’s by another young writer in Lovecraft’s circle – Richard F Searight. The name of the story is The Sealed Casket
It can be found here
Sealed Casket
In it, the Eltdown Shards are introduced, which was referred to later by Lovecraft in The Challenge from Beyond, which we’ve already read.
Richard Searight first published in 1924 at the age of 21 with the story, The Brain in the Jar. It won first place in a survey of the readers of the magazine Weird Tales. It wasn’t until 1933 that Seawright began to pick up the writing pen again. He wrote to Lovecraft at the suggestion of the editor of Weird Tales, who warmly embraced him, remembering the great story he had written in the mid 20’s.
He sold a few stories, but he was regularly rejected by magazines, because he wasn’t a big name. He was still trying to find a regular magazine to publish through, and he was the sort of writer frequently discouraged by rejections. As someone who has poured a lot into a story and gotten rejections myself, I sympathize. While Lovecraft was still alive encouraging him, he kept it up, and published poems and stories. After his mentor passed, however, he would file away a story after one rejection, and gave up writing altogether a few years later.
Due to his collaboration with Lovecraft, and some stories in the Mythos, some of his works have been anthologized, and many unpublished works saw print. I have an anthology with five of his short stories and his poetry in it, and four of them were never published.
So let’s read The Sealed Casket and see if we can discover whether it’s an unknown awesome, or a typical story.