Showing results for "Facts" in Anthologies & Short Stories

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, also known as just Arthur Jermyn or The White Ape, is a short story in the horror fiction genre written by H. P. Lovecraft 1920. The themes of the story are tainted ancestry, knowledge that it would be best to remain unaware of, and a reality which human understanding finds intolerable.

A doctor desires to attempt something that has never been done before, to hypnotize someone as they die. He does. And, frightful consequences ensue.

The narrator is interested in mesmerism, a pseudoscience involving bringing a patient into a hypnagogic state by the influence of magnetism, a process that later developed into hypnotism. He points out that, as far as he knows, no one has ever been mesmerized at the point of death, and he is curious to see what effects mesmerism would have on a dying person. He considers experimenting on his friend Ernest Valdemar, an author whom he had previously mesmerized and who has recently been diagnosed with phthisis (tuberculosis).

On the brink of death, the friend of a notable mesmerist commits to an experiment of hypnosis prior to imminent death. As the tale progresses, the mesmerist describes keeping his friend in a fully mesmerized state without a pulse or breath. When Valdemar asks from his trancelike state to either be awakened or let go, the narrator tries to wake him from the grips of death - with dire consequences.

Many would have disliked to live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and scholar and had not minded, until a peculiar box object arrived from Africa and after seeing it, he went out on the moor and set himself on fire. Discover what it was about the object that explained his peculiar personal appearance, and made him end his life.