favor in this tale, killing off Robert Harrison Blake (aka Robert Bloch). Bloch later wrote a third story, "The Shadow from the Steeple" (1950), to create a trilogy. Several of the surface details of the plot were taken directly from Hanns Heinz Ewers' "The Spider", which Lovecraft read in Dashiell Hammett's anthology Creeps By Night (1931). In Blake's final notes, he refers to "Roderick Usher", an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", which Lovecraft described in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" as featuring "an abnormally linked trinity of entities...a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment." An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that this interpretation is the key to understanding the ending of "The Haunter of the Dark": "[W]e are to believe that the entity in the church--the Haunter of the Dark, described as an avatar of Nyarlathotep--has possessed Blake's mind but, at the moment of doing so, is struck by lightning and killed, and Blake dies as well." Connections with other tales The Shining Trapezohedron is mentioned as having been fashioned on Yuggoth, an outpost of the Mi-Go mentioned in "The Whisperer in Darkness". "It (i.e. The Shining Trapezohedron) was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica", suggesting a connection with the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness. The Serpent Men of Valusia also held possession of the Shining Trapezohedron at one point, connecting it to the Kull tales of Robert E. Howard. The "catacombs of Nephren-Ka" are mentioned as the haunt of ghouls in "The Outsider", and Nephren-Ka is mentioned as the Pharaoh who built a temple with a lightless crypt to the Shining Trapezohedron and "did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records". The events of this story are alluded to in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, in which they are depicted as having actually happened, and Lovecraft's story having been inspired by them. The Shining Trapezohedron, along with several other aspects of "The Haunter of the Dark" and Lovecraftian horror in general, are central to the plot of Edward Lee's 2009 book, Haunter of the Threshold. Fritz Leiber's 1977 novel, Our Lady of Darkness, features a horror writer, aware of Lovecraft's story, who becomes fascinated by a place visible from his San Francisco