"The Silver Key" alludes to other Lovecraft stories that feature Randolph Carter, allowing the reader to place these stories in chronological order: first The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, then "The Statement of Randolph Carter", followed by "The Unnamable".
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia compares "The Silver Key" to Lovecraft's early story "The Tomb", whose narrator, Jervas Dudley, also "discovers in his attic a physical key that allows him to unlock the secrets of the past."[REF] .