[1] In this work, a mysterious individual who has been living alone in a castle for as long as he can remember decides to break free in search of human contact and light.
"The Outsider" combines horror, fantasy, and gothic fiction to create a nightmarish story, containing themes of loneliness, the abhuman, and the afterlife.
"[2] The opening paragraphs echo those of Poe's "Berenice", while the horror at the party recalls the unmasking scene in "The Masque of the Red Death".
[3] Another suggested literary model is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818), in which the creature causes a shock when he enters a cottage: "I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted."
[3] Colin Wilson, in The Strength to Dream (1961), points to Oscar Wilde's short story "The Birthday of the Infanta", in which a misshapen dwarf is horrified to see his reflection for the first time.
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia finds this analysis to be exaggerated, but suggests that the story "may possibly be indicative of HPL's own self-image, particularly the image of one who always thought himself ugly and whose mother told at least one individual about her son's 'hideous' face.
"[3] "The Outsider" is written in a first-person narrative style, and details the miserable and apparently lonely life of an individual, who appears to have never made contact with another person.
He tells of his environment: a dark, decaying castle amid an "endless forest" of high trees that block out the light from the sun.
Ghouls make frequent appearances in Lovecraft's work, such as in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), although they are generally very different from the undead creatures described here.
Nitocris, a legendary queen of Egypt, also makes an appearance in the 1924 Lovecraft and Harry Houdini collaboration "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs".
Nephren-Ka is mentioned in "The Haunter of the Dark" as the Pharaoh who built "a temple with a windowless crypt" to the Shining Trapezohedron, and "did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records".