"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is the first person testimony of the titular character, who has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock.

After several minutes of silence, Warren suddenly begins to make vague, panicked outbursts that culminate in a desperate plea for Carter to flee.

After his disappearance, Randolph Carter tells police that "I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown."

In "The Silver Key", he is alluded to as "a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia."

Lovecraft based the story on a dream that he transcribed, adding only a preamble to make it more fluid as a narrative,[4] and wrote it in the form of a testimony given to the police.

The story contains an early statement of a common theme of Lovecraft's—the terrible price of knowledge: As to the nature of our studies--must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension?