“ As the ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all the million windows of Baharna’s terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of heaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.”
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, pg.483)
Welcome back to Our Daily Lovecraft. Breathe deep, and relax…
If you’re just joining us, you can start your Lovecraftian journey here!
“The Strange High House in the Mist”
This story was different in an interesting sort of way. It starts off kind of…normally, I suppose one could say. We’re in Kingsport, which apparently is where the Miskatonic river runs (again, more mentions in this story, from Arkham to Ulthar to even the Terrible Old Man himself). The mists here rise and fall and it’s all quite romantic and pretty. There’s a really tall kind of stone spire that looks like it touches the sky (seems odd but okay), and on that strange piece of world there exists a little house. Everyone believes the same person has lived there for centuries, if not longer. Then one day a new guy moves into town and decides he must know who lives there. He visits, has a relatively nice time, and then sees some otherworldly stuff.
Yet unlike typical Lovecraftian fare, we’re not treated to demons of eldritch design or terrors that make men end their lives in madness. In fact, it sounds pretty awesome. The gentleman comes back, lives a relatively mundane life, and that’s about it. Now, they say he didn’t come back the same man, which I believe. But it doesn’t seem too awful. Unless they stole his soul or the part of his soul that reveled in good times, I’m honestly not sure if the things he saw were actually evil or not. In fact, the sounds people in Kingsport hear at times with the mist rising up and whatnot is a lot of really fun-loving laughter. Like there’s a truly amazing party happening up on that spire to the point that the elders of the village worry the young men are going to want to go up and have a look. It’s weird because Lovecraft tries to instill fear in this concept but to me it just doesn’t work. It sounds more like there’s an elvish celebration happening and maybe seeing it wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe you might not come back the same, but maybe it’s because you were content with all the awesome you saw. The gent who went up the mountain came back. He went on with life and his children grew up well and happy, so unless we know more about his inner thoughts, we’ll never know enough to be frightened.
Tell you what though—the extraordinarily old soul that lived in that house has seen things, man. He was around before the Elder Ones were born so…dang. Given how things keep coming back in these stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if this man made another appearance somewhere in the future. He’s definitely not going anywhere and there are plenty of stories yet to come.
“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”
This was a LONG tale. According to Joshi’s introduction it’s a “short novel.” He also completely spoils the ending, by the way. Thanks, dude. Apparently one of the previous stories, “The Silver Key,” was meant to come after this tale though Lovecraft wrote it while working on this one. I suppose because the stories in this collection are done in chronological order in terms of completion, this story was several months later. Hence why we’re now just getting to it.
I have to tell you – I love this story. While the final ending was kind of “meh,” it’s the journey that was so fabulous and mesmerizing. Lovecraft has a way of delivering the most beautiful of things as well as the slimiest of dark places. We’re yet again in a dream world where, once more we meet a Randolph Carter who keeps glimpsing a stunning sunset city in his dreams. He wishes to visit it, only to have that very place snatched from his mind’s eye by the very gods he’s prayed to. Thus begins his massive dream-quest to meet with these gods and beseech them to let him visit this marvelous sunset city.
And what a quest it is. People can be obsessed with the Cult of Cthulhu all they want – I want to visit Lovecraft’s dream places. The way he describes them are always so vivid and wondrous. I want to have dreams that take me to these places that are so full of color and phenomenal architecture, magic and more. Even better, you think you might just be following Carter around while he tries to get to this place dubbed unknown Kadath where the gods abide. And you are, but with adventure attached! I expected this story would be perhaps similar to “The Quest of Iranon” but instead it’s more in-depth and with some actual side-quests involving everything from pixie-like creatures (and not the nice sort), talking cats from the one and only Ulthar (or at least, Carter speaks cat language), friendly ghouls, kidnappings, and more. I was pleasantly surprised and the only thing that allowed me to put the book down was that there was so much description that at times I had to pause to let my brain sink it in. It’s truly a fantastical piece of work and I can only imagine how some of those images placed on the paper might be able to translate to the big screen (honestly, it would be a lot of CGI. Probably similar to Gods of Egypt, honestly). Right now I feel like it can only be adequately captured in art, some of which I stumbled across several stories ago when looking for certain Lovecraft-related images. Daniel Lieske’s “Celephaïs” is one such piece. It’s so pretty and it just makes me happy.
My delight in this story aside (because really, it knows no bounds – you even find yourself cheering for ghouls for heaven’s sake. Who the heck thought that was going to happen in this day-to-day Lovecraftian saga we’ve got going on here?), the entire time I’ve been reading these stories wondering what kind of weird connections scholars of Lovecraft’s work might be making between the stories, looking for things that aren’t there, doing everything they can to make the stories connect even if the only things there were the references to items in previous tales, done in passing. But then we have this story and Lovecraft does it for them. Almost every single element we’ve experienced before appear in this story. I could not believe it. From characters to places to things to gods themselves – they’re here! It’s amazing how they’re woven in, some just in passing again (Pnakotic Manuscripts) and some playing surprisingly major roles (Pickman from “Pickman’s Model.” I thought that guy was dead – how extraordinarily wrong I was!). Even the shortest slivers of stories that seemed to have no real placement in the larger world that Lovecraft was making, a world I assumed was inhabited by awful things and ruled by Cthulhu and his fellows, appear once again, such as Nyarlathotep from the story of the same name. He exists in this tale in a much more physical way here than as perhaps an idea from before. Or even mentions of the city of Olathoë and it’s destruction from “Polaris.” In that story we’re never sure if it’s real or not – here it is made very clear that it exists in the dreamworld, or at least it did once before evil things came and destroyed it. Just as it was in the original story.
Weaving all these things together, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential as they were before, was great fun and I wonder if people reading Lovecraft in the same way, provided they’re enjoying what they’ve read so far, have or will have the same kind of enjoyment of it as I have. If the Cthulhu mythos is all connected in some way, I wonder how much more of this dreamscape work is ahead of me because I’d be excited to come across more. Even if you never read a Lovecraft story for the horror, if you adore fantasy and want to visit other places, this is something you should read because it is just on a whole different level.
Featured image © Nicole Taft
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