Lovecraft Ascending

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death (1995) by H.P. Lovecraft, containing the following stories (Publication dates in brackets):

Introduction: Concerning Dreams and Nightmares by Neil Gaiman: Enjoyable but light on context and somewhat glib. The volume could really use a historical overview of its contents to establish a context for the stories, along with both composition and publication dates for all the stories.

• Azathoth (1922): Short prose poem/fragment.
• The Descendant (1926) : Fragment.
• The Thing in the Moonlight (1934): Fragment.
• Polaris (1920): It's an oddity all right, one that could be sub-titled 'Angry Man Yells at North Star.'
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919): A scientific romance of multiple personalities got turned into a mostly unfaithful movie.
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1920): Maybe the best of Lovecraft's short, moody Dunsanian horror stories. Introduces a precursor to the Deep Ones.
• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920): The first appearance of the closest thing to a recurring protagonist Lovecraft ever created. Has one of HPL's two most familiar, quoted and/or mocked concluding lines.
• The Cats of Ulthar (1920): HPL loved cats and he let it show. And they would show up again to play a major role in the events of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
• Celephais (1922): Prose poem.
• From Beyond (1934): Short horror story of perception. Turned into a sort-of faithful movie.
• Nyarlathotep (1920): Short prose poem/fragment about the Herald of the Great Old Ones from ancient Egypt to a briefly imagined dystopic future.
• The Nameless City (1921): That would be the lost desert city of Irem, which also figures in the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Other Gods (1933): Whimsical bit of Dunsanian fabulism and cosmic relativism.
• Ex Oblivione (1921): Prose poem.
• The Quest of Iranon (1935): Dunsanian fable.
• The Hound (1924): Fairly straightforward horror story features two decadents and an unusual-for-HPL setting of Amsterdam.
• Hypnos (1922): As much a nod to Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" as it is a Dream-Cycle work.
• What the Moon Brings (1922): Prose poem.
• Pickman's Model  (1927): A straightforward horror story with elements that would be re-used in the Dream-Cycle short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written the same year but published 16 years later. Has one of HPL's two most familiar, quoted and/or mocked concluding lines.
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943): HPL's oddest long work combines the soporific with the startling. Randolph Carter stars.
• The Silver Key (1929): Randolph Carter again, exploring the Dream-lands.
• The Strange High House in the Mist (1931): Demon-haunted Kingsport makes an appearance, though it's positively normal compared to its representation in "the Festival."
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1943): Unpublished for years after its composition, this short novel gave us "essential salts" and Lovecraft's most fully realized antagonist, Joseph Curwen. Certain sections approach a parody of overused tropes.
• The Dreams in the Witch-House (1933): Horror story has ties to both the Dream Cycle and to the Cthulhu Mythos. Somehow turned into soft-core-porn horror on TV anthology Masters of Horror.
• Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1934) by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price: Price and Lovecraft collaborate on a continuation of the story of Randolph Carter, for whom friends and relatives now search. A lengthy section on four-dimensional, non-linear space-time is nearly essential to understanding where Alan Moore is coming from in similar sections in his Lovecraft-inspired Neonomicon.

Overall: Certainly not as strong a collection as one of HPL's later-period work would be, but still extremely strong at points, and necessary for understanding him as a writer. Highly recommended.

Looking for Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft (1927/first published 1943): The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath wasn't published until six years after H.P. Lovecraft's death. It's fascinating, poetic, uneven, and occasionally soporific. It's also the longest bridge between HPL's Dunsanian period and his mature Cthulhu Mythos work, having been completed after the publication of the seminal Mythos novella "The Call of Cthulhu." 

Lord Dunsany, far and away the most influential English-language fantasist of the first half of the 20th century, supplied a literary model for Lovecraft's in-between years. HPL's Dunsanian period moved him from verbose nods to Edgar Allan Poe and other horror writers to the cosmic horrors of the Mythos that would occupy Lovecraft from the mid-1920's to his death in 1937. 

The Dunsany stories, sometimes referred to as Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, aren't strictly horror. Instead, their lapidary prose and often surreal settings aim for a more nebulous form of the Weird and the Fantastic. They are indeed dream-like at even their shortest lengths, and many of the Dream-Cycle fragments are expansions of dreams set down by Lovecraft. From Dunsany also came Lovecraft's pantheons of strange gods with stranger names, and strange places with stranger names. Dunsany helped unshackle Lovecraft from real religions and traditional supernatural menaces. Dunsany helped Lovecraft fly.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath follows the efforts of recurring Dream-Cycle character Randolph Carter to discover why he's been banished from a wondrous city he'd previously been visiting in his dreams. Yes, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is indeed set in dreams -- or "Earth's Dreamlands," as Carter would say. There are also Dreamlands on other worlds. There are also Dreamlands in the dark between the stars, but you probably wouldn't want to find out what lives there.

Carter seeks the fortress of Kadath of the Cold Wastes, where dwell the gods of Earth, who seem to have barred Carter from his Dream-City. Looming far beyond and greater than the gods of Earth are the Other Gods. These are versions of the alien 'Gods' of the Cthulhu Mythos, though only Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are named among them. 

Carter will have to deal with these gods along with various monsters, ghouls, night-gaunts, cats, Gugs, almost-humans, vampires, and moon-beasts in the course of his quest. He'll meet Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow. He'll converse with Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, herald of the Other Gods. He'll make friends and allies of the Cats of Ulthar and the ghouls of the Dreamlands. And he'll voyage through strange and mysterious lands, over weird seas, and under strange ground.

And all without chapter breaks!

Those who would come to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath seeking cosmic horror in the vein of "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness" should steer clear. There are sections of weird, unsettling description. But this novella really works best as a lengthy prose poem devoted to evoking the weird, the surreal, and the logic of dreams.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has some tiring passages. Its diction and syntax would have been helped in stretches by serious, ruthless editing. And HPL really, really falls in love with the word 'pshent' (now generally spelled 'pschent') over the last 20 pages or so. Nonetheless, it's a rewarding text both for the devotee of HPL and the general fantasy reader. Listening to prog-rock while reading it might also be a good idea. It's pretty trippy. Recommended.

Nefandous

H.P. Lovecraft: Tales: edited by Peter Straub (Collected 2005): If you're going to buy one collection of H.P. Lovecraft's horror and science-fiction stories, this Library of America volume is the one. While it omits the products of about ten years of HPL's apprenticeship learning to write, along with all of his Dunsany-era stories, it nonetheless does contain pretty much all of Lovecraft's essential fiction. The inclusion of his essay on supernatural fiction would have been nice, but the appendices make up for that exclusion.

More importantly, Straub uses the new standard HPL texts as assembled by S.T. Joshi from Lovecraft's original manuscripts and the original magazine appearances of these stories. As monumentally important as editor and publisher August Derleth was to the survival and posthumous propagation of Lovecraft's work, his editing instincts were always somewhat wonky. Derleth tended to think that italicizing key passages and putting exclamation marks after every third sentence made HPL scarier! It didn't. The much calmer, less obtrusive prose of these remastered stories restores a lot of the lost grandeur and sublimity of Lovecraft's greatest moments.

While Lovecraft made cosmic horror and imaginary gods a staple of American horror fiction forever after, he also made the documentary tone a mainstay of horror fiction. Most stories are first-person accounts given by a narrator who has survived the events (at least for a little while -- there's always a cost to saving the Earth) or who has collected information about events that he himself did not participate in. One of the odd things about the current horror boom in 'found-footage' and 'fake documentary' films is that HPL would have loved them: they, and not narrative horror, are the closest approximation on the screen of what the narration of stories from his mature writing period seeks to achieve.

As other critics have noted, one of the fascinating things about looking at HPL's stories in the order of composition rather than the order of publication is to see him gradually losing interest in horror. His work after 1931 or so (he died in 1937 at the age of 47) moves more and more towards being straight, though extravagantly cosmic, science fiction in which all the mythological elements have rational (albeit bizarre) explanations.

For example, the cosmic aliens of "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Shadow Out of Time" really aren't that menacing -- certainly not compared to the invading horrors in the earlier "The Call of Cthulhu" or "The Colour Out of Space." Indeed, the time-travelling Great Race of "The Shadow Out of Time" turns out to be relatively benign, while the Mi-Go of "Whisperer" seem more misunderstood nuisance than threat.

Another progression involves Lovecraft's oft-mentioned racism and bigotry. In his early 1920's story "The Horror at Red Hook", pretty much all the horror flows out of Lovecraft's then-deep-seated loathing of non-WASPy ethnic types, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and miscegenation. But by the last two chronological stories in this collection, Lovecraft presents Australian aboriginals as the only group with a rational response to the things that lurk in the cyclopean ruins of ancient cities hidden in the Outback, and working-class Italian Americans as the last line of defense against the resurrection of the extraordinarily dangerous Nyarlathotep. It's a welcome shift in attitude.

In any event, this is a fine collection with a decent bibliography, time-line, and annotations, though the last seems a bit scanty. Though it at least defines the word 'nefandous.' Highly recommended.