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The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

H.P. Lovecraft

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Feb 14, 2020 Werner rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, trad-fantasy

Note: The edition to which I attached this review isn't the one I read. Because this novella is short (141 p.), it's hard to find free-standing printings of it. I actually read it in the Bluefield College library's 1970 Ballantine Books printing, with a worthwhile introduction by Lin Carter,

The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath (Adult Fantasy Series) by H.P. Lovecraft

, which has the same title but binds the novella with five other works by Lovecraft. However, I didn't read the other five at this time. Though it wasn't published until after his death, the author wrote Note: The edition to which I attached this review isn't the one I read. Because this novella is short (141 p.), it's hard to find free-standing printings of it. I actually read it in the Bluefield College library's 1970 Ballantine Books printing, with a worthwhile introduction by Lin Carter,

, which has the same title but binds the novella with five other works by Lovecraft. However, I didn't read the other five at this time. Though it wasn't published until after his death, the author wrote this, according to his letters, primarily in 1926-27, making it one of his earlier works..

Dreams played an important part in HPL's writing. By his own statement, a lot of his story ideas came to him in dreams, as did fictional elements and motifs like the scary "night-gaunts" who inhabit some of his tales (and who play a significant role here). Quite a few of his stories posit the idea that dreams are a vehicle of communication between humans and... other entities, or that they can be windows to realities unseen by waking eyes. ("The Dreams in the Witch House" comes to mind, for example.) So it isn't surprising that, as the title implies, it's in vivid dreams that his protagonist here first beholds the mysterious, ethereally beautiful city he feels compelled to search out, and that his quest plays out in a deep dream. That protagonist is Randolph Carter, who appears also in several other Lovecraft tales ("The Silver Key," "The Unnameable," and "The Statement of Randolph Carter," just to list the ones I've read), and who's thought by many to be an alter ego for the author himself.

Lovecraft is primarily known as an author of naturalistically-explained, but dark and horrific, speculative fiction that imagines sinister entities beyond the realm of normal experience, some but not all of which is directly connected with what has come to be called his "Cthulhu Mythos" (the first work of that corpus proper, "The Call of Cthulhu," was published in 1927, the year this book was finished) with its concept of the Elder Gods or Great Old Ones, powerful malevolent entities that ruled the primeval Earth and remain dangerous. Much of his fiction outside of the Mythos proper have features that relate to or adumbrate it. The same could truthfully be said of this novella, to a significant degree. There are evocations of the characteristic Lovecraft idea of "cosmic horror," "mindless" and unwholesome "Outer Gods" who rule the void of space, headed up by the demonic Azathoth, and whose messenger is the "crawling chaos" Nyarlathotep (both names are echoed in the Mythos stories). We also have references to the "Pnakotic Manuscripts," and many allusions to ideas of ancient, pre-human races, unholy cults with grisly rites, horrible places and beings in the bowels of the Earth as well as space. An earlier Lovecraft story, "Pickman's Model," is directly referenced here as well; the sinister creatures from there are also here, where they're identified as "ghouls," and a prior acquaintance between Carter and Richard Upton Pickman is posited. (Unlike at least one Goodreader, I didn't find the treatment of Pickman and the ghouls irreconcilably inconsistent in tone or details with the earlier story --though let's say that there were some "developments" between the two....)

For all that, though I've classified most of Lovecraft's work as science fiction, I've classified this as fantasy, to suggest a distinction in content and tone. One could argue that his whole body of fiction has a great deal of basic commonality, and he didn't necessarily divide it up in his own mind the way some later readers do (he didn't coin the term "Cthulhu Myhos" --August Derleth did-- and those stories don't actually have an entirely consistent or compatible body of exact details). And this novella doesn't feature "magic" as such, which we usually consider a key aspect of fantasy. But the world of dreams here is an objective place, though intangible to the waking world; normal cats here can jump from Earth to the dark side of the moon on a nightly basis, and much of the world-building has the characteristic tropes of a fantasy world. Many readers familiar with classic fantasist Lord Dunsany --whose work Lovecraft read and highly praised-- have detected a Dunsany influence here and in several other early Lovecraft works, though I haven't read enough of Dunsany's writing to claim that myself. (And I haven't read much of this strand of HPL's work to be very familiar with it, either, though arguably "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is in that vein.) But be that as it may, it's difficult to see the literary vision here as strictly explainable in naturalistic terms. The tone is also different from the Lovecraft writings I've called science fiction; we have less emphasis on existential pessimism, more description of beauty and grandeur as well as horror, a kind of storytelling that's more positive and upbeat than is his wont elsewhere. (Of course, the quest narrative itself that structures the book is a traditional fantasy motif.) This is a markedly different side of Lovecraft's creativity compared to most of my prior reading.

Stylistically, this is a tour de force (Lovecraft, of course, is one of the writers I most admire just as an English-language stylist); his command of vocabulary, language and diction is impeccable, and he perfectly adapts his style to his purpose. Some of his most effective passages are here. (He did send me to the dictionary a few times, but that's not a bad thing!) As in most of his work, he concentrates solely on male characters, and prefers to rely on straight narration, usually summarizing dialogue rather than delivering it verbatim (except where the latter kind of delivery has an essential dramatic effect). He also chose, as he said in a Dec. 1926 letter to Derleth, to write it "continuously... without any subdivision into chapters" (an idea he apparently got from William Beckford's Vathek). But these characteristics do not make it at all tedious to read. The level of originality in the imagination is amazing; the pace is steady and the plot eventful and suspenseful. (It's a quick read, not solely because it's relatively short.) It's also unpredictable, especially in the denouement and ending --and yet (without stating any spoiler) I realized that the ending was perfect for the story. My only regret now is that I waited so long to read this! ...more

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