This story shows Lovecraft at perhaps his most nostalgic –
and, in some ways, his most non-horrifically eloquent. Consider the description of King Kuranes: “For
though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and
marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstacies and delights, novelties and
excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of
his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that
pure and quiet England, that ancient beloved England, which had moulded his
being and of which he must always be immutably a part.”
Sure,
this story is weighted down with elaborate and elegiac prose, but it’s worth
it. And the haughty tone is continually
undermined, and enlivened, by both horror and humor. Amid all the splendor is the echo of the daemon-sultan
Azathoth’s apocalyptic insanity and the creeping, sprawling incoherence of
Nyarlahotep. And prancing through the
pomposity are the absurd cats – feline chiefs, warlords, Mafiosi… dangerous but
so very cuddly. Even the most sullen or prosaic mind should endeavor to endure the stilted glories of the Dream Lands to find at
the bazaar of the sheep-butchers, in Celephaïs, a “grey and dignified being… sunning
himself on the onyx pavement” that “extended a languid paw as his caller
approached.” Meow.
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