An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

If there is any dominant literary influence on the novel, it is probably William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), which is similarly an exotic fantasy written without chapter divisions. Several other features of plot and diction bring Beckford’s Arabian fantasy to mind. One other possible influence is John Uri Lloyd’s curious novel of underworld adventure, Etidorhpa(1895), which HPL read in 1918 (see SL 1.54–55). This strange work, full of windy philosophy and science defending the idea of a hollow earth, nevertheless contains some spectacularly bizarre and cosmic imagery of the narrator’s seemingly endless underworld adventures, although no specific passage seems to be echoed in HPL’s work. Nevertheless, HPL’s dreamworld creates the impression of being somehow underground (as in Carter’s descent of the 700 steps to the gate of deeper slumber), so perhaps he was thinking of how Lloyd’s narrator purportedly plunges beneath the actual surface of the earth on his peregrinations. (Some have believed that the episode involving the high-priest with the yellow silken mask is an allusion to Robert W.Chambers’s The King in Yellow[1895], but HPL would not read this work until two months after completing the Dream-Quest.)

The novel seeks to unite most of HPL’s previous “Dunsanian” tales, making explicit references to features and characters in such tales as “Celephaïs,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” “The Other Gods,” “The White Ship,” and others (not to mention the “real-world” story “Pickman’s Model”); but in doing so it creates considerable confusion. In particular, it suddenly transfers the settings of these tales into the dreamworld, whereas those tales themselves had manifestly been set in the dim prehistory of the real world.

It has frequently been conjectured that the tale carries out HPL’s old novel idea “Azathoth” (1922); but while this may be true superficially in the sense that both works seem to center around protagonists venturing on a quest for some wondrous land, in reality the novel of 1926 presents a thematic reversal of the novel idea of 1922. In the earlier work—conceived at the height of HPL’s Decadent phase—the unnamed narrator “travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled”; but he does this because “age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men.” In other words, the narrator’s only refuge from prosy reality is the world of dream. Carter thinks that this is the case for him, but at the end he finds more value and beauty in that

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reality—transmuted by his dreams and memories—than he believed. (Carter’s realization is prefigured in the episode involving Kuranes.)

In this sense, the resurrection of the Dunsanian idiom—not used since “The Other Gods” (1921)—is meant not so much as a homage as a repudiation of Dunsany, at least of what HPL at this moment took Dunsany to be. Just as, when he wrote “Lord Dunsany and His Work” in 1922, he felt that the only escape from modern disillusion would be to “worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial,” so in 1926—after two years spent away from the New England soil that he now realized was his one true anchor against chaos and meaninglessness—he felt the need to reject these decorative artificialities.

See Peter Cannon, “The Influence of Vathekon H.P.Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” (in FDOC); L.D.Blackmore, “Middle-Earth, Narnia and Lovecraft’s Dream World: Comparative World-Views in Fantasy,” CryptNo. 13 (Roodmas 1983): 6–15, 22; S.T.Joshi, “The Dream World and the Real World in Lovecraft,” CryptNo. 15 (Lammas 1983): 4–15; S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” CryptNo. 37 (Candlemas 1986): 25–34, 59; Giuseppe Lippi, “Lovecraft’s Dream-World Revisited,” LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 23–25.

“Dreams in the Witch House, The.”

Short story (4,940 words); written in February 1932. First published in WT(July 1933); first collected in O;corrected text in MM