Hello Everyone. This is the second week of our Dream Cycle book club. In this thread we will be discussing the stories read last week: Polaris and The White Ship.
Our reading assignment for this week are two more short stories: The Doom that Came to Sarnath and The Cats of Ulthar.
Our first story, The Doom that Came to Sarnath was written in 1919, the same year as The White Ship. It is available via the Internet Archive here and can be found in audio format via LibriVox here
Our second story, The Cats of Ulthar was written in 1920. It is available via the same link provided above, and in audio format it can be found via LibriVox here
Polaris strikes me as the retelling of a fever dream. I did enjoy The White Ship more than Polaris because it seemed to be a little more cohesive. Either story could easily be the basis for a concept album by Rush or an epic song by Iron Maiden.
I have to admit that I don’t much care for these early writings. They are brief and somewhat disjointed, a little too dreamlike to hold my interest. I do hold them in some regard since they show the beginnings of his Dreamlands ideas that take on fuller form in his later writings.
I definitely get the fever dream vibes. Especially early in his career, Lovecraft reported that some of his short stories were transcripts of his own dreams, written while not yet fully awake in order to keep the dream in his mind. I think perhaps this combined with his relative inexperience in writing contributed to his earlier stories being much shorter and often less coherent. I’ve often had amazing dreams that don’t hold up against reflection in the cold light of day.