Pulp Fantasy Library: The Nameless City

“The Nameless City” occupies a peculiar and revealing place in H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Written in January 1921 and first published later that same year in the amateur journal The Wolverine (before appearing Donald Wolheim's Fanciful Tales), it fits comfortably in neither his Dunsanian dream fantasies nor his later cosmic horror tales. Instead, it stands astride both, blending several strands of Lovecraft’s evolving imagination into a single narrative. The result is a story that feels simultaneously archaic and forward-looking, poised between decadent fantasy, pulp archeological adventure, and the nascent Cthulhu Mythos that would soon define his mature fiction. 

The plot is straightforward. An unnamed explorer ventures into an ancient ruin somewhere in the Arabian desert, a city so old that even legend has forgotten it. What he finds is not the expected relics of a vanished human people but the physical remnants of an inhuman race. They are reptilian beings who built their low, elongated architecture to suit their own forms and who left behind murals and funerary chambers chronicling a far older history than that of mankind. As the narrator moves from sun-blasted ruins into the pitch-black passageways beneath them, the story shifts from a travelog into something uncannier. A visionary experience soon overtakes him. Part dream, part revelation, the vision lets him to see the reptilian race alive, chanting during nocturnal rites. The tale ends with a familiar crescendo of terror: a sudden rush of wind from the darkness and the narrator’s panicked flight, shaken by the conviction that the ancient beings may not be entirely gone.

Objectively speaking, “The Nameless City” is not a particularly strong story, even by the standards of Lovecraft’s early fiction. Its prose is overwrought and its plot unnecessarily dramatic. Even so, HPL regarded it with considerable fondness, perhaps because it marks one of his first serious attempts to portray a genuinely non-human civilization, complete with its own art, culture, and long arc of rise and decline. This is a theme he would revisit throughout his career. Its desert setting and dreamlike atmosphere still bear the imprint of Dunsany, but the tale also seems shaped by the era’s growing fascination with archeology and the mysteries of the ancient world. It is hard not to read it in light of the cultural moment, coming as it did barely a year before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb captured the world’s imagination.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that “The Nameless City” anticipates several of Lovecraft’s major later works. The long, claustrophobic descent into the ruins points toward the archeological exploration of At the Mountains of Madness, while the conception of a non-human race with its own history looks ahead to both "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Mound." Even the narrator’s sudden, overwhelming revelation of the ancient past prefigures the shocks of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and other mature tales. The inhuman builders themselves, with their distinct physiology and culture, have a faint resonance with the pre-human or parallel races that populate Lovecraft’s later tales, though he would eventually reframe such beings in more explicitly cosmic or quasi-scientific terms.

Yet what makes the story especially revealing is the way it straddles two different phases of Lovecraft’s imaginative geography. “The Nameless City” is clearly set in the waking world, but it makes casual reference to Sarnath, Ib, and Mnar, places that would later come to be associated with the Dreamlands in “The Doom that Came to Sarnath.” However, in 1921, Lovecraft seems to have imagined these locales as belonging to a remote prehistoric era rather than a parallel dream realm. The borders had not yet hardened. Names, ideas, and mythic motifs drifted freely between dream fantasy, cosmic antiquity, and pseudo-historical prehuman epochs. “The Nameless City,” then, offers a rare glimpse into this fluid early stage of his mythmaking, before his different modes of fiction crystallized into distinct conceptual territories.

For all its rough edges, I think the tale remains significant because it marks a turning point in Lovecraft’s development both as a writer and as a creator. Here, for perhaps the first time, he fully embraces the idea that human civilization rests upon the remnants of a far older and indeed alien past. It's a notion that would become central to his mature worldview. It is also among his earliest attempts to blend antiquarian curiosity with cosmic dread, the signature synthesis that would soon define his best work.

This is why I see “The Nameless City” as a kind of literary bridge. It spans fantasy and horror, waking world and dream, the Dunsanian phase of Lovecraft’s youth and the more confident, original voice that would produce “The Call of Cthulhu,” "The Colour Out of Space," and the great masterpieces of his later career. Its imagery of ancient stones, subterranean chambers, and forgotten races may lack the polish of his mature style, but the essential vision – that distinctly Lovecraftian sense of deep time, buried history, and alien life – is unmistakably present. In that sense, “The Nameless City” may well be the first fully Lovecraftian tale and it deserves appreciation on those grounds alone.