Pulp Fantasy Library: Nyarlathotep

Like many of the early H.P. Lovecraft pieces I’ve been examining since September, “Nyarlathotep” occupies a remarkably strange position within his larger canon. First circulated in late 1920 in the November issue of The United Amateur, this brief work resists simple classification. It is neither straightforward narrative nor pure prose-poem, neither a true Dreamlands excursion nor an unambiguous exercise in cosmic horror. Instead, it unfolds like a lucid nightmare rendered with almost journalistic precision, a stark vision of societal unraveling and uncanny intrusion that foreshadows many of the motifs Lovecraft would later explore more fully.

Lovecraft himself explained that “Nyarlathotep” arose from a dream. In a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, he claimed he wrote the opening paragraph “before I fully waked,” suggesting the piece emerged almost directly from the dream-state. If we take him at his word, then the text was composed under a kind of incantatory compulsion, shaped only lightly by later revision, if at all. This immediacy distinguishes it from much of his mature fiction, which he often reworked extensively, and helps explain the breathless, uncanny atmosphere that permeates the piece.

As in many of his early works, Lovecraft was writing under the sway of powerful intellectual influences. After 1919, he immersed himself in the writings of Lord Dunsany and the Dunsanian imprint is unmistakable – the rhythmic prose, the dream-logic, the anxiety over cultural decay. At the same time, the story reflects his long-standing interests in astronomy, Egyptian antiquity, and fin-de-siècle pessimism. “Nyarlathotep” thus emerges from a convergence of impulses, from the mystical to the scientific, from the decadent to the apocalyptic, producing a work that is difficult to categorize but impossible to forget.

The piece itself presents Nyarlathotep as a wandering figure from Egypt who arrives with strange devices and demonstrations that unsettle the modern world. Crowds gather; the narrator, already alienated and uneasy, joins them. Soon the lights fail, machinery breaks down, and people drift into the streets in trances, marching into the darkness as a cosmic doom descends. This is less a story than a sensory and psychological descent. The narrative slips quietly from urban disquiet into full eschatological collapse, mirroring the disintegration of both society and the narrator’s consciousness.

Two elements in particular deserve emphasis. First, this version of Nyarlathotep is far more grounded than his later incarnation as the messenger of the Outer Gods. Here he appears almost human, a darkly charismatic prophet with a pharaonic air, demonstrating marvels that blur the line between science and sorcery. The implication is that modernity’s own tools – technology, rationality, scientific wonder – can serve as gateways to madness. Second, the masses drifting silently through the darkened city prefigure the collective irrationalities found in Lovecraft’s later fiction. More importantly, the collapse is not local but cosmic. Dreams, astronomy, machinery – all fail simultaneously. The universe itself seems to sicken.

Although “Nyarlathotep” predates Lovecraft’s fully developed Dreamlands tales, it marks a crucial step in their evolution. The action takes place in the modern world rather than in dream geography, yet nearly every aspect of it connects to his emerging dream-lore. The narrative is not a record of waking experience but a nightmare revelation, a dream so potent it bursts into daylight and overwhelms the ordinary world. This reversal is central: whereas the later Dream Cycle sends dreamers into symbolic, mythic realms, in “Nyarlathotep” it is the dream that invades the waking world, overriding reason, technology, and even cosmic order.

Stylistically, the story stands at a crossroads. Lovecraft was still under Dunsany’s spell and the imagery unmistakably reflects it. Yet, the creeping cosmic menace anticipates the hybrid mode he would perfect in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where Dunsanian fantasy interlocks with cosmic horror. Nyarlathotep himself is the clearest bridge between the modes. In Dream-Quest, he returns as a mercurial, godlike being who toys with dreamers and bends fates. The 1920 piece presents his prototype as a wandering prophet of cosmic truth whose presence signals doom. What makes the character unique in Lovecraft’s tales is precisely this dual existence. He moves freely between the Dreamlands and waking reality, linking the two in a way no other entity quite manages. “Nyarlathotep” is the moment that connection first takes shape.

The piece continues to resonate because it feels like a transmission from the edge of consciousness. It's brief, opaque, and deeply unsettling. As a document of Lovecraft’s artistic evolution, it is both important and often underappreciated. It captures the last intensity of his Dunsanian phase even as it gestures toward the cosmic immensities of the later Mythos. That tension between dream and nightmare, fantasy and cosmic dread, gives “Nyarlathotep” its lasting power. It remains one of Lovecraft’s most haunting works, not despite its ambiguity, but because of it.