Pulp Fantasy Library: Azathoth

Written sometime in June 1922 and never published during H. P. Lovecraft’s lifetime, “Azathoth” is little more than a fragment. Comprising just three paragraphs and fewer than 500 words, it might seem insubstantial at first glance. Yet, it remains a revealing artifact from a pivotal transitional moment in Lovecraft’s development, poised between the dreamlike, Dunsanian mode of his early work and the colder, more unsettling cosmic horror for which he is now best known. Precisely because of its brevity and ambiguity, “Azathoth” resists easy classification. It is often grouped with the Dunsanian tales when it is mentioned at all, but doing so obscures its real significance. "Azathoth" is not merely a relic of an earlier phase, but as a sketch of what Lovecraft was in the process of becoming.

By Lovecraft’s own account, “Azathoth” was at least partly inspired by his reading of William Beckford’s Vathek the previous year. An eighteenth-century Orientalist fantasy, Vathek centers on an immoral caliph whose accumulated sins drive him into a descent through the underworld, where he endures a succession of grotesque and fitting torments. Lovecraft, who had been fascinated by Middle Eastern lore since childhood – Abdul Alhazred itself began as a youthful pseudonym – was deeply struck by Beckford’s novel. So much so, in fact, that he resolved to write a weird novel in a similar spirit.

That ambition, however, quickly foundered. Lovecraft never advanced beyond a tentative beginning, and the fragment now known as “Azathoth” is all that survives of the project. For years it remained virtually unknown, surfacing only in 1938, when it was finally published in Robert Barlow's amateur journal Leaves. Since then, it's frequently been included in many anthologies of HPL's works, including the very first one I ever read. 

Despite its brevity, “Azathoth” repays attention, particularly for readers interested in the evolution of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories – or, more accurately, the evolution of his own thinking about dreams, creativity, and nostalgia. Its opening paragraph sets the tone unmistakably:

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

Rereading it, I was very much reminded of "The Silver Key," with its portrait of Randolph Carter’s attempt to reclaim the sense of wonder that adulthood has stolen from him. The loss of enchantment and the longing to recover it through imagination or dreams is a potent theme for literary meditation and one that resonates powerfully, perhaps increasingly so, with readers who feel themselves estranged from the world they inhabit.

The issue becomes more complex, however, when one considers The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written only a few years later, in 1926 (though not published until 1943). That work could plausibly be read as Lovecraft’s belated fulfillment of his earlier ambition to write a weird novel in the spirit of Vathek. In Dream-Quest, Randolph Carter quite literally “travels out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled,” echoing the aim of the unnamed protagonist of “Azathoth.” Yet, the conclusions of the two works diverge in an important way. Carter’s journey in Dream-Quest does not end in a permanent withdrawal into dream, but rather in an acceptance of the flawed, limited, but irreplaceable value of the real world into which he was born and in which he has no choice but to live.

Seen in this light, “Azathoth” marks a moment before that reconciliation was possible for Lovecraft. It captures a stage at which escape into dream still seemed not only tempting but necessary, before he had fully worked through the implications of such a retreat. As a fragment, it does not offer resolution, but as a document of transition it is invaluable. “Azathoth” shows Lovecraft standing at a crossroads, still mourning a lost world of wonder, yet already groping toward the darker, more complex vision that would define his mature work.