Pulp Fantasy Library: What the Moon Brings

H. P. Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” is another very short work and, though imperfect in many respects, it nonetheless offers a concentrated expression of ideas and techniques that would later come to define his mature style. More a prose poem than a conventional short story, it lacks both plot and character development, relying instead on mood, imagery, and suggestion. In just a few paragraphs, Lovecraft attempts – if not entirely successfully – to evoke a sense of antiquity, cosmic revelation, and existential unease by presenting a world transformed not through action or violence, but through the simple act of seeing it under an unfamiliar light.

Like many of the works I've been discussing for the past few months, "What the Moon Brings" was written during a transitional phase in Lovecraft’s career, when he was moving away from the imitative Gothic and Poe-esque tales of his youth and toward more experimental and personal forms of expression. This was the period when Lovecraft was most deeply influenced by the fantasy of Lord Dunsany, whose dreamlike narratives and mythic landscapes encouraged him to explore atmosphere and symbolism over more conventional storytelling. “What the Moon Brings” reflects this influence, both in its lyrical prose and in its emphasis on a journey into an altered reality. The piece was never submitted to commercial magazines, likely because its extreme brevity, lack of dialog, and absence of a traditional narrative would have made it unsuitable for such venues but well suited to Lovecraft’s ongoing work in amateur journalism. Instead, first appeared in The National Amateur in May 1923, the very same issue in which "Hypnos" also appeared.

Told in the first person, “What the Moon Brings” follows an unnamed narrator as he wanders through his garden by moonlight and gradually enters a surreal, dreamlike landscape. Crossing a stream and an arched stone bridge, he discovers that the garden has become endless, its walls replaced by trees, grotesque stone idols, and drifting lotus blossoms whose dead, staring faces urge him onward. The stream widens into a river and finally opens onto the shore of a sea, where the sinking moon reveals the ruins of an ancient, sunken city, a place where all the dead have gathered. As the tide ebbs further, the narrator glimpses the basalt crown of a colossal and monstrous idol rising beneath the waves, a revelation so terrifying that he flees by plunging into the shallows and swimming among the drowned streets and corpses of the dead, seemingly choosing death over the madness promised by the greater horror he has seen.

Quite obviously, “What the Moon Brings” engages many of the central themes of Lovecraft's later work. Most prominent is the idea of revelation as horror. The moonlight does not merely illuminate the landscape but strips away comforting illusions, exposing a deeper and more ancient reality. The notion that knowledge itself can be terrifying would become a cornerstone of HPL’s cosmic horror. The submerged ruins and half-glimpsed monstrosities anticipate later images of lost and sunken cities, most notably R’lyeh in “The Call of Cthulhu,” while the journey into an uncanny realm recalls the dream-voyages of stories such as "Celephaïs," and “The White Ship,” and foreshadows The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Stylistically, the piece aligns with Lovecraft’s contemporaneous prose poems, like “Nyarlathotep” and “Ex Oblivione,” where imagery and atmosphere take precedence over narrative. Together, these works suggest Lovecraft’s aspiration, at least in this period, to position himself within a broader tradition of decadent and symbolist literature rather than as a mere writer of genre fiction.

In the context of Lovecraft’s larger body of work, “What the Moon Brings” is minor, but it might be said to serve as a compact statement of his evolving worldview. It bridges his early fascination with dream fantasy and his later commitment to cosmic horror, demonstrating how the two modes might coexist. That's probably its greatest strength and the main reason I'd recommend reading it today, even if he achieves similar ends more successfully in other stories, many of which I've linked to above.