Customer Reviews

The Doom That Came to Sarnath (A Del Rey book)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a wonderful collection of some of Lovecraft's lesser known works, the majority of which come from his earlier writings. It is actually a pretty eclectic sampling of styles. One finds traditional horror, dream-enshrouded tales of unknown vistas, short "prose poems," collaborations with other writers, and even a science fiction story. While none of these stories can claim a place in the Cthulhu Mythos, several do presage its beginnings and offer glimpses of the universe of the Great Old Ones. "Nyarlathotep" introduces us to that dark god, "The Festival" refers to mouldy tomes such as the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhezred and offers us a glimpse of pagan practices, Polaris speaks of the Pnakotic manuscripts, and "The Nameless City" takes us deep underneath the desert sands to a forgotten abode of ancient, nonhuman creatures. Many of the tales take us to Dunsanian dream worlds where beauty and unearthly horror are separated by a veil of nothingness. "In the Walls of Eryx," cowritten with Kenneth Sterling, is very interesting in that it represents Lovecraft's only real foray into science fiction, a more than successful foray in my opinion. The only story I find less than first-rate is the tale "Imprisoned With the Pharoahs," a work ghost-written for Harry Houdini--passed off as a true story of the great magician's visit to Giza's pyramids; Houdini's presence as the protagonist makes the story seem forced and does not allow me to fully appreciate the elements of horror Lovecraft injects into the tale.

Lovecraft is, to some degree, an acquired taste, and for that reason I would not recommend this book for first-time readers. Any fan of Lovecraft will delight in these tales and mentally take note of every element that relates to the whole of his fiction, but the Lovecraft initiate may well become frustrated with the Dunsanian elements of many of these stories and may not fully appreciate the remarkable craftsmanship of the author; furthermore, the collaborations in this collection are clearly not Lovecraft's greatest works. Those looking for "horror" may well be disappointed, as will those seeking an introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos. While these stories can surely inspire delight and devotion among new Lovecraft readers, it is my feeling that they can be fully appreciated and understood only by those who are already familiar with Lovecraft's greater body of work.

I read my first Lovecraft about fifteen years ago, and never looked back. This book is the one I recommend to my friends who have never read any of his work before. The book is laid out like none of the others I have seen, in that it is divided into separate sections, depending on the type of story, the time period it was written in, or the style Lovecraft was emulating at that time in his career. Also included are snippets of various letters Lovecraft wrote to friends and colleagues which shed an interesting light on where some of the stories came from. I read this book straight through from beginning to end, which is unusual for a collection of Lovecraft's, but in this case found it a very rewarding experience, because the layout is such that the reader gets a real feel for how Lovecraft's talent developed. If someone is looking for a good jumping-on point into the Lovecraft experience, this is an excellent one.

I find it funny that there's a unicorn logo on the front cover of my copy of this book, saying that this work is Adult Fantasy. About the only thing Adult about H.P. Lovecraft is that he uses big words like "cacodaemoniacal". Although most of the works in this collection are fantasy, that doesn't mean that there isn't any horror to be had, either. Some of the stories in this excellent collection will give you more chills than the Sixth Sense ever did. Here's a brief synopsis of some of the stories in this book: THE OTHER GODS--One of my favorite fantasy pieces. It deals with mankind driving the gods up mountains. BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP--A primitive man from the mountains is put in an institution, where the main character discovers something extraordinary about the fellow. EX OBLIVIONE--Travel to a wonderful dream-world with a bronze gate that leads somewhere seemingly special. FROM BEYOND--This story reminded me much of The Sixth Sense. Lovecraft was never one for dialogue, but he did really well in this story. THE CATS OF ULTHAR--An elderly couple is suspected of cat-killing, but a boy passing through has thoughts of revenge. HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Tree, The Tomb, Polaris, What the Moon Brings, Hypnos, Nathicana, The Festival, The Nameless City, The Quest of Iranon, The Crawling Chaos, and In the Walls of Eryx. As you can see, you get lots of bang for your buck, so to speak. The stories are categorized, but they do not appear in chronological order--a partial chronology is included at the back. This is probably the best Lovecraft book I've read since The Best of H.P. Lovecraft. Both books are worth getting.

Lovecraft piles on the adjectives with a trowel, and his stories are often overwrought. But they are also creative, unique, genuinely creepy, and a whole lot of fun. He invented a history of the world in which humans are only the most recent (and least frightening) of earth's inhabitants. Some of his stories are tales of these ancient times, and in them he demonstrates a gift for high fantasy, with a decidedly morbid streak. Most of his other stories are present-day tales in which some unlucky or unwise person encounters the malignant relics of those forgotten eras, and these stories put the horror back in the horror genre. Sixty years later, Lovecraft's highly original work is still inspiring new authors to write more tales about his gods and monsters. This collection of his short stories is a nice sampler, an introduction to Lovecrafts work, and includes two absolute gems of micro-short stories. "Memory" and "What the Moon Brings" take only minutes to read, but provide more genuine chills and food for thought than any dozen modern horror movies with their one-dimensional graphic violence. Like it or hate it, at least you won't have read anything quite like it before. (And please! Never confuse Lovecraft's marvellous writing with the abysmal movies that bear the names of some of his stories! The movies are just travesties, and their names are just about all that they carried over from Lovecraft's originals.)

The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by H. P. Lovecraft between 1917 and 1935. Most of this is his earlier work; much of it is from his Dunsanian period, and none of these stories is part of the Cthulhu mythos.

This kind of atmospheric horror is tricky to write: if it's too vague, it's not compelling; if it's too detailed, it ceases to be "weird" and easily becomes silly. Lovecraft always keeps safely to the vague side of the line (occasionally to the point that a story will fail to be interesting); flashes and hints of the supernatural keep the horror of mystery intact.

Yet even as he only hints at the attributes of his many lurking horrors, Lovecraft vividly describes every other element in his tales. He frequently name-checks fictitious places and things to add verisimilitude to his stories. And he loves nothing so much as the adjective; indeed, one is hard-pressed to find many unadorned nouns in his writing. But where else can one find sentences like, "It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation" ("The Tomb")? This is Lovecraft. Every sentence is like that.

Thanks to this and other talents, Lovecraft excels at creating atmosphere, which is so key to good horror. There is something appealing about the ancient - lost, alien, mysterious, eldritch things, and Lovecraft's enthusiasm for them is evident in his writing.

Many of the stories here are dream-fantasies that are heavily influenced by the writings of Lord Dunsany. The trouble here is that after a couple such stories, the reader may realize that they're all much the same, and one can readily see where most of them are going well in advance. "The narrator has vague interactions in malevolent dimensions resulting in madness and/or doom" (Lovecraft loves madness and doom) could be a plot synopsis for at least half the stories in this volume. His later, proto-Cthulhu tales are more interesting, and "In the Walls of Eryx" (Lovecraft's only piece of science fiction), co-authored with Kenneth Sterling, is the best story here.

The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories is, on the whole, a decent collection that is too often hampered by repetition of plot, theme and device.

Too often the critique weighed against H. P. Lovecraft's fiction is that it "isn't scary" -- & so I am delighted to come to Amazon and review comments from readers who did indeed find the weird tales by this Master of Horror scary indeed. As with all of the old Del Rey editions published by Ballentine Books, these mass paperback editions do not include the Corrected Text edited by S. T. Joshi and therefore cannot be viewed as definitive -- but they are convenient wee packages of HPL's fiction nonetheless, attractively adorned with the eerie cover art of Michael Whelan. THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH AND OTHER STORIES was compiled by Lin Carter in the early 1970's, and Carter has an introduction in this edition. This book contains a few tales that are also included in THE TOMB AND OTHER STORIES, also published by Ballentine. The contents to this collection are:

Farewell to the Dreamlands, an introduction by Lin Carter
The Other Gods
The Tree
The Doom that Came to Sarnath
The Tomb
Polaris
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Memory
What the Moon Brings
Nyarlathotep
Ex Oblivione
The Cats of Ulthar
Hypnos
Nathicana
From Beyond
The Festival
The Nameless City
The Quest of Iranon
The Crawling Chaos
In the Walls of Eryx
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (published as "Under the Pyramid" in modern editions of H. P. Lovecraft)

What I especially enjoy about this wee book is that Lin Carter has written prefaces for many of the stories, revealing bits of information about the work and Lovecraft's life, quoting from Lovecraft's letters, &c. Here is Lin's preface to one of my favourite Lovecraft stories, "The Nameless City":

In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, dated January 26, 1921, H.P.L. discussed the next story, "The Nameless City." He wrote:
"At the risk of boring you, I will enclose my latest--just finished and typed--THE NAMELESS CITY. This had its basis in a dream, which in turn was probably caused by contemplation of the peculiar suggestiveness of a phrase in Dunsany's BOOK OF WONDER--'the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.' The character of the 'mad Arab Alhazred' is fictitious. The lines are mine--written especially for the story--and Abdul Alhazred is a pseudonym I took when I was about five years old and crazy about the ARABIAN NIGHTS. I hardly know yet what to think of this story--you are the first to see it--but I certainly put enough work into it. I tore up two beginnings, only hitting the right atmosphere the third time, and destroyed (or rather rearranged) one conclusion. I aim at a cumulative succession of horrors--thrill upon thrill and each the worse!..."

The lines HPL refers to as his own invention are:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die,"
which are now usually associated with Cthulhu, but they found their origin in this early non-Mythos tale

The prose poem, "Nyarlathotep," is one of the finest things that Lovecraft ever wrote. It has been enormously influential and has inspired writers, artists and film makers.

This is not, perhaps, the best book to begin reading Lovecraft if you are reading him for the first time. Still, it's a great wee collection of a variety of that which has come to be known as Lovecraftian horror.

H.P lovecraft writes great horror stories and this is no exception he's probably one of the great horror story writers along with the likes of Poe. This book is made up of creative writing and conjours up distorted images in your head from the suspense that builds up to the climax toward the end. H.P Lovecraft's books tend to focus on the Horror/Fantasy genre and is the kind of horror material that involves creatures of a new breed and not so much a typical thriller story for example. The doom that came to sarnath definatley wipes the floor with alot of the modern horror stories that you see around and is an intense, shaded, wonderful, gripping book.

These are some of the tales from Lovecraft's early period, when he was still very influenced by the fantasies of Lord Dunsany. The title tale is a neat little story of genocide, vengeance, and a doomed city, replete with eldritch touches.

This book came very quickly. The cover had no rips, tears, or scarring of any kind. The pages are yellowed from age, but with no tears. The spine was in perfect condition. It looked like no one had ever read it. That will change! A great buy!!

what more is there to say.
I liked it and I have the whole set.