The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, and more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

The Cats of Ulthar

“It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat.”

The Cats of Ulthar is a short story that depicts felines in an ambiguous manner. On the one hand, it presents them as sacred, mystical beings. On the other, this same characterization connects them to the horrible monsters of Lovecraft’s stories, framing them just like those inscrutable and terrifying creatures.

The first sentence sets the story in a fantastical town – Ulthar, near the river Skai – and highlights how there cats are apparently revered by the population. Their characterization, however, follows the horror tropes common in Lovecraft’s prose, being linked to ancient knowledge, lost cities, and heretic notions: the first cat to be described in the story, for example, is said to be “the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meröe and Ophir. He is king of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa.”

This means that Orientalism is once again present in the narrative, with the occult being tied with the “jungle” and “sinister Africa”, which paints those regions as unholy places, home of unspeakable horrors and the supernatural.

The narrator proceeds to connect said cat to a mythical creature, a Sphinx, using the comparison to reinforce how powerful the feline is, since even the monster pales in comparison to him: “The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.” The pronouns here also play a part in establishing the cat as a proper figure, as the narrator refers to the animal not with an “it” but with a “he”.

Then comes the contrast: despite their wisdom and power, the cats in Ulthar used to be killed by an old couple in the woods. An old farmer, alongside his wife, tortured the poor animals, whose cries used to be heard at night. The narrator says this couple frightened the people of Ulthar so much that they managed to keep killing without fear of reprisal: the people cowered before them, limiting themselves to not let any animal near their cottage.

The old farmer and his wife are the main villains of the story. Their cottage lies “darkly hidden” in the forest, and we can assume they’re sadistic, since it’s said they “took pleasure” in butchering the animals. But their description is unusually timid in some parts: the narrator says they killed cats in a “peculiar” manner instead of perverse, deranged, or cruel. The narrator writes that the villagers didn’t confront the farmer and his wife because of “the habitual expression of their withered faces,” but never bothers to explain what that expression was. Even the sounds heard at night are not qualified in any way: “and from some of the sounds heard after the dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar.”

In other words, there’s an uncharacteristic lack of adjectives related to the old farmers, with the narrator more implying that the things done to the cats were horrible and sadistic than outright stating these things. We still know that they are horrible people because of the reaction of the villagers, who “lamented” the events after each night, and wanted to confront them, thinking they were “brutal assassins”.

The inciting incident comes with the arrival of “a caravan of stranger wanderers from the South.” Here, the adjectives come back with full force, as these people are said to be “dark” and “strange” – the latter, a word that is repeated often in the paragraph. They have figures of human bodies with animal heads painted on the side of their wagons, which suggests that they worship beings that are part beast, part man. This positions them on the opposite side of the spectrum from the old cotter and his wife: while they kill animals, the wanderers revere the connection between animal and man.

Among these strange people is an orphan boy, Menes, whose only company is a black kitten: “the plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow.” The story’s main conflict becomes clear: the old couple are animal killers and the boy’s only company is a fragile kitten. Tragedy is bound to follow and Lovecraft doesn’t stretch the tension, for the boy’s cat is already missing in the next paragraph.

The villagers tell Menes of the wicked farmer and the boy suddenly starts to pray at the sun, summoning his hybrid gods “in a tongue no villager could understand.” The narrator writes that the clouds started to form strange shapes, reflecting the creatures in the wagons, but also dismisses the supernatural element, stating that “nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.” This dismissal is here to give credibility to the account: by defending that the events were impossible – but narrating them as fantastical nonetheless – the narrator tries to distance themselves from them, as if to paint themselves as a skeptical, unbiased narrator. Paradoxically, then, the act of denying the supernatural is meant to give more credibility to it, as it’s being filtered by skepticism and still coming out as a fantastical tale.

The day after the inscrutable prayer, the “dark” wanderers are gone, but so are all the cats as well. The villagers become divided: some believe the foreigners took the cats away with them as an act of revenge, while others believe the farmer and his wife killed them all, as someone saw the cats near their house at night, “pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts.”

But the villagers don’t go there to find out, complacent as they are with all things in life: “they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.” But when they wake up the next day, all cats are back, fatter and sleeker. There’s an emphasis on the fact that the animals are not eating anything anymore to suggest that they’re already satiated.

So, predictably enough, curiosity overcomes fear, and the villagers finally decide to visit the cotter and his wife, finding only “two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor,” with the “cleanly picked” part clearly indicating why the cats were full.  The story, then, goes full circle, with the villagers passing the law that no man can kill a cat in Ulthar.

It’s weird, then, that the couple – the main antagonists in the story – are not the ones that are constantly described as “dark” and “strange”: the wanderers are the ones that are. In other words, the narrator passes judgment more on the characters that defend and revere the cats than the ones that harm and kill them. Negative adjectives come just when it’s time to describe their cottage or when the narrator is reproducing what the villagers said about them.

Dagon and Cthulhu have much more in common with the cats than with the animal killers. In terms of good and evil, light and dark, the cats end up being just a different kind of evil in Ulthar, a different kind of oppression. No man may harm a cat in Ulthar, but more out of fear than respect: just like the villagers didn’t want to meddle with the old farmers, they want to avoid problems with the cats.

Although fairly predictable, The Cats of Ulthar is less simple than it appears at first glance. It frames felines under a strange light, depicting them as terrifying beings connected with mysticism and the supernatural.

June 27, 2021.

—> You can read or listen to The Cats of Ulthar here.