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 Doom That Came to Sarnath

“There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.”

The Doom That Came to Sarnath is a story about two cities. First, there’s the ancient city of Ib, where old beings – green, odd, and unpleasant to the eye – used to dwell. They danced and worshipped lizard gods, building jade idols in their image. One day, however, the people of Ib were slaughtered by human settlers, who came to Mnar looking for precious stones.

The Ib are the indigenous population of Mnar. They are described as creatures so strange and repulsive that their human slayers had to push their bodies to the river with spears so as to avoid touching them. Any bigoted parallel to real indigenous populations is encouraged by the narrator himself, who claims those monstrous traits are commonly found on uncivilized peoples, being observed on “beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned.”

Then, there’s the city of Sarnath, built over the ruins of Ib by the very humans that destroyed it. The people of Sarnath have foreign names (Gnai-Kah, Nargis-hei) as do their gods (Zo-Kalar, Tamash, Lobon). They used Mnar’s stones to grow rapidly and prosper, and a good chunk of the story is reserved to describing the city’s many beauties, intending to produce a sense of marvel and wonder in the reader.

There’s a focus on quantity in the descriptions of the city: “there were many palaces” and “many were the pillars” of those palaces, which were also packed with “many galleries, and many amphitheatres.”  But there’s also opulence. The throne of its king is surrounded by golden lions, for instance, while the domes of the palaces are so high that “one within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky.”

Lovecraft makes a point of describing the materials used to build Sarnath, which makes the place more solid and palpable while also highlighting the wealth of the place by the quality of the materials: the streets are paved with onyx, the houses are “of glazed brick and chalcedony,”, the palace floors had “mosaics of beryl and lapis-lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle” while the throne of the king was “wrought of one piece of ivory.”

It’s interesting to notice how the prosperity and might of Sarnath is linked directly to the life of lavishness of its rulers: not once the narrator talks about how healthy and happy are the common people. He’s too enamored with the palaces, with the statues that surround the king, with his walled gardens that boast fountains of scented water and waterfalls. Sarnath is considered “the wonder of the world and pride of all mankind,” because of the opulence of the wealthy. Inequality may be a thing in Sarnath and the fact that the king is once described as being “surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves” may reinforce this theory.

After describing Sarnath, the story talks about the festivals held in it. It tells how the people celebrated the fall of Ib and the destruction of their elder gods and jade icons. But one icon remained: the one of the sea-lizard Bokrugh was kept as a trophy but vanished one day. The high priest of Sarnath was found dead before its altar, having “scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shake strokes the sign of DOOM” – again Lovecraft puts the keyword all in caps, which today is more prone to make us cringe than anything else.

So eventually, “DOOM came to Sarnath.” They were celebrating their conquest when the creatures they had slaughtered long ago reappeared, coming out of a nearby lake to descend upon them like “a frenzied throng.” They were “a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, fappy lips, and curious ears; things which danced horribly bearing in their pawns golden platters set with rubies and diamonds containing uncouth flames.” Kings and princes fled alike and Sarnath was no more.

Now, in its place, there’s only a marsh where the “exceedingly ancient idol coated in seaweed” of Bokrugh still stands. Evil to Lovecraft has to be old, foreign, and uncivilized. Instead of marble and gold, the idol of Bokrugh is marked by seaweed. Its rightful place is a marsh; not a city – from where it even disappears. And it’s not just ancient, it’s exceedingly ancient.

And the message is clear: you shouldn’t underestimate this evil – the “other” – for its ambition is great. It doesn’t care about torturing a single, unimportant person. It doesn’t kill the king of Sarnath; it makes his entire empire cease to exist in a day. It is the destroyer of civilizations. The lake that stands where once there was Sarnath is marked by its stillness. Nothing flows in or out of it: it has become a place of death.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath tackles some of the same subjects of previous Lovecraft tales in an effective manner. You have old gods and sea creatures threatening to destroy human civilization. And you have the fear of the other, who is framed as a monstrous and destructive force.

March 31, 2021.

—> Read or listen to The Doom That Came to Sarnath here.