Hello everyone and welcome to Week Nine of our Dream Cycle Book Club. This week’s thread is for the discussion of the three stories from last week: The Outsider, The Silver Key, and The Strange High House in the Mist.
Our reading for this week is a single story, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. It is Lovecraft’s first novella-length Dreamlands story and ties together many of the disconnected stories that we’ve read in previous weeks. The PDF is available via the Arkham Archivist here. Audio is provided once again by the talented HorrorBabble here.
The Silver Key used in the OP was created by the Rhode Island based sculptor Gage Prentiss
The Outsider is a bit of a mind bender, though we should come to expect that in our dream stories. A common occurrence in Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle are the seamless transitions between dreaming and waking worlds, which leave the reader pondering on what part is dream and what part is reality.
Our narrator is seemingly the sole denizen of an ancient castle, surrounded by a dense tall forest which blocks most natural light. Indeed, our narrator takes to watching candles for comfort. He is undersocialised as he does not recall ever interacting with anyone, though he remarks that there must be servants who have cared for him. He can read and believes that he can speak, though he never had a teacher and has never had a reason to speak.
One day he commits to climbing the treacherous tallest tower in his castle. Though he may fall in the process, it would be worth it for him to have caught a single glimpse at the moon. Reaching the top of the tower, the narrator climbs through a trapdoor and finds that he is not at some precipitous height on the tower of a castle, but stood in a churchyard. Off in the distance, he sees an uncannily familiar castle.
In the castle he sees people reveling. He wishes to join them and so climbs through a window. The guests flee in panic and the narrator looks around for the monster from which they escape. Stood within a frame is some terrible unspeakable monstrosity. The narrator nearly swoons and reaches out, accidentally touching the monster. He then flees in fear and finds the way back to the comfort of his “castle” is forever closed. He finds a new life roaming with the ghouls of this land, forever haunted by the memory of touching the cold glass of a mirror when he reached out to the monster.
Of course this story is up for interpretation as to what is dream or if in fact all of it is a dream. Having read the Dream Cycle before, I believe that the monster may in fact be a ghoul who once lived in this castle. We will see in this week’s story that ghouls have some way of accessing the dreamworld, which for some reason encompasses the land of the dead. My interpretation of the tale is that the ghoul retreated into the dreamlands, where he was comforted by a dream simulacrum of the castle in which he lived before his ghoulification.