H.P. Lovecraft: 'The Nameless City' {read by Mark Nelson}

"The Nameless City" is a short horror story written by American writer H. P. Lovecraft in January 1921 and first published in the November 1921 issue of the amateur press journal The Wolverine. It is often considered the first story set in the Cthulhu Mythos world. Though Lovecraft himself was quite fond of the story, it was roundly rejected by a variety of magazines. Lovecraft said that the story was based on a dream, which was in turn inspired by the last line of Lord Dunsany's story "The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men", quoted in the story itself: "the unreverberate blackness of the abyss".

Critic William Fulwiler argues that Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core was one of Lovecraft's primary inspirations for "The Nameless City", citing "the reptile race, the tunnel to the interior of the earth, and the 'hidden world of eternal day'" as elements common to both tales. More generally, Fulwiler suggests, the theme of "alien races more powerful and more intelligent than man", which recurs frequently in Lovecraft's writings, may derive from Burroughs' Pellucidar stories. However, both writers drew on an already existing and vast literature of "lost city" stories and novels.

The story contains the first mention of Abdul Alhazred, a fictional authority on the occult who would later be mentioned in most of Lovecraft's major Cthulhu Mythos stories, including "The Hound" (1922), "The Festival" (1923), "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), "The Dunwich Horror" (1928), "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930) At the Mountains of Madness (1931), "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), and "The Shadow out of Time" (1934). In "The Nameless City", Alhazred is not yet identified as the author of the famous Necronomicon, but the "unexplained couplet" that Lovecraft attributes to him is later established as coming from that work.

"The Nameless City" is an early example of Lovecraft's technique of mixing references from history, literature and his own fiction to create a persuasive background for his horrors. At one point, the narrator recalls: "To myself I pictured all the splendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed."

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(Voice Recording):
*read for LibriVox by Mark Nelson
LibriVox (Horror Story Collection 003)

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(Music):
"Classic Horror 1", "Classic Horror 3", "Echoes of Time", "Penumbra", "The Return of Lazarus", "Teller of Tales", & "Unnatural; Situation"
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License

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(Illustrations):
Solarized pictures of the Pyramids of Giza
by various photographers (Public Domain - WikiCommons)

"Portrait of Lovecraft"
by Dominique Signoret (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0))

Bronze bust of H.P. Lovecraft at the Providence Athenaeum. Providence, Rhode Island
by Kenneth C. Zirkel (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

*All other artwork an photos are in the public domain

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