He seeks the gods from one end of the dreamlands to the other, from the southern isle of Oriab, where the terrible face of a god is carved on a high mountainside, to the northern city of Inquanok, built all of onyx. He even travels to the underworld of the ghouls and the dark side of the moon. But the only way to gain his dream city is to find the hidden peak of unknown Kadath, where the gods dwell. And if he does, he must face an ancient horror: the crawling chaos, Nyarlathotep.

Kuranes is known by another name in the waking world, a place he finds ugly and meaningless. Then, in a dream, he glimpses radiant "Celephais." Once, in childhood, he spent an eternal hour in this ageless city, which lies in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. Kuranes wishes to remain in Celephais and the dreamlands—but he wakes. Thereafter, he devotes his every hour, waking and dreaming, to finding Celephais again. But the cost of regaining his dream city may be his life.

At the age of 30, Randolph Carter loses his ability to travel the dreamlands. Despising prosaic reality, he seeks long and fruitlessly to return to these otherworldly realms. Then, in a dream, his late grandfather reminds him of "The Silver Key" of his wizardly ancestors. When he finds it, Carter disappears—returning to a place he never expected. But his vanishment causes unrest among his potential heirs, at least one of whom wishes him declared dead. So a mysterious East Indian aids Carter's heirs and friends in learning his horrific fate, which lies "Through the Gates of the Silver Key."

Lighthouse keeper Basil Elton yearns to plumb the mysteries that he glimpses on the horizon and in the ocean's depths. One night he walks upon moonbeams to board "The White Ship." He sails with its crew to fantastic lands ... until they seek to pass through the basalt pillars of the West, and thereby draw the attention of the gods. Elsewhere, a professor named Thomas Olney discovers wonders that are, perhaps, best avoided, when he enters "The Strange High House in the Mist."

Cosmic madness

While he's not likely to win academia's vote for best horror writer of the 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is surely the era's most influential. He created the popular Cthulhu mythos and opened it to other authors, establishing an early and still extant "shared universe." He served as a mentor and inspiration to such writers as Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffman Price and Clark Ashton Smith. More recent writers who have acknowledged or manifested his influence include Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, Thomas Ligotti, Brian Lumley, Gary Myers and Colin Wilson. Additionally, Lovecraft's fiction has been adapted into comics, games, television and film.

Since Lovecraft is famous for his horror, it's ironic that many of his best works are fantasy. These dark-edged fantasies belong to his Dream Cycle, also known as the Dreamlands sequence. Now, exactly which stories comprise the Dream Cycle, or whether it's a separate series at all, are matters of debate. (Should the sequence include "Pickman's Model," which has a character found in "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" but is set on Earth? Is the Dream Cycle, which drops Mythos names, just a part of the Mythos series?) But editor Lin Carter wisely skipped these arguments when he compiled six of Lovecraft's superior Dreamlands stories in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1970).

Lovecraft's fine eponymous novella explores a fascinating dreamscape of imaginatively varied cities, geographies and beings as its protagonist journeys for weeks (or months, or years) during a night of slumber. Since Randolph Carter is on a quest, his activities are considerably more linear and purposeful than is actually the case in dreams, and that's a good thing for the reader. However, Carter's quest goes on long enough to make "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" a tad baggy. This effect isn't alleviated by Lovecraft's prose, which, though inspired by Lord Dunsany's excellent fantasy, doesn't exactly transcend its pulpiness.

Prose and pacing are more effective in the lovely, nine-page "Celephais," which reprises Carter's search for a dream city with a different character (Kuranes, who appears briefly in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"). "Celephais" also directly demonstrates a recurring Dream Cycle theme: Reality is a lot less interesting or meaningful than fantasy. Randolph Carter returns to seek another escape from a mundane, boring present in the equally well-crafted "The Silver Key." The theme changes when Carter travels "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price that is notably weaker than the solo Lovecraft tales herein) and finds the cosmos a place that makes him eager to return to Earth. The theme of fantasy's superiority returns when a new character departs our world on "The White Ship," a far shorter and stronger story. And the theme turns cautionary in "The Strange High House in the Mist," a short work in which Lovecraft's prose, pacing and evocation of wonder achieve a pinnacle. Possibly his finest story, this piece (which may or may not involve the Dreamlands) concludes The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath on its highest point.