Azathoth (short story)

"Azathoth" is the beginning of a never-completed novel written by H. P. Lovecraft in June 1922. It was published as a fragment in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. It is the first piece of fiction to mention the fictional being Azathoth, one of the major entities in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, though the entity only appears in the title.
==Inspiration==
Lovecraft described his planned novel as a "weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel", referring to a novel of Arabia written by William Thomas Beckford in 1786.S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Azathoth", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 13. Suggesting that his story would involve "material of the Arabian Nights type", he wrote that
Though Lovecraft likely never got past the 480-word fragment that survives, he later wrote a novel with a similar theme: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
==Plot summary==
The story begins by describing how the modern world has been stripped of imagination and belief in magic. The protagonist is an unnamed man who lives in a dull and ugly city. Every night for many years the man gazes from his window upon the stars, until he comes over time to observe secret vistas unsuspected by normal humanity. One night the gulf between his world and the stars is bridged, and his mind ascends from his body out unto the boundless cosmos.
==Behind the Mythos==
"Azathoth" as it survives has something in common with Lovecraft's story "Polaris" and his poem "Astrophobos" -- and indeed with the A Princess of Mars, the original John Carter novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which the hero stares at the planet Mars, in the form of a red star, and is then transported there astrally.
==References==
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:H. P. Lovecraft works