A Quest to the Cities of Dreams (The Dream quest Series Book 1)

Six bone-chilling tales of bizarre beauty and awesome horror lurk in the dark of the soul, waiting to be called upon by the demons of nightmares, and let loose in the frightened mind. Read more Read less. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The Best of H. Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: The Tomb and Other Tales.

The Dream Cycle of H. Dreams of Terror and Death. Customers who bought this item also bought. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. At the Mountains of Madness: And Other Tales of Terror. From the Inside Flap lling tales of bizarre beauty and awesome horror lurk in the dark of the soul, waiting to be called upon by the demons of nightmares, and let loose in the frightened mind.

Product details Mass Market Paperback: Del Rey; Reprint edition March 12, Language: Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention randolph carter silver key dream-quest of unknown unknown kadath dream quest white ship house in the mist high house strange high gates of the silver dream world cthulhu mythos cats of ulthar pickman model ship strange robert howard hoffman price title story night gaunts short stories.

Showing of 45 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Audio CD Verified Purchase. I will preface this review with a disclosure: I am a die-hard fan of Lovecraft's cosmic horror genre, particularly the Cthulhu mythos stories, and am not especially fond of the works in his Dream Cycle into which this title falls. I chose to read it due to its recurrent story line involving the cats of Ulthar because I love the fantasy cat genre in literature to which Lovecraft always does more than justice.

As far as the narration is concerned, the lively and whimsical style Jim Roberts adopts is well suited to such a fantastic narrative. Brilliance puts out some really cool audio cds and I have a few. This one is pretty good. My only complaint is with the reader. He is not a trained vocal actor and that is apparent in the careless way he pronounces some of the Lovecraftian terms in the story and his New York accent penetrates through. I grew up an hour away, but this is one of the cases where the flat, middle America radio voice would have been preferable.

One person found this helpful. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. To the initiate, this book will seem esoteric. To the initiated, this book will seem like the first step of the journey.

"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" by H. P. Lovecraft

For HP Lovecraft, it was the first step and the last. This was written before much of his better known works, yet, I found that it had more depth than many of them. Truly, I have enjoyed "The Color of Space" and many many of his shorts; however, the pure madness of the creativity of this many was demonstrated most assuredly in this novelette. Got it as a gift for my Got it as a gift for my adult daughter. The story is unusual for the author as it is a fantasy instead of horror. Plus this is the same additio. This edition of the book is terribly printed and manufactured.

It also says "illustrated," but the illustrations are terrible, pixelated versions of uncredited artists' work and they are completely random and unrelated to the story. There aren't even page numbers! The present novella is a prime example of this vision. Always upward led the terrible plunge in darkness, and never a sound, touch or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery.

A quick browse of the florid prose favoured by Lovecraft in describing these 'superior' beings can partly explain his lasting influence on readers and writers interested in the study of the supernatural: But I can at least appreciate the monumental struggle of the individual against the darkness waiting to engulf him every night, the heavy price paid by the artist, by the dreamer who dared to descend into Hell and bring back to us a clarion call of warning and an entreaty not to loose sight of our private sunset city, this symbol and relic of your days of wonder Lovecraft, like Randolph Carter, was constantly plagued by night-gaunts, ghouls, gugs, ghasts, zoogs, moon-beasts, shantak-birds and evil priests, but parts of the Dreamland are still reminiscent of his youthful days of wonder.

The author's utopia bears witness to the less savoury things I heard about the author: Cats are allowed favored-nation status, but that's about it as far as Lovecraft is concerned. Most of the racial insensivity is not particular to Lovecraft, but a mirror of the larger views held by his anturage and by a lot of philosophers and political leaders of the period the story was written. Same can be said about the purple prose, something most of the readership expected in their Weird Tales.

I would never recommend banning an author for his private views, especially since his contribution and influence on the genre is undeniable. Since October with its Halloween themed reads is just a month away, I plan to further explore the universe of Lovecraft. I am sure there are more haunting gems to be discovered among his stories: Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but only stand and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake less sleep loose his hold and send him down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed valley.

The stars came out, but save from them there was only black nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against whose beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from an unseen brink. Lovecraft Illustrated Volume 1 Contents: Dec 13, Tijana added it Shelves: A to nije pohvala. Aug 05, Jakk Makk rated it it was amazing. Not an entry level volume. Dream-quest is a strange first choice since it was a Lovecraft first draft. This advanced mythos touches on several stories not present here. This volume would be better if it contained the, Cats of Ulthar and other tales.

No doubt this has to do with some publishing brouhaha. A better collection can be had for free online. Beware, Dream-quest has subject matter repugnant to many. As for you, find a better collection. Here is my preferred order, assuming you read all of the Dreamlands: Nov 30, Rose rated it did not like it Shelves: Well, that was painful!! I used to think back in the first half of the last century that authors were paid by the word.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: A Graphic Novel

However, I think in this case he was paid by the adjective and adverb. Does everything have to be described so Well, that was painful!! Does everything have to be described so intensely? You could probably cut 50 pages out just by stopping the over-descriptiveness. Now pump him full of LSD and magic mushrooms et voila, Lovecraft. So, the story…as descriptive as it was, and as weird as it was, was overwhelmingly boring. The protagonist, Carter, has discovered a city in his dreams that he can see but cannot get to but he really, really wants to go there. This is the story of his travels through dreamland in search of this city.

My dreamland is better than his. It was dark and full of monsters, and cats — apparently Lovecraft had a fondness for cats. Would I recommend this? Not to the average reader anyhow. The rest of you, step away from the book. The lack of dialogue shouldn't be a surprise to any Lovecraft lover, but the imaginative way this story is told and filled with unearthly creatures while the protagonist is searching for a way to get to his destination should be enough to overlook that.

The main character is Randolph Carter who meets many strange and terrifying being 4. The main character is Randolph Carter who meets many strange and terrifying beings on his journey; beings like zoogs, ghasts, gugs, nightgaunts and so on. Whatever Randolph Carter encounters, whatever happens to him on his journey, he never stops going forward.

There isn't a single place or a tavern where people don't try to warn him off his quest to get to Kadath. One of the beautiful things is that he gets help from unlikely sources. There are so many references to other Lovecraft's stories here, I am certain I missed a few. Some of well-known characters play an even greater role than you might expect. Here you'll find out what happened to Kuranes and where exactly Pickman ended up after he had disappeared. The cats of Ulthar don't just make an appearance, but rather give this story a fairy tale touch.

Even Nyarlathotep has a role to play. Now, you can choose to read this story partly as a commentary on society. I'll simply read it as fantasy. Dec 31, Dan Henk rated it it was amazing. I think Lovecraft often gets a bad rap. People read that he influenced the modern greats, everyone form authors like Stephen King and Clive Barker, to movie makers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven, and then dive into his books expecting the same fare.

He wrote for a different era. His mind-bending, first person surrealistic approach to a creeping, nameless horror stunned and fascinated huge segments of early century America. The America that read, that is, which wasn't nearly what it is today. I enjoy his approach, even if some of it is a bit florid, but his ideas are dauntless. They broke conventions and rearranged the way a future breed of horror authors would look at the world. Even today, I find them stunningly original, and well worth the read. If any sound familiar, it is only because they have been copied, usually far less efficiently, by later day authors.

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Apr 20, Dfordoom rated it really liked it Shelves: Lovecraft was very much influenced by the great British fantasist Lord Dunsany. But somehow it does work. The prose is unbelievably purple, but it suits the dreamworld perfectly, and captures the right mood of impossibleness. The dreamworld Lovecraft creates is bizarre and grotesque, but sometimes beautiful and often glorious. The army of cats is absolutely fabulous! I liked this one very much. Nov 07, Maureen rated it it was ok Shelves: View all 3 comments. Dec 22, David Sarkies rated it really liked it Shelves: Kubla Cthulu 30 December While this rather long short story was not necessarily based upon the poem with an interesting background by Coleridge , it still reminded me of it quite a lot, except of the part where he is woken up halfway through his opium induced dream state by some guy from Portlock who refused to go away to get him get back to his trip well, it didn't happen that way, but it still sounds cool.

Actually, considering Lovecraft was a bit of a teatottler then descending into a he Kubla Cthulu 30 December While this rather long short story was not necessarily based upon the poem with an interesting background by Coleridge , it still reminded me of it quite a lot, except of the part where he is woken up halfway through his opium induced dream state by some guy from Portlock who refused to go away to get him get back to his trip well, it didn't happen that way, but it still sounds cool. Actually, considering Lovecraft was a bit of a teatottler then descending into a heroin induced dream isn't really his style, though I should remember that this is not so much a story about him, but a story about one of his reoccurring character's: The version that I read has a short story about Carter before this one, though it is probably more a statement than a story.

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However, one thing that seems to have been consistent with the Lovecraft stories that I have read so far has the main character wander into some ruins or whatnot, come across a deep pit descending into the Earth, and upon entering these pits uncovering some indescribable horror. In a way I was starting to expect more of the same, except that Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath does take a different path. Much like Kubla Khan , Carter has a dream of a beautiful and magnificent city, and decides that he must go and look for this city, however the only beings that happen to know the location of this city are the old gods of Earth.

The only way for Carter to reach them though is to go on a dream quest, so he descents into the world of dreams and goes on what is quite a long, and adventurous, journey, to look for the gods and discern the location of this magnificent city. In the process he gets kidnapped by some rather disreputable sailors, leads an army of cats against some monstrous entities, and makes some friends with ghouls, who happen to be the souls of those who have died.

In a way this story is somewhat different than what one would expect from Lovecraft in that it is more of a fantasy adventure than a horror story. Okay, a lot of the horror elements are still present, though unlike many of the other stories, it seems as if Carter is able to deal with them without going insane — maybe it has something to do with him being in a dream world than in reality. In many cases it reads like a fantasy story, though, with the exception of the ghouls, ghasts, and cats and humans , most of his encounters involve creatures with names worthy of Cthulu himself.

Oh, and it is also set in the world of Cthulu, which means that the elder gods that Carter seeks aren't the anthropomorphic gods that we are all familiar with and Nyarlanthotep, the crawling chaos, seems to regularly make an appearance. One of the interesting things about this mythos that I discovered happens to do with the cats. It seems as if cats are not only antagonistic towards many of the nasties that inhabit Lovecraft's realms, but they are actually able to deal with them. I guess this idea stems back to the Egyptians who first domesticated cats so that they could deal with the snakes, but then raised them to some godlike status.

In a way the suggestion is that having a cat around is a good thing because against the supernatural and the horrific they are much more capable defenders than are dogs and Stephen King even borrowed the idea for one of his short stories. In fact the image of Carter wandering through the world among and army of cats was somewhat cool.

Mind you, like the cats that we all know, these cats also have a mind of their own, and don't so much travel with Carter because he persuaded them to, but rather for their own reasons. Then there is this idea of the dream. Carter seems to go into the dream world to escape from the dull and dreary would in which he lives to find something that he believes is truly glorious.

Mind you, whether anything in the world of Cthulu can be truly consider glorious, as opposed to horrific, is a question open to debate, but this dream that Carter had no doubt grabbed his imagination to make him want to leave the familiar and travel to the fantastic. Yet, interestingly, the further we descend into the dreamquest, the more we forget that we are actually living in a dream.

It is sort of like the statement 'reality is a state of mind without drugs'. Many people take drugs in fact most of them to escape reality — in a way they provide a gateway to the world of dreams, a world where the dreariness of society no longer exists. The problem is that the more you descend into the world the more you become disconnected from reality.

Dreams are always funny, and those annoying alarm clocks that yank us out of a world that appears to be much better than the work-a-day world in which we exist are the bane of our existance. Yet, like drug users, when we catch a glimpse of this heavenly realm the more we pursue them, and the more we disconnect ourselves from reality. In fact there are people that make substantial amounts of money, and countless pieces of literature, about interpreting dreams.

In a way we want to attain that heavenly realm in much the same way that Carter wanted to reach this heavenly city. Yet the reality is that we are always dragged back into the real world by annoying men from Portlock, and like Coleridge, we simply cannot return. Anyway, Carter discovers that he is not the only person who is seeking the city, and when he arrives at the domain of the old gods, discovers that they have all left to dwell in that city.

Yet, instead of being shown the way, instead he is made to look back outwards, back to the world of New England, to discover that the real beauty lies in the reality of home and not the vague world of the dreams. It is only when he returns and looks upon the Charles river that flows through the old town of Boston that he realises, as Dorothy discovered, that there is truly no place like home. In a way, like the drugs, clutching onto the world of the dreams really does not solve our longings, but rather disconnects us from what we have forgotten is truly beautiful.

Jul 22, Dana Campbell rated it it was ok. Reading this was like slogging through quicksand. I wanted to enjoy it, I really did, but I just couldn't. I read at least 50 pages a day. This page book took me the entire month to read. It's like Lovecraft sat down and said how many elaborate adjectives can I fit into each sentence. I have an expansive vocabulary so I only had to lookup a word every few pages but I can imagine most people would need a dictionary every few sentences. The book over there the most terrif Reading this was like slogging through quicksand.

The book over there the most terrifying thing you've ever seen and in that corner something even more horrific. I couldn't care about Carter. I also had no idea why he was on this journey. The part at the end about the spheres of music was vaguely interesting. I've also heard that Lovecraft thought this was the worst thing he had ever written so I'm not entirely sure why the book club picked this instead of another of lovecraft's books and I would definitely give Lovecraft another try at some point.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes cli Synopsis: All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles.

It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place. Although it took me an unforgivably long time to get this whole story read, it was not through lack of interest, I assure you.

I have looked at many reviews, and it appears that a lot of readers just didn't "get it" - describing it as a "travelogue" or such. Others complain of Lovecraft's racism, but ignore the fact that he was just parroting the thoughts of the time. Besides, anyone who venerates cats the way this guy does can't be all bad, right?

I reveled in the lush prose, enjoyed the horrors he creates in this short. I highly recommend Lovecraft to people who, like me, love words. Back in college, I worked for a few semesters shelving books in the sub-basements of the library, which for some reason set it's 3 floor at ground level. Two floors below that was a largely-ignored fiction section, dimly lit by flickering lights that turned off automatically when no one was around.

The farther corners never really got direct light, giving the whole space a perfect kind of eerie-cozy twilight feel, and in retrospect, it was a pretty amazing place to work. Not least because I usua Back in college, I worked for a few semesters shelving books in the sub-basements of the library, which for some reason set it's 3 floor at ground level. Not least because I usually kept up with my shelving pretty well and found time to browse the more esoteric sections when no one was around almost always.

Naturally, this was the perfect place for reading Lovecraft. Most people tend to be less than thrilled with Dreamquest , I think, but in that context those strange winding mythologies were just about right. May 01, Alan Smith rated it really liked it. H P Lovecraft is best known as a writer of highly original, wordy and grotesque horror tales, based on the premise that a displaced pantheon of evil tentacled gods lurk just outside our own ordered, settled world, and are only a hairsbreadth away from breaking back in and tearing the universe apart.

But many may not be aware that there is a gentler side to the Providence Dreamer. Now, speaking of this particular author's "gentle side" might seem as weird as anything he ever wrote, but in the earl H P Lovecraft is best known as a writer of highly original, wordy and grotesque horror tales, based on the premise that a displaced pantheon of evil tentacled gods lurk just outside our own ordered, settled world, and are only a hairsbreadth away from breaking back in and tearing the universe apart.

Now, speaking of this particular author's "gentle side" might seem as weird as anything he ever wrote, but in the early part of his writing career, Lovecraft came under the spell of Lord Dunsany, the Irish fantasist whom Lovecraft actually heard lecture , and during this period he wrote many tales that are out and out fantasy, rather than the cosmic horrors he later penned. This work is a collection of these tales, including three from the "Randolph Carter" cycle Carter is an idealized version of the author, who spends his time searching out arcane lore and trying to avoid the modern world , together with "Celephais", a story about a man so obsessed with his dreams he fails to wake up, "The White Ship", a quest tale with a truly tragic conclusion, and "The Strange High House In The Mist", about a guy who meets some of the more benevolent characters from mythology.

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The Carter stories are particularly intriguing, telling of Randolph's search through the world of dream looking for a wonderful city to which the gods have denied him entrance - only to find that it is actually composed of his boyhood memories Dream Quest Sure, these are fantasy, but there's nothing insipid about them - you'll look in vain for happy endings and friendly elves! In fact, in Carter's attempts to avoid the pressure of the world and recover the wonder of dreams you read a symbolic and mythological account of Lovecraft's own life and world-rejection OK, Lovecraft can be wordy, overblown, and in his own way, didactic After all, what's a "rugose" or an "eldritch" or two between friends?

First, this story, I think, is just for the hardcore Lovecraft fan. It was only some years after his death that it was published. Here Lovecraft delves deep in his Dream World and in all craziness of dreams in general or at least his dreams, which were certainly much crazier than m First, this story, I think, is just for the hardcore Lovecraft fan. Here Lovecraft delves deep in his Dream World and in all craziness of dreams in general or at least his dreams, which were certainly much crazier than mine.

No doubt, this story has its fair share of problems, but I had so much fun reading it, the adventure, the perils, the battles, the cats - YAY Cats!

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I do acknowledge that it definitely does not achieve the same heights as most of what Lovecraft was writing around that time and after, like The Call of Cthulhu, At The Mountains of Madness or The Shadow over Innsmouth, just to name a few. And did I say it had cats? Yeah, they were some big damn heroes. Jun 18, Brady rated it it was ok Shelves: There's two kinds of Lovecraft. One is surely Lovecraft bitterly selling out, mixing his beautiful description with an actual plot that moves at a readable rate and contains real elements of horror see Herbert West, Reanimator.