“…there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.”

-H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Azathoth’

Over the weekend I felt like finding a very short story to indulge in. The last seven months have been a roller coaster of health issues and generally fading out of my own life, so a return to reading felt prescriptive. Though I’ve dug into my many TBR piles to slowly connect with novels and history once more, I eventually wanted a super fast read just to see how it flows.

This is what led me to H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Azathoth’.

I have a sizeable tome of the man’s work and though I’ve read most of his tales back in the late 90s, I hardly recall them. Couldn’t remember a lick of this one, so it offered a dopamine rush as it felt new.

Any fan of Lovecraft knows the title creature is listed as a blind idiot god somewhere out in the universe. Well, surprise. this story which would now be considered flash fiction lacks Lovecraft’s typical human fatalism. It chucks that right out the door in favor of science fantasy exploration across an undiscovered country.

The tale is told on one side of a page and remarks on the life of an unnamed man who daily returns to his small flat with a single window that looks out only into a mind numbing courtyard of equally banal panes of glass. This seems to drive the very learned man to a form of creative madness (a Lovecraft classic). He stares off into outer space attempting to find something more to existence.

“…til at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects.”

One day, the cosmos answered back.

“There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold; swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds.”

Here the man ascends, seemingly having an out-of-body experience, into the cosmos and encounters lush realms that dazzle his senses. I loved this story so much. It’s short and punchy and highly descriptive, almost sugary compared to the bitter salinity of Lovecraft’s usual chanting cultists and mind-rending gods.

Imagine my surprise when I looked this story up on the nefarious Wikipedia to find out this tale is really a fragment, something Lovecraft reworked later on in the longer ‘The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath’. Lovecraft penned this fragment in 1922, but eventually had it published sixteen years later, because why let a good tale languish?

My reading of this was the man entered the Dreamlands (?), though the story does not specifically state he does. However, the referencing pointed to it as much as I can tell, but he could also have had a John Carter of Mars type of interplanetary transference. Either way works for me.

The story is titled ‘Azathoth’ but there doesn’t seem to be a hint of the idiot god anywhere, unless it was the impetus behind answering the man’s wish. If so, Azathoth is a lot kinder and /or more random than it receives credit for. I doubt this. Lovecraft is rather strict about the unfairness of the universe and the ritual mania of those cosmic beings he made up.

This was one of the best stories I’ve read, clocking in at around 480 words, but it nailed the mind and life of an author. An explorer. A dreamer. An astronaut, sailor, geographer, or scientist. We’re all dreamers and heavy readers wishing upon a million stars for answers from beyond, for new experiences and better ways to explain them.

In Hellraiser Pinhead says, “We have such sights to show you.” I mean, if we leave out the flesh ripping and agony, then, sign me up. And this quote came to mind right when our unnamed protagonist is whisked away to those brilliant otherworldly stations. Travel that informs without destroying. Beauty across the universe. Knowing there has to be more out there than the doldrums and finding out, lo! Your instincts are correct.

So I circled back around to realizing ‘Azathoth’ is flash fiction despite its recognition as an incomplete work by the author, since he did publish it. And that’s groovy, because we tend to think of this as a modern phenomenon. In truth it’s just that the present day’s time crunches have made the much shorter formats more popular and more appealing to certain publishers.

So as you journey through this hot, hot summer dreading going outside or dealing with your very own personal dilemmas, consider allowing this brief interlude to whisk you away during a lunch break or before placing your head on the pillow at night. For even ol’ H.P. realized sometimes you have to sit the stress of the times off to the side and allow yourself to dare to dream of august, mesmerizing realities beyond the window.

You can read this short short story here. Enjoy, fellow explorers of such sights the universe has to show us.