“The Doom That Came to Sarnath” by H.P. Lovecraft
My apologies for the late blog post: I was very sick, as you can hear in the tapes, but I didn’t hear no bell. I survived to tell the tale.
Fun fact: this is not actually a Dreamlands story. It's just set in the very far past. We will hear references to Sarnath in “The Nameless City,” which is clearly set in the Arabian Peninsula in the text. When setting the scene up in OBS for “Doom,” I made a desert scene, because, I thought “Okay, this is a Dreamlands story, I can make a desert set.”
It’s not a Dreamlands story
It is not set in a desert in the least
I recorded “The Nameless City” early, with my desert set, and then recorded this story. I used my aquarium scene and of course, it’s only after I record it that I find out that I could’ve also added a ruin from the Library of Congress’s archives as the backdrop. But, sometimes, you just have to hit “publish.”
I think one issue with this story is pacing. We get six paragraphs covering the events of prehistory to the fall of the Bukrug-worshippers. We get five paragraphs about the growth of Sarnath. We get six about the 1000th festival and the Doom that, like the title promises, comes to Sarnath. On paper, that’s fine: we have a third that’s an prologue of the events, a third that’s a climax/cresting of Sarnath, a third that’s an epilogue.
The pacing just feels off to me to though. I know, very academic, right? (It is not.) I will have to mull over why this is. I think it has to do with the scale of things and the descriptions of the first and final thirds being less granular than the descriptions of the middle third. I think if it were split into fifths, with the first fifth being about the lake pre-Sarnath, the second fifth being about the conflict, the third fifth about the rise of Sarnath, the fourth fifth also being about the titular doom, and the final fifth being the epilogue, the pacing would’ve been more ideal because it would have more of a focus about the actual doom that came to Sarnath, rather than the origins of Sarnath and its growth.
I can see why this work 'feels' like a Dreamlands work. Once again, Howard Philips Lovecraft mentions gold. One of these days, I need to do a post about Lovecraft stories and gold and a chart about which ones have gold. If I made a Lovecraft bingo sheet, ‘GOLD’ would be the free spot in the center. Maybe that’s a story reading idea…a bingo sheet that I do in editing in post… He mentions scenery that fits in Antiquity but also within an Orientalist fantasy -- "heels of camels from the Bnazic desert," the mentions of elephants, etc. Very luxurious!
Do you think the beings that emerged from the lake were new ones, descended from the moon, or were they the beings that had been pushed into the lake all those centuries before? Maybe a little column A, little column B?
Sorry for the unexpected 'special effects' in the background. Let me know if I messed up this file and there's any repetitions. I do all my readings in one 'cut' and rarely have to repeat anything for a second take, but if I did and forgot, let me know where the repetition is in the comments and I'll fix it.
