H.P. Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep

Presents horror legend H.P. Lovecraft's short prose piece "Nyarlathotep". This book presents Lovecraft's original poem in tis entirety and also features a visual interpretation.

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up—This is a monster story meant to chill readers; with a dozen new illustrations, the chill arrives faster. The horrible creature of the title is a Pharaohlike figure that draws the darkest impulses and urges from any creation and drains it of all sanity and life. Nyarlathotep releases monsters from within himself as well as those from without and pretty much destroys the narrator with a slow but insistent madness. Readers unfamiliar with Lovecraft's writing will have an easier time deciphering this nightmare through the graphic images, which give jarring color to the dreadful events. This is a powerful, fearful tale that will speak to sophisticated readers and to teens already drawn to Lovecraft, Poe, Stephen King, and their ilk.—Will Marston, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Chuck BB presents a series of illustrations to accompany the entirety of Lovecraft’s 1920 prose poem “Nyarlathotep,” which is considered a significant cornerstone to his Cthulhu mythos. The poem itself is a doomful swill of vague premonitions, chilling imagery, and abstract horror. It follows the arrival of an ancient Pharaoh-like figure named Nyarlathotep, who attracts crowds wherever he goes with demonstrations of supernatural power. The narrator attends one of his showings, but after laughing at Nyarlathotep he is sent into an indecipherable surreal panorama of terror and insanity and maybe the end of the world. BB’s artwork is appropriately all doom and jagged angles but colorfully manages to avoid the gloom in his vivid imaginings of Lovecraft’s often impenetrable prose, capturing evil without resorting to grotesquerie. Most readers new to Lovecraft won’t get much more than confusion and maybe a nightmare or two out of this, but if the shivers hit others just right they’ll be slavering for more after digesting this very short oddity from an early master of horror. Grades 8-12. --Ian Chipman

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