Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Nameless City
“The Nameless City” is a Lovecraft story that’s grown on me. It has two Poe-esque elements of his often uneven early work that are, IMHO, sadly lacking in his later stories: (1) a first-person in-the-moment narrative (rather than an after-the-fact, relatively sedate, journalistic recounting of the facts) and (2) a lot of grab-you-by-the-shoulders emotion and screaming and fainting. Actually, not so much of the latter, but it does have the first. The dreamlike, but very conscious, account of the narrator’s journey into the underground city… the Arabian Desert setting, the only time Lovecraft set a story in the Middle East, except for the disappointing “Under the Pyramids”… and the strange, lizardlike inhabitants. Their description is very evocative, although I wonder how quadrupeds which didn’t stand upright were able to use their arms for fine manipulation. I guess their forelegs were really versatile. Or perhaps I should’ve drawn them in such a way that they crawled entirely using their hind legs, leaving their forelegs free, perhaps propelling themselves with a contraction of the trunk, like snakes.
Meanwhile, I’ve put up a new page of my collaboration with Patrick Macias, The Deadliest P.R. Guy in the World!
Look up the prehistoric *Pristichampses,* a crocodilian that walked on four legs and could stand on two! Though the didn’t have horns I would use them as the evolutionary basis for these beings Lovecraft didn’t name. Note the similarities between this story and “At The Mountains of Madness.” From sculptures telling the story of the race to their retreating to an abyss to live.
The “Race” were immortal, only dying by violence, just like the Old Ones (cue Ted Cassidy as Rhuk from a first season Star Trek) and they had somehow found a way to immortal with only their etheric parts of their bodies made solid, tough as kevlar. See Astro Boy episode 10 about Rudolf Hatter and his want to become immortal, like Stalin, by splitting off his etheric body then making it solid.
This is the second time I am submitting. The first time is invisible.
“URBS SINE NOMINE”? (Just to keep the map all-Latin?)