Weird Fiction discussion

This month's selection has been described as a prose poem and has a Wikipedia page longer than the work itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyarlat.... It is our January 2024 Lovecraft group read for The Dream Cycle. This six-paragraph work can be found online here: https://hplovecraft.com/writings/text.... "Fellahin" is Arabic. I translate it as "peasants" usually; "farmers" or "dirt farmers" is another possibility. I'm impressed Lovecraft knew and used it.

This is a dreamy and mystical work-and very mysterious and dark.
I'm really not sure what happens, but the writing is beautiful.

Rosemarie wrote: "This is a dreamy and mystical work-and very mysterious and dark.
I'm really not sure what happens, but the writing is beautiful."

I agree with this!

I finally got around to reading this tonight, a month late. I'm rounding up to give it three stars. Great sentences and word choices as always with Lovecraft. But the plot was light, even for Lovecraft.

I get that there was some person, or being, named Nyarlathotep, who "came out of Egypt" during a particularly hot August. Nyarlathotep is an inventor of some sort, who combines pieces of matter to make complicated things. Our story's unnamed protagonist is going out to meet this Nyarlathotep as Nyarlathotep approaches his city.

I lose the story in the last two paragraphs though. Apparently, Nyarlathotep draws power, including electrical energy, as he projects something from the moon. There are three columns of some vague sort that get acted upon, but other than that I don't know what's going on. Towers, snowbanks, disappearing friends of the protagonist, shadows writhing in hands, whatever that means, and mindless gargoyles that form Nyarlathotep's soul. What a mishmash!