Sunday, January 28, 2024

THE READING RHEUM: "THE FESTIVAL" (1922/1924)




Though there are no Mythos-references in "The Festival," it comes off as a better Mythos-story than "Nyarlathotep," from which "Festival" borrows its trope of "accursed city full of demon spawn." The city in this case is Kingsport, which had been used in a previous non-Mythos tale, "The Terrible Old Man," and would be used again in future HPL stories. 

Whereas the narrator in "Nyarlathotep" is just a floating eyeball, the narrator of "Festival" has a rough reason for going to Kingsport, having been summoned by "the fathers." This is apparently a reference to the narrator's family, though the reader never meets any of those relations. The narrator knows that he's going to participate in some obscure "festival" that takes place in the Christmas season, but that is supposed to be a celebration of much older, forbidden rites. Conveniently, he knows this but not any details of the celebration, so one might assume that he was there only as a child before moving elsewhere. That said, the narrator only encounters two discrete unnamed characters, while the rest of the celebrants are just a faceless mass, the same as the hapless crowd in "Nyarlathotep," except that the city's denizens are apparently aware of the other worlds with which they commune.

Prior to the festival itself, the narrator drops references that suggest that his people may have come from the race of ocean-dwelling humanoids that assumed human form. HPL would later use this trope to greater effect in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," but the Innsmouth residents are more overtly piscine in appearance. The payoff of "Festival" is an extremely imaginative Mythos-version of a witches' sabbath. and despite the narrator's having witnessed these unholy mysteries, he survives. After recovering in a hospital he goes to Kingsport again, but now it's just an ordinary city. He gets off pretty easy to many HPL protagonists, past and future.

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