Celephaïs: Annotated

Celephaïs is a collection of fantastic short stories authored by Howard Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe with an introduction by Sigmund Freud. The main theme of the stories is the dream world, whether dreams inspired during sleep or with the help of exotic drugs.

"Celephaïs", a fantasy story inspired by a dream recorded in Howard Lovecraft commonplace book as "Dream of flying over city", is a fictional city created in a dream by Kuranes, the anti-hero of the story. Celephaïs is described as being situated in the valley of Ooth-Nargai beside the Cerenerian Sea and its most remarkable feature is that it is unaffected by the passage of time, and takes no decay or wear, so that a person may leave it and return many years later to find that nothing has changed.

Celephaïs" was inspired by a tale by Lord Dunsany, "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap", included in this collection, where the main character becomes more and more engrossed in the imaginary kingdom of Larkar, that he created, until he begins to neglect business and routine tasks of daily living. Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky", also included in this collection, inspired the imagery of the horses drifting off the cliff where the horizon of Celephaïs meets the sky.

Other fantastic stories in this anthology include: Ambrose Bierce's Beyond the Wall, Edgar Allan Poe's SIOPE, Manuscript in a Bottle and The Oval Portrait as well as Howard Lovecraft's Azathoth, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Dagon and Hypnos.

The collection offers an excellent introduction to Howard Lovecraft's dream world complete with the inspirational stories that shaped its development. If you have enjoyed reading Necronomicon, The Call of Cthulhu, Robert Bloch's Psycho, Neil Gaiman' American Gods or Frederik Pohl's Virtual Nightmare you will definitely enjoy reading Celephaïs.

Howard Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror fiction having inspired such writers as Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Neil Gaiman. The influence of his Cthulhu mythos can be seen in film (Re-Animator, Hellboy, and Alien), games (The Call of Cthulhu role playing enterprise), music (Metallica, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath) and pop culture in general.