Review: Nyarlathotep

Nyarlathotep by Julien Noirel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rating 2 out 5 | Grade: D-; Mildly interesting

After reading Nyarlathotep one comes to the conclusion that this is not one of Lovecraft's more inspired stories. With no context, a being known as Nyarlathotep, posing as Egyptian nobility, goes around building mysterious machines with grass and metal. It calls for performances where the audience are made to watch some form of sinister phenomenon involving electricity, which give them visions of a world brought to ruin by some great calamity.



Following which, the participants all wander off, their perception of the world being corrupted by the alternate vision of the ruined one, and one by one all succumb to insanity.

It is hard not to make the comparison with another person who lived in the timeframe who made bizarre machines, and held sinister performances involving electricity. I don't know if Lovecraft had some negative reservations about Tesla's work, or if the strangeness of Tesla's experiment which caused reservations even in the regular public, somehow triggered that part of his psyche which gave him endless nightmares, but whatever he is trying to communicate comes across rambled, even more than one would expect from a Lovecraftian tale.



The only saving grace is the artwork, which manages to capture some of the bleak, dark, and depressing atmosphere and environment of these stories. But too little to make me invested without a good premise.



I feel the need to go and reread some of the author's better works, perhaps The Call of Cthulhu or At the Mountains of Madness. I'm gonna go do that.

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