Meanwhile, Lovecraft's imagination is in overdrive, and he's slinging names and locations and infernal beasts three, four, or five to a page. In it, there's no real discernable plot, just Randolph Carter moving from one location to the next, wildly observing things. This is one of the unreadable Lovecraft stories, in my opinion. I got about a third of the way through the walls of text Lovecraft threw up at me, and I simply didn't have the heart to go on. Instead you see a writer working and reworking ideas and themes (including characters and character names) until the truly classic stories evolve.

Also, seeing the Cthulhu Mythos as an intentionally consistent and coherent whole was probably not foremost in Lovecraft's mind either. A lot of this has been tacked on by later reviewers and analyzers, August Derleth being probably the worst offender. At the same time I think way too much is made of Lovecraft's conception of his dream-cycle works as a connected whole at all. One thing you can see in this collection is a working out of themes and ideas that he used again and again in his dream-cycle stories.

Writers like Dunsany and Eddison and Machen did this sort of thing much better than Lovecraft.

I admittedly am not a big fan of Lovecraft's 'prose poem' dream-cycle stuff, preferring his horror and scifi stuff (yes, The Whisperer in Darkness is a scifi story, not a horror story). Even so, Kadath itself meanders all over the place and parts of it vary greatly in quality. Of the 'stories' in this book I would only call The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath a classic.

The dream quest of unknown kadath 2003