Fungi from Yuggoth

Fungi from Yuggoth
Full story	online here
Author	H.P. Lovecraft
Date of writing	27 December 1929 – 4 January 1930
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🔀 This is an article about the poem. For the species, see Mi-go.

Fungi from Yuggoth is a sonnet sequence by supernatural horror writer H. P. Lovecraft that constitute a continuous first-person narrative. It concerns a person who obtains an ancient book of esoteric knowledge that allows one to travel to other planets and strange parts of the universe. The title is a term for the Mi-go, an alien race the narrator encounters, which are fungoid beings resembling crustaceans which hail from the planet Yuggoth, to which the narrator has unwittingly traveled.

Plot

I. The Book

In the tangled alleys of a seaside town the narrator searches a bookshop for tomes and grimoires finds a strange book they want to buy but can't see the shopkeeper, hearing only a disembodied laugh.

II. Pursuit

The narrator flees the shop hiding the book under their coat. Despite not being seen stealing it they can't shake the laugh from the shop and the sound of approaching footsteps as the path ahead grows more and more unusual.

III. The Key

Making it home and bolting the door the narrator reveals their intention to use the book to bridge dimensions in order to explain their unusual visions of sunset spires and twilight woods.

IV. Recognition

The narrator enters a vision of the world of Yuggoth and sees a Nameless Figure sitting on an altar being feasted on by inhuman creatures and is spooked by the figure's shrieking cry.

V. Homecoming

The figure tells the narrator that he was going to take him 'home', and escorts him through a seaside city and into the sunset-lit sky, taking him to a black gulf he said 'was his home when he had sight'.

VI. The Lamp

The narrator lights a lamp to see in the black gulf, and went into his tent to light it with some unknown oil, which flashed with some mysterious shapes that intrigued the narrator.

VII. Zaman's Hill

The narrator approached a hill with stories that it was alive and killed deer, birds, lost children, and a mailman from Aylesbury who had been ridiculed for saying that it was alive and ate people.

VIII. The Port

The narrator reaches a seaside port ten miles off of Arkham as the sun set, as a sailboat from his destination of Innsmouth sailed by, which the narrator did not wave to when he feels that Innsmouth was a very oddly-gray and unsettling town.

IX. The Courtyard

The narrator enters Innsmouth uncomfortable when seeing it's inhabitants, and sees them worshipping gods near the shore. He enters a courtyard which traps him with undead dancing men with no hands or heads.

X. The Pigeon-Flyers

The narrator was taken by these undead figures to a ritual in which birds would bring in offerings from Thog with one of them displaying an evil look.

XI. The Well

The narrator ends up helping a farmer named Seth Atwood remove a cursed well that drove his friend Eb into insanity, forcing Seth to kill him, only to find that the hole beneath the well was too deep to remove all the bricks from.

XII. The Howler

Despite warnings, the narrator went through the Briggs' Hill path which was once the highroad through to Zoar, which was destroyed by a man named Goody Watkins before he was hanged. After watching the sunset, he immediately runs upon hearing the sounds of a howling monster from a nearby house.

XIII. Hesperia

The narrator enters the land of Hesperia, which he describes as a paradise 'where beauty's meaning flowers' and a river of time brings in dreams through a starlit stream.

XIV. Star-Winds

The narrator watches the star-winds of Hesperia breeze along the cities, bringing bizarre sights and the view of the star Fomalhaut. These star-winds bring dreams and fertilize Yuggothian fungi and flowers.

XV. Antarktos

A 'great bird' tells the narrator of a mountain in a polar region that might hold an untold city buried underneath.

XVI. The Window

The narrator entered a house which, in a back room, had a stone-sealed window which he recognized he looked into in his dreams, and he removed the seal to find untold worlds beyond it.

XVII. A Memory

The narrator found an expansive land of steppes and rocky table-lands inhabited by alien beings, and was met by someone who referred to him by name who would tell him where he was: the man he encountered before had brought him home.

XVIII. The Gardens of Yin

The narrator approached The Gardens of Yin, a beautiful garden behind stone walls, but found that it was aged and no longer the beautiful garden it was as the gate was gone.

XIX. The Bells

The narrator searched his memories to find the source of the chiming of bells on a steeple that he had recognized until, on March, he was called back to the black gulf by a cold rainfall.

XX. Night-Gaunts

From the distance of the black gulf the narrator spots Night-gaunts coming from the jagged peaks of Thok, and take him into the Nether Pits of the Underworld.

XXI. Nyarlathotep

The narrator was met by the true identity of his guider: Nyarlathotep, as he bared witness to him executing some people in an Egyptian tomb.

XXII. Azathoth

The narrator entered a spatial void where he meets Azathoth, in the presence of shapeless bat creatures dancing to music played by servitors, in which Nyarlathotep reveals that he is Azathoth's messenger.

XXIII. Mirage

The narrator flows across a timestream and encounters an unknown land that he cannot tell is real or not.

XXIV. The Canal

The narrator enters an abandoned city with an endless river of black oily water.

XXV. St. Toad's

As the narrator walked the abandoned city, people whispered "Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes" which urged the narrator to run as he saw a ragged shadowy figure.

XXVI. The Familiars

In Aylesbury, the narrator witnesses a man named John Whateley, an occultist who lives on a rundown farm, who has become disfigured and is taken by night-gaunts before he could be put in an insane asylum.

XXVII. The Elder Pharos

In the sight of Leng, the narrator sees a ray of blue light that is said to come from a pharos in a stone tower where the last Elder One lives and talks to a figure with a yellow mask.

XXVIII. Expectancy

The narrator views an alluring light in the horizon where a 'breathless vague expectancy' shines across city spires and forests, that he claims makes life worth living.

XXIX. Nostalgia

The narrator enters a shore where he describes birds flying off and looking for an old shore that was their home in an endless horizon of ocean, and the shore has actually been sunken by alien polyps.

XXX. Background

The narrator goes to a village after seeing a light there, and finds that it's familiar to him from an old dream, inhabited by wraiths, who all respectfully give him space 'for eternity', seemingly recognizing him.

XXXI. The Dweller

The narrator enters a dream city version of Babylon where he saw a series on unearthed tombs opening to release walked out and into a 'gate of eternal night'.

XXXII. Alienation

The narrator then describes a man whose body has passed across space and saw many planets including Yaddith and then came back unable to perceive the world the same way again.

XXXIII. Harbour Whistles

The narrator describes harbor whistles in a night-lit town to meet a shipping line of mysterious forces manifesting into cosmic drones, and left with little sign they were there after that.

XXXIV. Recapture

The narrator entered the gate and was lead down to enter a lava-covered monstrous mound that had stairs not fit for a man, shrieking at him.

XXXV. Evening Star

An evening star shined on the narrator from the shades of a meadow, grown bigger, showing him pictures that he depicts as calling from home.

XXXVI. Continuity

The narrator then enters an aether linked to all the laws of time and space, locking dimensions, and one beam of light sent him back home on old farm building set against a hill.