- 🔀 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.