- 🔀 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, and finds a strange book. He wants to buy it, but can't see the shopkeeper, hearing only a disembodied laugh.
II. Pursuit[]
The narrator flees the shop, hiding the book under his coat. Despite not being seen stealing it, he 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 his intention to use the book to bridge dimensions in order to explain his unusual visions of sunset spires and twilight woods.
IV. Recognition[]
The narrator enters a vision of the "strange, grey world" of Yuggoth, where a victim on an altar to the Nameless One is being feasted upon by inhuman creatures. When the body shrieks at him with a "dead cry," the narrator recognizes it as himself!
V. Homecoming[]
A daemon 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 enters "hollow cliffs" where "frightened hieroglyphs" warn all Earth creatures away. There he finds nothing but a lamp containing "traces of some curious oil" and embossed with "symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin." Ignoring "the fears of forty centuries," he takes the lamp back to his tent, and when he lights it, the "vast shapes we saw...seared our lives with awe."
VII. Zaman's Hill[]
Zaman's Hill, near Aylesbury, had a reputation for two centuries for mangling animals and losing boys. Then one day the village at its foot disappears, houses and people alike, and a mailman is thought mad for saying the hill had greedy eyes and wide-stretched jaws.
VIII. The Port[]
The narrator sets off from Arkham, and ten miles later reaches the trail that follows the cliff above Boynton Beach; he hopes to reach a ridge that overlooks Innsmouth by sunset. He sees a sign but seeing a 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 "the city I had known before;/The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs/Chant to strange gods." He enters the gate of a black courtyard where he is supposed to meet a man, and finds himself closed in. He sees a swarm of dancing undead without 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 guide: Nyarlathotep, who emerges from inner Egypt and brings about the destruction of the world/
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.