Nyarlathotep - in The Work of H. P. Lovecraft

In The Work of H. P. Lovecraft

In his first appearance in "Nyarlathotep", he is described as a "tall, swarthy man" who resembles an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. In this story he wanders the earth, seemingly gathering legions of followers, the narrator of the story among them, through his demonstrations of strange and seemingly magical instruments. These followers lose awareness of the world around them, and through the narrator's increasingly unreliable accounts the reader gets an impression of the world's collapse.

Nyarlathotep subsequently appears as a major character in "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1926/27), in which he again manifests in the form of an Egyptian Pharaoh when he confronts protagonist Randolph Carter.

The twenty-first sonnet of Lovecraft's poem-cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth" (1929/30) is essentially a retelling of the original prose poem.

In "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933), Nyarlathotep appears to Walter Gilman and witch Keziah Mason (who has made a pact with the entity) in the form of "the 'Black Man' of the witch-cult," a black-skinned avatar of the Devil described by witch hunters.

Nyarlathotep is also mentioned in "The Rats in the Walls" as a faceless god in the caverns of earth's center.

Finally, in "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936), the nocturnal tentacled, bat-winged monster dwelling in the steeple of the Starry Wisdom sect's church is identified as another form, or manifestation of, Nyarlathotep.

Though Nyarlathotep appears as a character in only four stories and two sonnets (which is more than any other of Lovecraft's gods), his name is mentioned frequently in other works. In "The Whisperer in Darkness" Nyarlathotep's name is spoken frequently by the Mi-Go in a reverential or ritual sense, indicating that they worship or honor the entity, and in "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936), the "hideous secret of Nyarlathotep" is revealed to the protagonist during his period spent in pre-cambrian earth by Khephnes, another prisoner of the Great Race.

Despite similarities in theme and name, Nyarlathotep does not feature at all in Lovecraft's story "The Crawling Chaos", (1920/21) an apocalyptic narrative written in collaboration with Winifred V. Jackson (aka Elizabeth Berkeley).