The Cats of Ulthar - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

The Cats of Ulthar was a personal favorite of Lovecraft's, who was an ardent cat lover. A number of contemporary critics, as well as Lovecraft himself, consider the story to be the best of all his Dunsanian tales. It has also been noted that this is one of Lovecraft's most famous tales in both this and the "weird fantasy" style. Literary critic Darrell Schweitzer, however, comments that The Cats of Ulthar resembles Dunsany in "mood and execution" only and that " has no obvious parallels in any Dunsany story". Schweitzer refers to the prose as "restrained", and notes that, unlike Lovecraft, Dunsany preferred dogs and would have been unlikely to have written such an enthusiastic tribute. S. T. Joshi disagrees, claiming that "his tale owes more to Dunsany than many of his other 'Dunsanian' fantasies".

The character of Atal, the innkeeper's son who witnesses the cats of Ulthar circling the antagonists' cottage, would later appear in Lovecraft's The Other Gods. In this short story, written in August 1921 and first published in November 1933, Atal, now an adult, becomes an apprentice to Barzai the Wise and travels with him to seek out the tale's eponymous deities. Barzai even mentions the law against killing cats in Ulthar, further cementing the connection. Atal also appears as a priest in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath – written in 1927 but not published until 1943 – when protagonist Randolph Carter visits the city 300 years after the events in The Cats of Ulthar, when the town is populated mainly by felines. Cats would be used in what scholar Katharine M. Rogers calls "a more original way" in Lovecraft's 1923 work The Rats in the Walls. Here, as in others of Lovecraft later tales, cats embody the attraction to horror while, unlike the human protagonists, "never pursuing horror to the point of becoming horrible themselves". The text of The Cats of Ulthar, like many of Lovecraft's works, has fallen into public domain and can be accessed in several compilations of the author's work as well as on the Internet.