The Cats of Ulthar(1920)

H.P. Lovecraft

"The Cats of Ulthar" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. It belongs in the Dream Cycle series of tales and reads much like a fairy tale, explaining Ulthar's unusual law that "no man may kill a cat".

It was written June 15, 1920, and first published in the November 1920 issue of the amateur press journal Tryout. It was later reprinted in Weird Tales magazine in February 1926 and again in February 1933, then privately re-printed as a pamphlet for his friends in an edition of 42 copies, at Christmas 1935 - two years before Lovecraft's death.

The primary inspiration for the story is no doubt Lovecraft's well-known love of cats (as spelled out in his 1926 essay "Cats and Dogs", reprinted as the title essay in the 1949 Arkham House collection Something About Cats). Lovecraft seems to be speaking in his own voice in the story's introductory

For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungles lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

The story is considered one of Lovecraft's Dunsanian pieces the plot resembles the many revenge tales in Dunsany's The Book of Wonder (1912). The "dark wanderers" of Lovecraft's story recall the "Wanderers...a weird, dark tribe" in Dunsany's "Idle Days on the Yann" (1910).