Ulthar

Reception and legacy

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 long 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 still heavily populated by felines. Carter is later able to summon the cats of Ulthar to his aid. 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's 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 the public domain and can be accessed in several compilations of the author's work as well as on the Internet.