Vellitt Boe is a respected professor at the university of Ulthar. Once upon a time, true, she was a dedicated traveller, and hiked across the fields and highways of her world, risking danger yet often finding wonder. Those old skills come in handy when one of Boe’s students absconds with a young man. Doesn’t sound so bad, until Boe discovers that the ‘man’ is in fact a ‘Dreamer’, a person from the mysterious Waking World, and he has taken Boe’s student with him back to that impossibly distant place. Next, Boe learns her student was the grand-daughter of a sleeping God, and should that God awake and find his kin missing, he’s likely to obliterate all of Ulthar. So, walking stick in hand, Boe sets out to bring her student back. Between her and the waking world are many challenges: the hunger of the Ghouls, the dark city of the gigantic Gugs, the immense monstrosities that dwell in the ocean…and even an old friend of hears, another Dreamer, a man by the name of Randolph Carter…
Readers of 20th century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft will have probably figured out by now that this is a sorta-kinda sequel to Lovecraft’s THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. THE DREAM QUEST OF VELITT BOE seems like a bit of a conflicted beast, and is at best when it sharply critiques some of the underlying prejudices of the original; it works less when it is content to be an homage. It’s interesting, for example, that Vellit Boe has long realized that all the Dreamers from the Waking World are men…where are the women? “They dream small dreams,” scoffs Randolph Carter, and Boe, were she less polite, could have said some things to him about that. Boe, a middle-aged woman, is also an interesting person: experienced, world weary and no fool, she makes for a calm and brave protagonist.
The book speeds by very quickly at a mere 160 pages, and while the descriptions of a fantastical world were often inspired, just as often I felt them slip into a sort of impatient summation. The whole last half, in fact, felt very rushed, as if the author had grown a little tired of the project, and when things wrap up in the course of a handful of pages you put down the book and wonder if, perhaps, you might have been better served with your own dreams. Me like books.
Me Like Books 