The Cats of Ulthar

The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

—> You can read or listen to the short story for free here.

The Cats of Ulthar

“It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat.”

In The Cats of Ulthar, our favorite felines are framed under an ambivalent light. They’re presented as sacred, mystical beings, yes, but also characterized in a way very similar to other Lovecraftian monsters: cats can be these inscrutable, transdimensional, often unpredictable things, whose actions can be unfathomable in purpose, driving their owners to the brink of madness. And just try booping their noses too many times to see what happens.

The opening sentence sets the story in a fantastical town – Ulthar, near the river Skai – and highlights how cats are revered by its people. Their characterization, however, follows the horror tropes common in Lovecraft’s prose, being linked to ancient knowledge, lost cities, and heretic notions: the first cat to be described, for example, is said to be “the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meröe and Ophir. He is king of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa.” In other words, Orientalism is once again in full force here, with the occult being tied with the “jungle” and “sinister Africa”, which paints those regions as unholy places – the home of unspeakable horrors and the supernatural.

The narrator proceeds to connect said cat to a mythical creature, a Sphinx, using the comparison to reinforce how powerful the feline is, since even the monster pales in comparison to him: “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 pronouns here also play a part in establishing the cat as a proper figure, as the narrator refers to the animal not with an “it” but with a “he.”

Then comes the contrast: despite their wisdom and power, the cats in Ulthar used to be killed by an old couple in the woods. An old farmer and his wife tortured the poor creatures, whose cries were heard the whole night. It’s said that this couple frightened the people of Ulthar so much that they managed to keep killing cats without consequence: the people cowered before them and just tried not to let any animal near their cottage – with little success.

The old farmer and his wife are the main villains of the story, sinister and sadistic. Their cottage lies “darkly hidden” in the forest, where they “took pleasure” in butchering animals. Their description, however, is unusually timid for a Lovecraftian villain: the narrator says they killed cats in a “peculiar” manner instead of perverse, deranged, or cruel, for example. He also writes that the villagers didn’t confront the farmer and his wife because of “the habitual expression of their withered faces,” but never bothers to explain what that expression was. Even the sounds heard at night are not qualified in any way: “and from some of the sounds heard after the dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar.” We all know Lovecraft loves adjectives, but here he shows a surprising constraint and desire to leave the cruelty just implied.

The inciting incident comes with the arrival of “a caravan of stranger wanderers from the South.” Here, we shouldn’t worry anymore, as the adjectives come back with a vengeance, as these people are said to be “dark” and “strange” – the latter, a word that is repeated often in the paragraph. Apparently, Lovecraft can forgive cat killers, but he draws the line at black foreigners. After all, they even have figures of human bodies with animal heads painted on the side of their wagons, which suggests that they worship beings that are part beast, part man. This positions them on the opposite side of the spectrum from the old cotter and his wife: while they kill animals, the wanderers revere the connection between animal and man.

Among these strange people is an orphan boy, Menes, whose only company is a black kitten: “the plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow.” The story’s main conflict becomes clear, then: the old couple are animal killers, and the boy’s only company is a fragile kitten. Tragedy is bound to follow, and Lovecraft doesn’t prolong the tension – honestly, he doesn’t give it time to even build up –for the boy’s cat is already missing in the next paragraph.

The villagers tell Menes of the wicked farmer and his wife, and the boy starts to pray for the sun, summoning his hybrid gods “in a tongue no villager could understand.” The narrator remarks how the clouds started to form strange shapes, reflecting the creatures in the wagons, but also dismisses the supernatural element, stating that “nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.” This dismissal is here, however, to give credibility to the account: by defending that the events are perfectly explainable – but narrating them as fantastical nonetheless – the narrator tries to distance himself from them, as if to paint himself as this skeptical, rational mind. He doesn’t easily believe in this sort of thing; it’s just what happened.

The day after the inscrutable prayer, the “dark” wanderers are gone, but so are all the cats. The villagers become divided: some believe the foreigners took the cats away with them as an act of revenge, while others believe the farmer and his wife killed them all, as someone saw the cats near their house at night, “pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts.”

But the villagers don’t go there to find out, complacent as they were with all things in life: “they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.” But when they wake up the next day, all the cats are back, fatter and sleeker. There’s an emphasis on the fact that the animals are not eating anything anymore to suggest that they’re already satiated.  Yes, I bet you’ll never guess what these good kittens ate. Hint: most unfortunately, it was not the rich.

Predictably enough, curiosity overcomes fear, and the villagers finally decide to visit the cotter and his wife, finding only “two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor.” The story, then, goes full circle, with the villagers passing – just now – the law that no man can kill a cat in Ulthar.

Again, it’s weird – let’s use a polite euphemism, shall we – that the old couple – the main antagonists in the story – are not the ones that are constantly described as “dark” and “strange” by the narrator: the wanderers are the ones that are. You know, the ones that saved the day, who asked their gods for help and made the cats dispatch the fiends. The narrator passes judgment more on these characters, the ones who defend and revere cats, than on the ones who harm and kill them.  Priorities, right?

True enough, Dagon and Cthulhu have much more in common with the cats than with the animal killers. In terms of good and evil, light and dark, the cats end up being just a different kind of evil in Ulthar, a different kind of oppression. No man may harm a cat in Ulthar, but more out of fear than respect: just like the villagers didn’t want to meddle with the old farmers, they want to avoid problems with those good, satiated kittens.

So, although fairly predictable, The Cats of Ulthar is still contradictory in how it handles its narrative, unsure of what to frame as a monster and what not to. Nonetheless, one thing you should never do (besides booping a cat too many times) is ask Lovecraft what the name of his childhood cat was. Never, ever do that.

February 24, 2026.