Lovecraft wrote The Doom That Came to Sarnath only a short while after his mother was sent into an asylum. While Lovecraft was 30 at the time, he had lived his entire life with his mother, so this was an extra-traumatic event for him. It’s no wonder he is now writing about a completely doom-driven scenario.
This is a fairly hands-off telling with no actual main characters and no sense of urgency. We’re told there was a huge city back 10,000 years ago named Sarnath. We know this city was destroyed. So, in human terms, we’re talking about the era of hunter-gatherers. Long, long ago. And from there we go back FURTHER in time to 1,000 years before that, to when a stone city of Ib was in that location.
Ib descended from the moon, along with its fishy people, fully formed. The fishy people danced ‘hideously’. How can one even dance hideously? We should dance the way we want to dance! And he focuses on their bulbous eyes and flappy lips (and curious ears!) as being horrific. Poor fishy people. So the fishy people are living their happy fishy lives in their stone city.
Then along come dark-skinned hunter gatherers who are arrogant and greedy. Those warriors grab up their spears and slaughter the poor fishy people. Then the dark-skinned people build a giant city – Sarnath.
We get LONG PARAGRAPHS endlessly just describing the domes and temples and domed temples with rubies and diamonds and onyx. There’s, of course, an ivory throne which he borrowed from another author. There’s no ‘action’ in these scenes. Lovecraft could have talked about another conquest with a party in one room, or that sort of thing. Instead we just get a description-dump.
Finally we get to a party celebrating 1,000 years since the slaughter of the fishy people. This goes into a long description of what foods are at the party.
Finally the fishy-people have had enough. At midnight, under a gibbous moon, the fishy people descend from the moon and slaughter everyone including the slaves?!? I am re-interpreting this. I think all the slaves escaped to their homelands. The guests escaped. Only the descendants were slaughtered and tossed into the waters. Then the fishy people took down the egregious city and maybe drifted back up to the moon.
Several issues here.
First, why wait 1,000 years? The evil city-dwellers got to enslave and torture and capture people for 1,000 years without penalty. Then their far-distant kids got one brief night of slaughter when their only real crime was that they had a party. I’d like it better if there was a reason the fishy people couldn’t make the moon-journey until then.
What then happened to the fishy people? I’d like an ending moment of them happily dancing horribly on the moon. Or maybe in an underwater kingdom.
I’m iffy on the ‘saviors’ of this story, at the end, being the courageous blond-haired blue-eyed men who came to survey the scene.
Here’s the story to read it:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ds.aspx
Here’s my video discussion of the story: