 The book is a close stylistic pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, and is effectively an expansion of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle.While presented by the publisher as if a novel of the Cthulhu Mythos, it is, in fact, a collection of linked stories.The first of these stories, "The House of the Worm", was included (as "The Feast in the House of the Worm") in Lin Carter's anthology "New Worlds for Old" (1971), the thirty-fifth volume in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.