Chris's review of The Call of Cthulhu

The Call of Cthulhu (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Chris's review

rating:

bookshelves: classics, horror, science-fiction

status: Read in November, 2006

As I write this, the hour draws later, every minute, every second casting my life further into the black, frozen abyss of the Past and bringing me one more step closer to the illimitable void that is my inevitable death. I can only pray that the sweet oblivion of sleep is able to scour away the memory of the horrors I have endured, of the horrors that I have perpetrated. And if there is a God, and if He is merciful, he will allow me the privilege of perishing before I wake so that I may not see those horrors in the cold, unflinching light of day....

So, yeah, I enjoy reading Lovecraft.

Actually, what I realized as I read through these, is that I think I love the idea of Lovecraft more than his actual writings.

Don't get me wrong, the man was a genius. He was a master of not only horror, but of the language of horror, and managed to describe things that he himself admitted were indescribable. He took a simple house in the woods and turned it into an abattoir. He created half th...more As I write this, the hour draws later, every minute, every second casting my life further into the black, frozen abyss of the Past and bringing me one more step closer to the illimitable void that is my inevitable death. I can only pray that the sweet oblivion of sleep is able to scour away the memory of the horrors I have endured, of the horrors that I have perpetrated. And if there is a God, and if He is merciful, he will allow me the privilege of perishing before I wake so that I may not see those horrors in the cold, unflinching light of day....

So, yeah, I enjoy reading Lovecraft.

Actually, what I realized as I read through these, is that I think I love the idea of Lovecraft more than his actual writings.

Don't get me wrong, the man was a genius. He was a master of not only horror, but of the language of horror, and managed to describe things that he himself admitted were indescribable. He took a simple house in the woods and turned it into an abattoir. He created half the architecture of modern horror, and laid the groundwork for everyone who has been fortunate enough to follow in his footsteps.

Still.... All I could think was this: when Lovecraft was writing, in the 20s and 30s, he must have scared eight kinds of hell out of his readers. But it was a different age back then. People had never seen Alien or In the Mouth of Madness (do you read Sutter Caine? *grin*) or anything like that. The images and the concepts that Lovecraft presented to them were new and fresh and horrible. For a modern reader, however, raised on Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar, it's not all that difficult to imagine the fungus-aliens of The Whisperer in Darkness or the vast underground ossuary of The Rats in the Walls or even the dread Cthulhu itself.

The unimaginable is no longer so, and that is a great disadvantage for modern readers of Lovecraft. I don't think we are able to experience the pants-shitting terror that someone back in the 1930s, living in a little fishing village in New England might have felt when reading The Shadow over Innsmouth for the first time and then having to go out at look at the local fishermen a little more suspiciously.

Hell, I can plot sunken R'lyeh on Google Maps (it's right here, if you're interested).

So yeah, I think I love the idea of Lovecraft. The philosophy behind his stories and his mythos, his brilliant use of words and his ability to see the incipient horror in the simples of things. But he didn't scare me. Pity....less

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Chris's review of The Call of Cthulhu

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