The Call Of Cthulhu And Other Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales" by H.P. Lovecraft invites readers into a labyrinth of unfathomable horrors and cosmic mysteries. Through a collection of haunting and surreal tales, Lovecraft delves into the darkest recesses of human imagination, where ancient entities and eldritch forces hold sway. Brace yourself for a journey beyond the veil of reality, where the boundaries of sanity blur and the whispers of dread echo throughout eternity.

358 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 4, 2024

About the author

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

— Wikipedia

Reviews

[Sarah Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovecraft does cult horror pretty well. The stories that don’t involve cults were ok, with some being better than others.

My biggest issue is the amount of racism. I expected a little bit knowing the author’s character as well as the time, however it was a lot more than I thought. Major trigger warning if you read The Rats in the Walls as the name of the cat is absolutely disgusting.

[Samuel Chare · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you realise how much of modern literature is influenced by HP Lovecraft and its use of lovecraftian’ themes, regardless of what you think of his stories, his impact on modern literature, especially horror and fantasy is immense and you can really see the link to modern novels whilst reading his stories.

[Elizabeth de Moya · Rating 5 out of 5]

He uses so many adjectives. That’s what fiction is really all about. It is horror and science fiction and fantasy. And it was written in 1928.

[Pascal Wagner · Rating 2 out of 5]

2, I am a new reader of the horror genre and I wanted to explore it with this book, coming out the other end and I am disappointed that this was my first read. Though, it is not the case that I am very upset with lovecraft’s concepts or stories more so than I think he is just a bad writer. His writing has strange tropes that it falls into, like the incessant hesitance to describe scenes apparently to incite a wishful mystic and the comedically dramatic turbulence the protagonist goes through, inflicted by microscopic hurdles. These crutches that he uses malform weird asymmetries in his work which makes the pacing die and accelerate unprecedentedly and dampen his overall delivery, in spite of an occasionally good concept. Of course that is not even mentioning his most egregious fault which is the lifeless flowery prose he speaks in that I cannot express my distaste for enough. In addition, I don’t enjoy most of his stories, some are just trite concepts that he embraces too readily or are tastelessly esoteric flights of fiction in which only every sixth sentence is relevant to the plot. I don’t believe HP Lovecraft’s work is deserving of its meteoric ascension to fame, as it is inhibited and inundated by its dull and faltering style.


P.S. The Call of Cthulhu is relatively exempt from almost all stylistic faults I describe.