I’ve never read any H.P. Lovecraft before.
(This edition was published by John Kinderton)
This review in no way endorses H.P. Lovecraft as a human being because what we know from history is, he was a racist, xenophobic bigot. There’s a lot about him not to like.
The Call of Cthulhu is probably his best-known work so this being a Halloween weekend, I wanted to give it a read and see what this cosmic-horror theme he is known for is all about.
Judging this book purely from a literary sense, I found The Call of Cthulhu to be exemplary storytelling. I loved it.
But sometimes a crack appears. Something leaks through. And once you see it, you can never look away again.
The Call of Cthulhu follows Francis Thurston as he investigates his uncle’s death by researching the papers his uncle left behind, strange tales of his obsession to learn more about a cult of an alien creature that infiltrates groups all over the globe.
He sets off on this journey, intrigued by a bas-relief shaped in the form of some awful creature unlike anything he’d ever seen.
One moment it suggested an octopus, all writhing limbs and bulbous head. The next, a dragon. Then the hunched parody of a man. Tentacles where the face should be. A scaled, bloated body. Stubby wings at wrong angles.
As he reads the papers and glimpses over at the bas-relief object, he begins to feel as though it is watching him.
Yet here it was – dreamed into clay in 1925, echoing something pulled from a Louisiana swamp in 1908, which itself echoed something found on the Greenland ice decades before that.
He travels and hunts down clue after clue after clue, all the time growing more paranoid and obsessed with finding answers. The odd words written on the object are repeated in other cults worldwide. None of the scholars he contacted recognized the object or words. It was a mystery.
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
They spoke of the Great Old Ones – beings who had come to the young Earth from the stars long before humanity existed. Those entities had retreated – inside the earth, beneath the sea – but they still reached out in dreams. The first humans to receive those dreams had formed a cult. This was that cult. It had never died. It waited in secret places across the world for the day when the stars would be right and the great priest Cthulhu would rise from his house in the sunken city of R’lyeh to claim the Earth again.
I was intrigued. I ate every word up. I loved the way it was written. It was gripping and intense, as well as haunting.
I would encourage anyone who loves reading good books, good stories, to read The Call of Cthulhu at least once in their life.
The horrors that lurk behind life in time and space are real. Unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars dream beneath the sea, known and served by a nightmare cult eager to set them free whenever the earth heaves their sunken city back into the sun and air.
There are two more short stories included in this edition.
The Haunter Of The Dark
The Dreams in the Witch House
Both are well-written as well, and haunting.
At a cosmic-horror author, from what I have read, H.P. Lovecraft deserves his props. But as for anything else, he wasn’t the sort of author I would have supported when he was live.
5 stars.
Allen M Werner is the author of The Crystal Crux Series and the Shades of Myth series.
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